TSA Wants to See You Naked
WHOOPSIE!
Planning to fly this holiday season? You’ve probably already braced yourself for long lines, delays and extra fees just to check your luggage.
Unfortunately, you can also expect another hassle at the airport this year. 70 airports around the country are now using controversial body scanners—also known as “naked scanners.”
These machines use low-dose radiation to produce strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies, essentially taking a naked picture as passengers pass through security checkpoints.
Authorities at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) say you can opt out of the naked scan. But doing so will subject you to new and highly invasive manual searches of your body, including your breasts, buttocks and inner thighs.
The Denver Post, in a front-page story Thursday morning, captures the entire debate over intensive hand-pat searches with one shot: a TSA employee with his gloved hand firmly in the junk zone of a passenger who remains–for his sake–happily unidentifiable. The TSA worker even seems to be struggling–his face fixed in a disturbing grimace.
The debate over hand searches launched into the top slot of most cable newscasts Monday with the camera-phone-captured encounter between TSA workers and a flyer who compared the searches to “sexual assault,” and advised agents not to “touch my junk.”
Now if the agent is really hot…….