Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The TSA Must Think We're Mushrooms

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, December 05, 2010

The TSA must think we're mushrooms. You know, the way they are trying to keep us in the dark, and the way they keep feeding us a fertilizing agent that comes from the south end of a north-bound cow.

Allow me to explain. They say that the images from their new porno scanners are images that will not be retained, images that will not be stored, cannot be transmitted, and so forth. As my son observed, just back from a flight to the east coast, "Are you joking me?"

Think about this for a minute. Does anyone seriously think that if a bomber successfully smuggled explosives on to a plane, and the thing blew up, and we all went back to the place where they cleared security, that those folks would just shrug and say they had no possible idea how the explosives got through their nudey machines. "You see, as we never tire of telling the American people, the images are gone as soon as we clear the passengers. Blip. Like that. All gone away. Sorry."

Anybody here think that's what would happen? Show of hands?

Someone got explosives past the "look-at-that-babe-guys" scanner, don't know how, but they figured out a way. They did this at Baltimore Washington, say. These bad guys walk around in the Denver airport for a couple hours, and then successfully blow up a plane on the way to Portland. We are interested in the methods of the person or persons who did this, and so, natch, our attention goes back to Baltimore. The folks in Baltimore are no help at all, because they don't store images. Shrug.

So if they don't store images, they are not interested in installing these machines for security reasons. If they are interested in security, then they actually are storing the images, or are trying to manipulate public opinion such that they will be in the near future allowed to store images. This brings us back to the two basic options that the observer is forced to confront when analyzing the actions of government officials. Are we dealing here with stupid or evil? Or perhaps both?

The reports I get from travelers indicate that there are a lot of these machines in a lot of airports that are not being used. This neglect of their new high tech voyeurtoy appears to be the result of blowback from the American public. That blowback needs to be building to a crescendo. Some enterprising people are already selling fig leaf undies that hide from your government that which you should not have to be hiding from your government. I suggest that they, or somebody like them, make a version of this valuable product that causes the text of the Fourth Amendment to appear on their screens instead whatever it was they were looking for.