transportation security administration

Chris Knight's avatar

I haven’t heard Mitt Romney say a single nary thing about eliminating the Department of Homeland Security and completely scrapping the Transportation Security Administration. That he hasn’t and apparently approves of those governmental monstrosities is just one more reason why the Romney/Ryan ticket won’t get my vote next month. Neither will Obama/Biden, but that’s a post for next week.

But just in time for the election, The TSA is removing those cancer machines it euphemistically calls “body scanners” from major airports. The official line is that the cancer machines are being relocated to smaller airports in an effort to “speed things up” across the board.

But there are serious reasons to consider that rather than completely giving up on Nude-o-vision(tm), the TSA may in fact be gearing up to implement even WORSE technology: namely scanners with much finer resolution and stronger abilities at detecting small objects on a person ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I guess that means we can finally get rid of the Department of Homeland Security and that unforgivable abomination of bureaucracy called the Transportation Security Administration. Right?

Right???

EDIT 11:52 p.m. EST: I will make note of my thankfulness that Bin Laden has finally come to his just desserts, by humbly suggesting that his corpse be given the “Mussolini treatment”, culminating in his remains being eternally desecrated by wrapping them in pig skins.

But still: tonight, the United States has won as decisive a victory as could possibly be had against the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Some will say that this presents an opportunity to bring our armed forces home.

I disagree.

Tonight, there is an obligation to bring them home.

A few months shy of the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and we can finally say in all truthfulness, “Mission Accomplished”.

If Americans want to feel earnest victory ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

One more bit of evidence for the already bloated file of arguments for why the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration and the whole damned “War on Terror” is an effin’ joke…

Alyssa Thomas, all of six years old, was temporarily detained from boarding a flight from Cleveland to Minneapolis by TSA agents. Alyssa is on the dubious “No Fly List” and nobody knows why.

Here’s the story from Fox 8 News in Cleveland, Ohio…

WESTLAKE, Ohio – Alyssa Thomas, 6, is a little girl who is already under the spotlight of the federal government. Her family recently discovered that Alyssa is on the “no fly” list maintained by U.S. Homeland Security.

“We were, like, puzzled,” said Dr. Santhosh Thomas. “I’m like, well, she’s kinda six-years-old and this is not something that should be typical.”

Dr. Thomas and his wife were made aware of the listing during a

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Chris Knight's avatar

Eleven airports – most of them in the Midwest and California but also Charlotte-Douglas International here in North Carolina – will be the first in the country to receive the full-body scanners that create a virtually naked image of the person being examined and leave nothing to the imagination.

The Transportation Security Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security over it, claims that the images created by these machines are not stored in any way.

Does anybody possessing more than the minimum neurons for a working ganglia honestly believe anything that this asshat excuse for a government tells us anymore?

This is simply more “security theatre”: measures that make it look like our government is sincerely doing something to deter “the terrists” but in reality is just a multi-billion dollar puppet show.

If the government was serious about both stopping terrorism and serving its people, domestic airports would adopt the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Ryan Thomas, a four-year old lad who is developmentally disabled and must wear metal leg braces because of low muscle tone, was considered enough a potential terrorist threat that a Transportation Security Administration goon forced Ryan’s parents to remove said leg braces while the family was en route to a vacation at Disney World.

Words fail.

Oh yeah, by the way, ten thousand TSA agents will now have access to classified information.

What the hell is happening to our country?...

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Chris Knight's avatar

My loathing for the Transportation Security Administration just soared to new depths.

The story from Philly.com…

In the tense new world of air travel, we’re stripped of shoes, told not to take too much shampoo on board, frowned on if we crack a smile.

The last thing we expect is a joke from a Transportation Security Administration screener – particularly one this stupid.

Rebecca Solomon is 22 and a student at the University of Michigan, and on Jan. 5 she was flying back to school after holiday break. She made sure she arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, given the new regulations.

She would be flying into Detroit on Northwest Airlines, the same city and carrier involved in the attempted bombing on Christmas, just 10 days before. She was tense.

What happened to her lasted only 20 seconds, but she says they were the longest 20

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Chris Knight's avatar

In today’s performance of “Security Theatre”, it’s 8-year old Mikey Hicks of New Jersey: a Cub Scout who is on the Transportation Security Administration’s terrorism watch list.

Mikey has been on the list since the age of 2, when he was first examined by TSA goons to see if he was carrying any explosives, guns or stabbing weapons. And Mikey doesn’t appreciate his constant treatment by Homeland Security one bit: “I don’t like being touched in certain spots. They go like, (pat down on the side), and go like that way.”

Just more proof that our own federal government is a bigger menace than “the terrists” have ever been....

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Chris Knight's avatar

Need another reason to hate Transportation Security Administration (or as I call ’em “Thousands Slacking Around”)? No thanks to the new “backscatter” virtual strip search machines that Janet Napolitano wants to put into more airports, the United States government will soon be the world’s largest producer of pornographic images.

Here’s a pic that’s up on Drudge Report right now, showing a woman in one of the scanning machines…

And if you’ve got the nerve for it, here’s what one dude was able to produce with three clicks of Adobe Photoshop.

(With the same image, I was able to produce an identical photo with two mouse clicks inside Photoshop, in less than 20 seconds.)

Our British friends are already noting that the machines violate child pornography laws over there. And there is some speculation that the electromagnetic waves used in the backscatter devices can destroy DNA ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Transportation Security Administration is a colossal farce of an agency. It’s bureaucracy so bad it makes bad bureaucracy seem good in comparison. The TSA is a grand example of what I and many others prefer to call “security theatre”: something that the government does to make it look like it’s actively trying to stop “the terrists” from blowing up planes and such… but in reality is just trickery intended to fool the rubes.

Well, the TSA has somehow goofed and posted its “top secret” manual for screening airline passengers online. And the TSA apparently believed that covering sensitive up with black rectangles in an Adobe Acrobat file would be enough to hide confidential information… without realizing how easy it is to just remove the layers with the rectangles!

Want to read it for yourself? Here’s the zipped-up archive containing the TSA screening manual!

Between this and the leaked ...

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So according to former Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway in this video produced with the Department of Homeland Security, you are a potential terrorist if you: have guns, use binoculars, take pictures, use e-mail, talk on the telephone, give to charity, buy gold, look at the time on your watch, and plenty of other things that you otherwise would never have thought would be incriminating behavior.

Behold our government’s latest performance of Security Theatre:

This is more than ridiculous. The people of Colorado and all Americans should feel insulted by their own government, that it would even suggest that we are as cowed and paranoid as this video suggests. What the #&@$ was Elway thinking when he agreed to help make this crap?...

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