Definition of opposite-sex scanner viewing and frisking includes same-sex attracted

Women have a right to fear being taken advantage of by male TSA security -- straight men have the same right to fear being taken advantage by gay male security (gays are not girls) -- with no phony options-to-request. A gay male has every right to refuse his own partner access to his body -- ditto for gay TSA security.

Who will tell their teen age sons it is okay for a gay man to perform even an old fashioned (pre-enhanced) frisk on him -- not to say on his private and personal parts (same parts as a girls to a straight man) -- because we cannot discriminate in job assignments?! (Lesbians are not boys -- a trickier issue than I can handle.)
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I want to make it absolutely clear that I am no homophobe. When I was an SF cab driver I used to joke that I made my living going down to the Castro after midnight to hustle (ditto for Halstead in Chicago and Christopher Street in New York when I rarely drove yellow there).

I had a gay teen living with me for a year in the Bronx in the 70s. That's when I figured out that gays are not girls. They programmed between the ages of 3 and 6 to see the big ego in women -- just as straights programmed to see the same in men -- that's all the difference between. That lightning bolt between our legs then takes the path of least resistance.

My first move away from home was to Chelsea in Manhattan which even in the 60s had a strong openly gay contingent.

Congress already voted against TSA naked child scanning -- ditto for state laws against opposite sex groping and scanning

How can TSA administrative regs -- composed with delegated Congressional legislative power – overwrite an explicit Congressional prohibition of naked child imaging: a legislative house divided against itself? Said prohibition passed First Amendment muster due to the harm done the imaged child. Viewing of (especially opposite-sex*) naked child images by either TSA or non-airport security personnel constitute the same legal offense.

(An artist's rendering of what a child's naked scan image would look like could not be shown legally on TV -- yet real female children are being viewed by male TSA viewers all over our landscape, all day and all night, with incalculable damage to many. Stop it right now!)

Without TSA regs for legal cover (the government made me do it) male TSA agents (one viewer per scanner) viewing the kind of naked images of adult females which scanners transmit could be prosecuted under the same federal and/or state laws that would make such viewing illegal at any high school or skating rink entrance.

Ditto -- most especially! -- for TSA males physically "meeting the resistance" of female genitalia or brushing hands over their private (all!) areas, every bit as much as at any department store entrance. How can mere airport regs authorize -- nay, mandate! -- male stranger upon female stranger attractive part-touching just because, for example, TSA may short handed on female employees (many small airports?) -- instead of merely refusing boarding of same (crackpot but not criminal)?
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Both same-sex naked viewing and same-sex private part touching conflict with the justification previously cited by courts for okaying so-called administrative (warrant-less) searches: relatively limited invasion of privacy (sobriety checkpoints as far as it's been stretched). 17 out of 17 TSA employees out of the 20 who answered a query from a travel site survey proclaimed their disgust with being forced to perform overly personal pat-downs (at last count drawing 819 mostly disgruntled comments).

Courts require a balancing justification for supposed-to-be not too intrusive administrative searches. If 1 in 10 million yearly US airline flights were going down to terrorism taking 300 souls with them, would saving them supply justification to subject the other 9,999,999 plane loads to (even same-sex, adult-only) naked imaging and/or random private groping (scanner saw a hanky in your pocket; you can't just take it out and go through again -- you're wearing a sanitary napkin; you may choose a private room for your ordeal) -- even assuming $5 per passenger security actually worked? Not until we begin breathalyzing every driver at every checkpoint -- which would be a lot less intrusive and save a lot more lives -- than nationwide X-rated security theater.

A Cornell University study claimed 242 more driving fatalities per month occurred post 9/11, attributing those to travelers driving instead of flying (commenter #770 says he will fly to Mexico and drive to the U.S. if necessary to avoid the TSA).

[*Same Child (p.3); Exact Same Scanner; Software Detection Only (p.2)]

[FLASH: Helena, Montana airport scanners will display stick-figures only -- apparently without TSA objection. http://montana.watchdog.org/2010/11/19/airport-scanners-may-turn-flyers-into-stick-figures/]

Most shocking of TSA revelation of all: small airports/2 or 3 agents/T-R-Y for opposite sex pat-downs!!!

Most shocking of TSA revelation of all -- at very bottom of page:
http://forums.officer.com/forums/showthread.php?156579-See-what-the-TSA-Scanners-REALLY-See/page2&p=2564830

Posts 1,319

Originally Posted by Nikk

If I understand correctly, the TSA pat downs are always performed by someone of your same gender.

Answer at very bottom of page:
There's a TSA agent on another forum that stated they TRY to have someone of the same gender do the pat down, but there's no guarantee. That's especially true at small airports where only 2 or 3 TSOs might be on duty at any given time.

Automatic TSA poll results -- automatic TSA legal results?

Automatic poll result should be: 95% oppose opposite sex remote viewing of nearly naked (pubic hair missing) airline passengers if separate lines for each gender is a practical alternative. 99.9% support separate sex scanners for their wives, daughters and son. A poll suggestion: how many Americans understand that opposite-sex viewing is the norm?

Should be automatic court test result: not separating genders for scanning when the alternative is easy (anybody sensible would say even if it isn't) is the equivalent of putting a camera in a stranger's shower room -- even if you never see the stranger in person: a serious felony under local law with adults, under federal law with children.

Should be automatic result of constitutional test: unneeded opposite sex naked imaging is the very definition of unreasonable search.
Should be automatic result of constitutional test: unneeded opposite sex intimate touching is the very definition of the very definition. Even if you say you can force her to miss the plane you may not make "the deal" to borrow a phrase from an old taxi driver's magazine article.

Criminal prosecution leading from the above results: once employees have been notified (policy need not wait): crossing the gender line, looking or touching, will result in full prosecution.

Has Janet Napolitano been intimately frisked by a male TSA worker yet? Would she want her teenage daughters to be ogled by male remote viewers when two lines work as easily as one? Has somebody asked her? Did anybody ask the American people?

DADT and unit cohesion: no problem EVEN if I know he is in the closet -- AS LONG as he stays there

I used to take a more pop-psychology approach to DADT and simply say straight male camaraderie is based on one-dimensional "shared interest" and simply state that gay males represent the opposite of such, so automatically cancel it out.

But, if I were in the army and I knew a soldier was in the closet (in point of fact I would recognize many -- do everywhere else) I would not be one bit less friendly with him than others -- nor be significantly embarrassed to shower with him (maybe a little quicker). OTW, if he came out I could not act in the same friendly manner towards him ...

...let's take a moment out to specify I am talking in front-line type, fighting type units, not in the Pentagon -- not in an office in other words -- where the undefinable camaraderie (indefinable should be no surprise -- this all takes place in the midbrain which forebrains seem to have little access too -- goes for shrinks too) is necessary ...

because now I am deathly afraid he will see much more in my friendliness. Now normally embarrassed about sexual privacy, too. Sensitives like this are like salt: you can add but you really can't subtract. No amount of indoctrination is going to make them go away.

25 years ago I read a causal remark in Armed Forces Journal (getting myself current in the military over 5 years) that officers have to be good looking to get promoted. I guess you have to prepare carefully to get people to charge a machine gun nest against their own interest. All this care and preparation saves lives -- or if it takes lives gets the job done.
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"Voit-comp test" for gay or straight: do you see the big ego exclusively in males and not in females (straight) -- or the other way around (gay). Nothing more to it (AC/DCs may be in between). Sexual lightning takes the path of least resistance, that's all. Not sure if most shrinks know this either.

TSA "sexting" and teenybopper girls

From now on let's call TSA scanners "sexters."

If a male sexter viewer suggest his male remote viewer buddy (they seem only separated by a small screen in one video) take a look at a naked teenage girl, is he guilty of trying to pass child pornography? Is his buddy guilty of possessing that child pornography if he looks or of some big felony? If his buddy looking is not a big felony we have to make that law real fast. Is his male boss guilty of the same big felony if he lingers to look at the naked teen who caught his eye as he passed behind?

Did I mention that sexter machines have only one view screen and only one viewer per sexter machine even though both sexes pass through it in American airports -- the latter not allowed in India or Pakistan airports. For all we know they cannot get enough female applicants to look at naked bodies all day -- viewing is not a TSA employee job; goes to outside contractors; maybe TSA doesn't want to take responsibility when it hits the fan.

Wait; maybe buddy peeking would fit under one of those new state laws making it a big felony to plant a peek camera in a neighbor or tenant's apartment -- new law keeping up with new technology. What iron clad protections should (nothing anyone knows of now) be put in place to protect us from buddy peeks -- a much more likely crime than any terrorism (99 lashes if you try it in India or Pakistan :-])? Hard to make much of an argument for that level of protection, isn't it, as long as males are complacently allowed to view shower-stripped, naked females?

In a bad year we lose 43,000 lives to traffic accidents. We would not willing to strip search every man woman and child (even in front of same sex) 3 times a year on the average (billion airline passengers a year) and sexually touch 1/8th of the population (or more as the process expands) to do something about that. It wouldn't be America anymore.

The key thing about being American is individual freedom and personal rights. It is not worth taking away our sexual privacy if a plane goes down every month (out of 5 million flights a year) -- not that the current "security theater" could foil a determined terrorist.

Media DADT on opposite-sex airport scans?

Media DADT on opposite-sex airport scanning -- the epitome of "unreasonable search -- the biggest unscooped scoop? Poll the public anyone?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLpOcEtsElI&feature=player_embedded
This company demo shows a male remote viewer examining both naked men and women and a 4 1/2 foot tall pubescent girl! Two other demos show young females examining naked males. All the better to promote sales in places without room or resources for two scanners -- or who wont go to the bother of separating the sexes? But an underage teen "sexting" another underage teen can get both arrested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKnY8-G26Ww&feature=related
This video shows both female/male and male/female TSA viewing. The remote viewers seem only separated from each other (and who knows who else might be roaming past) by short eye shields. But if they cannot see us directly it's all right. Just don't sneak a strip searcher into a school or a womens' club or it's 10 years.

Don't like scanning/groping, don't fly?:
Constitutionally that is amounts to saying if you don't want your house searched don't buy a house. You may go about your daily business without being strip searched (by the opposite sex?) or private area touched (opposite sex frisk stories pop up -- in this AP story what looks like a TV monitor sits next to the scan monitor) -- even could prevent a 1 in 20 million chance that a terrorist may blow up your flight. Clearly does not fit "administrative search" first-principles which requires low invasiveness and high need. Listen to America's top young constitutional scholar Jeffery Rosen: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/24/AR2010112404510.html.

Eighth grade math debunks the need:
According to Dana Milbank in the Washington Post it would cost $50* more per ticket to achieve Israeli level security that could actually catch (and therefore deter) a terrorist. How many are ready to fork over? Must not be a very material threat, then.

Common sense says scanning/groping wont even work:
Current scanning and groping wont stop drug-trafficking: they'll go in to deeper cavities or us fatter mules. A homegrown terrorist who can't figure that out can always buy an overseas round-trip ticket. Meantime, millions of the billion who fly domestic every year are on the highway -- getting killed in highway accidents -- to avoid intimate privacy violation they (and their children) just cannot stomach.

Courthouse (unnamed) video clearly shows men and women strip-scanned by same machine

www.gigisup.net

Courthouse (unnamed -- in Colorado) video surreptitiously taken by a lawyer clearly shows men and women (and presumably would include children) processed through the same full-body scanner. The lawyer also complains to guards that he was groin touched the last time.

Who could possibly trust perfect back and forth switch between male and female images? (Do they use separate male and female scanners at airports -- all of them?

Note: Cook County courthouse reportedly uses full body scanners (Daly control-freak city -- well that's why I came here, to get away from the chaos that was once New York City).
Does Cook use separate male and female scanners.
Does it opposite sex frisk (possible long running practice* at Castle Rock, Co courthouse where this lawyer likely took video).
Does Cook genital touch?
*Now widely distributed AP story: "Angela Hellenbrand received a quick pat down Tuesday by security guard Mike Couts ..." My widely distributed comment:

My first-draft explaining (should be so plain I wont use the word "arguing") that current administrative search precedents are not applicable to naked body scanning which seems to automatically bring with it a much touchier frisk on the same whatever rationale: http://ontodayspage.blogspot.com/2010/11/no-meaningful-precedent-for-tsas-so.html .

Any actual-genuine-real danger of airline bombers (that sexual invasion can do anything about): ask very real TSA "molestee" victims

Any actual-genuine-real danger of airline bombers (that sexual invasion can do anything about): ask very real TSA "molestee" victims. Example: http://www.prisonplanet.com/sanitary-towel-prompts-tsa-to-grope-sexual-assault-victim.html

Will add to the above: ask women who feel like they are being molested by (female) agents "enhanced" frisking them if they are concerned about airliners blowing up. They are not. Terror is a purely theoretical fear concerning only those who are not repulsed by the sneaky-peak scanners or the terrorizing frisks. Some say there is only one terror incident per 20 million airline flights.

Sales approach-wise you can try to make your point with eighth-grade math (e.g., will kill more driving) but the simple image of planes blowing up makes people feel like paratroopers who must be brave about lowering risks when there is no real danger at all -- and the sexual violations wouldn't stop a home-grown with an IQ of 100 anyway. But, sales-wise, putting the trade off in the context of the real fears of women and children and women-children can trump the brave paratrooper willingness thing.

"Angela Hellenbrand received a quick pat down Tuesday by security guard Mike Couts ,,," AP

Quotes from the following AP story on Castle Rock, Co courthouse: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101124/ap_on_re_us/us_courthouse_scanners#mwpphu-post-form

"Angela Hellenbrand received a quick pat down Tuesday by security guard Mike Couts ,,,"

Does anybody notice that Angela -- A FEMALE -- seems by this story to have been patted down closely enough to find the paper backing of a sticker in her pocket by Mike -- A MALE!

"A guard [presumably of the same sex -- though the story does not mention two guards; can they afford two?] in a separate room monitors the gray images with pixelated faces and genital areas ..." -- but a guard of the opposite sex may do the frisking?

No meaningful precedent for TSA's so-called "administrative searches

Quick note on Thanksgiving -- still re-writing this:
A quick check of the net tells me there is no actual "administrative search" precedent for the level of intrusion on sexual privacy in the new TSA policy. Just about all you need can be found here: http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/eamc_01/eamc_01_00050.html.

The so-called precedent for consent or not concerned a bulge in the pocket of person who wanted to leave the airport without any more search (he got 70 months for possession of a couple of ounces of cocaine!) under the old, non-sexual privacy invading methods.

When I was a kid reading comic books, they had a novelty advertisement page that always featured special glasses you could look through womens' clothes with (I don't know if they worked with men :-]). Today Hollywood war movies feature infrared scanners you can see watch figures through walls with. The reality now is a technology that can literally see through your clothing.

Virtual strip search and private part groping require thinking through from scratch how the doctrine of "administrative search" applies -- just as sobriety stops did. Seemingly for opponents examination from first principles puts them in pretty good shape.

The article linked to above quotes CAMARA V. MUNICIPAL COURT:
"First, [area inspections] have a long history of judicial and public acceptance."
"Second, the public interest demands that all dangerous conditions be prevented or abated, yet it is doubtful that any other canvassing technique would achieve acceptable results."
"Finally, because the inspections are neither personal in nature nor aimed at the discovery of evidence of crime, they involve a relatively limited invasion of the urban citizen's privacy."

First, I have been on 150 prison visits where if you had tiny brass rivets in your plastic eyeglass frames (late '70s) or brass lace eyelets in your shoes you had to take them off and go through the metal detector again. It has always been the norm that nobody but incarcerated prisoners are subject to private area touching -- least of all across the board females and (especially female) children.
Second, essentially no canvasing technique other than the Israelies use to protect their tiny handful of planes can stop a terrorist with any initiative at all. You check shoes they switch to underwear. You check underwear ... if a domestic flight goes down with all this screening the very first thing investigators will look for is the presence of an obese Islamic passenger who could hide a turkey drumstick between their cheeks, wires and switch up nearby orifice, battery in their LCD flashlight. A homegrown terrorist can go to the extra expense of a round trip to Ireland (Canada?, Mexico?).
Third, the inspections could not be more personal in nature nor a less limited intrusion of a person's privacy. Your female children would much rather an unlimited search of their bedroom or entire house than to be touched on what one little girl called (her grandmother's) "special girl parts." That goes for lots of grannies too.

What we are looking at is a potential sea change in our expectations personal privacy. If the TSA can do it, soon everybody else will by setting up scanners to -- and cops on the street (nightclub bouncers too?) may begin to touch special parts only because they want to be as good as TSA (human nature?).

Case closed: you cannot subject a billion Americans a year to what feels like to the most vulnerable like virtual strip search (if confined strictly to airports I could endure that) and 100,000 male and female adults and children to public groping for what amounts to no reason at all -- unless you want to kill many more than one plane load of people every year in traffic accidents involving folks who drove to avoid unbearable loss of privacy (Osama can add the 1,000 extra killed in the three months after 9/11 to his score -- maybe the shoe and underwear bombers can start adding up their score as the stats come in following 20,000,000 violations every week.)

(Am I wrong? Are the figures only 1% opt out but 3 1/2% are enhanced-patted down? If you are willing to do the scan but much fear the grope like me that permanently threatens my greatest need for that kind of privacy -- only a matter of time)
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Will add to the above: ask women who feel like they are being molested by (female) agents "enhanced" frisking them if they are concerned about airliners blowing up. They are not. Terror is a purely theoretical fear concerning only those who are not repulsed by the sneaky-peak scanners or the terrorizing frisks. Some say there is only one terror incident per 20 million airline flights.

Sales approach-wise you can try to make your point with eighth-grade math (e.g., will kill more driving) but the simple image of planes blowing up makes people feel like paratroopers who must be brave about lowering risks when there is no real danger at all -- and the sexual violations wouldn't stop a home-grown with an IQ of 100 anyway. But, sales-wise, putting the trade off in the context of the real fears of women and children and women-children can trump the brave paratrooper willingness thing.

Stripping our most compelling 4th and 14th Amendment rights -- all for nothing

The curtain between government and our most private privacy has been raised from ocean to ocean: 3 million men and women everyday exposed naked to the eye of an unseen stranger (maybe even sneaky peeks in those back rooms) and 100,000 more men and women have their most-privates groped by a stranger in view of strangers (family and friends could feel worse). All for nothing.

Well; not for absolutely nothing: it will make it a bit less likely any home-grown shoe or underwear bomber will take down a domestic flight -- and more likely they will destroy a flight originating in Europe or Africa or Asia or South America (the only attempts so far). Or a home-grown will need a "martyr" big or obese enough to tape plastique comfortably inside their butt-cheeks with whatever little wires and switch hidden from a metal detector in an adjacent cavity; batteries not included, can be carried in a little flashlight. Or buy a round-trip ticket. All for nothing.

If an eccentric millionaire offered $50,000 rewards to all who could cross screening with equivalent size devices he might go broke in a month. Anybody see how the New York Detective smuggled a pistol (what we Bronx kids would have called a "zip gun" in the '50s in Russia in the "Gorky Park" movie. All for nothing.

Personal privacy doesn't worry you personally? Being regularly frisked by police without probable cause might not irk many people. In our worst neighborhoods such frisking of young males could bring an end to gang violence and the worst crime; freeing residents to roam outside their homes again -- to me that would be something worth considering. In the three months after 9/11, 1,000 more Americans died in traffic accidents avoiding air travel. How many "hidden" airline crash equivalents (if we count 200 extra highway deaths as one domestic airliner load) will sacrificing our most fundamental 4th and 14th Amendment rights -- the latter would invoke Roe v. Wade's compelling interest test? -- cost every year. All our privacy gone (police would never think of going so far) -- all for nothing.

Suppose Osama blackmailed us with...

I have a right to be in public anywhere (EVEN AT THE AIRPORT!) without being stripped or intimately groped without probable cause. What are airports some kind of normal-human-emotions-don't-exist zone?

... even if there were the the most compelling of practical reasons ...

There is an extremely practical reason to allow police to randomly frisk any young male (especially) they wish to. This would end all gang violence in the poorest neighborhoods and make Americans who live there feel much less like they are permanent prisoners in their own homes (I fully understand; I'm originally from the Bronx). But the Constitution has some very pointed things to say about it because we don't want to live in a police state.

Imagine if Osama threatened America with an airliner brought down if we did not electronically strip search 3 million men and women every day all over the country and have strangers aggressively grope all the private areas of 100,000 men and WOMEN in public. Would you give in to that threat? Imagine after we gave in to such mass ugliness an airliner went down anyway -- and Obama laughed and said I fooled you; I sent that bomber in from outside the country just like the last two -- foolish Americans! (Or maybe he really found a 300 "martyr" -- have to investigate if there were any obese Islamic passengers on the downed plane.)

My candidate for #1 TSA shock story on the internet: rape victim intimately groped by male agent

Why all the fuss on the internet over a little boy whose father actually took his shirt off for him or over males who were intimately touched inside the clothing or females horrified to be enhance-frisked by female agents ...

... when the numero uno internet shocker should be http://pncminnesota.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/rape-survivor-devasted-by-tsa-enhanced-pat-down ...

This happened in Chicago -- second city -- where you would think personnel density would present no shortage of female agents. If this can in Chicago it can happen anywhere -- and from other reports it seems to be considered routine by TSA agents.

Are these stories left behind for lack of video? If so I plead with anti-groping activists to prepare their own videos ranging from at least a person talking about what they read or (probably the most effective) visual recreations of the worst media reports.

Related issue: if male TSA agents feel free to routinely grope females (which should be recognized as a violent felony by the Obama administration from now on -- immediately! -- some journalist ask Obama please) when there are supposedly too few females on hand (pun intended) how much more free do non-TSA, private contractor X-ray viewers -- who we cannot view in return -- feel to view naked images of the opposite sex??

http://wewontfly.com/judy-in-denver-several-agents-stood-in-a-group-laughing-at-us Third paragraph down: “The person viewing you is in another room. You won’t know if it’s a man or woman”?

If these stories don't move to number one concern why should anyone care about anything?

PS. wewontfly.com has 16,483 Facebook fans. Opps; make that 16,495 -- I just took another look. Opps; make that 16,499.