Bit Bucket

As I live in Washington DC, and my Congresswoman does not have a vote, I would encourage you to send a similar letter to your Congressperson.  The TSA’s latest abuses cannot be allowed to continue:

Congresswoman Norton,

As Congress comes back into session, I encourage you to use your seniority on both the Homeland Security Committee and on the Transportation Committee to change the policy that they have enacted concerning the Transportation Safety Administration’s use of millimeter wave technology in the screening of passengers.  These devices represent an unnecessary invasion of privacy as part of security procedures, and aren’t making anyone safer.

While I appreciate the need to try to make airports more secure, these scanners show images of a patron’s naked body to the TSA in order to do it.  Worse, if you decide to opt out of the scanners for personal privacy reasons, or for concern over radiation exposure, you’re subject to a very intimate patdown that allows the TSA to touch the genital regions of a patron, out of nothing short of retaliation.

This is patently unacceptable.  The choices you have to make if you take your family traveling is that you can have their genitals leered at by TSA goons (one such example of bad behavior includes a pilot’s 18 year old daughter: <http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-safety-security/1147497-tso-saying-heads-up-got-cutie-you.html> ) or you can have them fondled.

Which would you choose?

The fourth amendment to the United States Constitution, which you have sworn to uphold and defend against powers foreign and domestic, says that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

A boarding pass is not probable cause to have my person searched in such a fashion. 

This is a bridge too far. A functioning travel network is crucial to a free society, and to have to show one’s genitals to the TSA, or allow them to be groped, in order to travel is the sort of unnecessary restriction on one’s liberty, and in exchange for no increase in security (these devices, and these patdowns, do not show hidden packages that could be contained in body cavities, which is the next logical step in the progression of the terrorists) and only serve to inconvenience the travelers.

Please enact legislation to stop the retaliatory patdowns and remove these intrusions into our personal privacy.

Thank you,

Tom Bridge