T.S.A. mandates "junk touching"

Over the weekend John Tyner's "If you touch my junk I'm gonna have you arrested" video went viral.  Tyner's laughable lamentations have given rise to national outrage and indignation over increased security measures recently implemented by the T.S.A.  While Tyner's making light of the incident was indeed humorous, the issue of airport security measures infringing upon travelers' freedoms deserves a more weighty examination.

In the wake of the recently thwarted Yemeni-bomb plots, the T.S.A. has re-written their pat-down process, which supplements the body scanner/strip-search screening currently in use in 68 airports around the country.  The body scanners themselves are invasive enough on their own, however now the T.S.A. has ramped up the pat-down process to require testicular "resistance."  

The T.S.A. officer can be heard in the video explaining the procedure to Tyner:  "We're going to be doing a groin check. That means I'm going to place my hands on your hips, a hand on your inner thigh, slowly go up.  I'll do that two times in the front, two times in the back. And if you'd like a private screening, we can make that available." Right, because having a stranger repeatedly rub my inner thigh until they achieve testicular resistance is going to be so much more pleasant in a private room away from the prying eyes of witnesses! 

Here's the thing: if the T.S.A. really wanted to crackdown on airport security they would ultimately need to perform full body cavity searches on all passengers. Anal smuggling has proven an effective method for prison inmates to transport contraband for as long as prisoners have had contraband worth smuggling and cavities worth filling.   

Let's just hope that we won't be seeing this measure on a T.S.A. agenda any time, ever. 

Now, if you've ever spent any legitimate amount of time in an airport – and given airport wait times, I'm sure that you have – then you are painfully aware of the class of people working for the T.S.A.

Let's not split hairs.  I wouldn't entrust the care of my pet goldfish to the surly T.S.A. security professionals, so I damn well won't trust them near the family jewels.  Nor do I want Disgruntled Debbie and the other T.S.A. cronies carefully inspecting my nude body scan image. 

This is to say nothing of the general public, which, it was recently learned, has as much access to your nudity as you have to Jenna Jameson's.  Just days ago, the website Gizmodo released a video of over 100 scanned body images that were saved by a Florida Federal Courthouse.  Besides irrefutably proving that Florida's entire judicial system is uniformly obese, the fact that these images are available at all seems to contradict the T.S.A., whose "privacy" page includes the promise that "Advanced imaging technology cannot store, print, transmit or save the image, and the image is automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely located security officer."

This past summer Senators Bob Bennett (R-UT) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced the S.A.F.E.R. A.I.R. act, a bill that would mandate the use of body scanners at all commercial airports nationwide by 2013.  This means that simply avoiding the porn-production machines currently installed at 68 of our airports will no longer be an option.    

Numerous European transport safety officials have come out against the superfluous and ineffective security measures of U.S. airports, not only for their infringement upon personal privacies but also for their extreme inefficiency and potential to expose passengers to harmful radiation.

It is said that if we buckle to terrorism and live in fear than the terrorists have won. Well, Jihad doesn't frighten me, but I am afraid of Morbidly Obese Otis, in the grease stained, triple XL, electric blue T.S.A. shirt, rubbing up and down my inner thigh until he meets resistance…TWICE!  

So congratulations global terrorism, it appears that this victory is yours and yours alone!