A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.
Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma,... (more)
Business traveler, Penny Moroney, was flying home from St. Louis to Chicago. Like all other airline passengers, she had to go through security first. When the metal in her artificial knees set off the detectors, she had to undergo more screening. When Moroney asked if she could go through a body scanner, she was told none were available.
A pat down was the only alternative.
Moroney explains “Her gloved hands touched my breasts...went between them. Then she w... (more)
For women and men who have already been sexually assaulted, the new screening rules--or just the threat of these rules--present a very real danger. They can be triggering events, setting off a posttraumatic-stress reaction. "I started crying. It was so intimate, so horrible. I feel like I was being raped," an anonymous rape survivor recounted on a Minnesota blog. Melissa Gibbs, a spokeswoman for We Won't Fly, a group protesting the new regulations, says that a rape survivor she spoke to ... (more)
President Obama said today he sympathizes with passenger complaints about aggressive body pat-downs at airports, but his counter-terrorism aides say they are necessary to guard against hidden explosives.
Balancing privacy and security is a "tough situation," Obama told reporters at a news conference following the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
"One of the most frustrating aspects of this fight against terrorism is that it has created a whole security apparatus aro... (more)
As I wrote yesterday, the surest way to head off a genuine popular movement that may threaten government control is to claim the position as its head and either turn it in a less threatening direction or slow it down. To control the limits of debate. To tap the energy of a groundswell and channel it to one’s advantage.
That is why we now see the politicians who created the TSA assuming the leadership pos... (more)
If you don't want to pass through an airport scanner that allows security agents to see an image of your naked body or to undergo the alternative, a thorough manual search, you may have to find another way to travel this holiday season.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is warning that any would-be commercial airline passenger who enters an airport checkpoint and then refuses to undergo the method of inspection designated by TSA will not be allowed to fly and also w... (more)
Think the complaints about the TSA are beginning to reach a tipping point? There's a whole bunch of new news on this front, starting with a California district attorney saying that he's ready to charge TSA agents with sexual assault if evidence is presented that the new pat downs go too far (apparently multiple DAs are now saying this). ... (more)
Appearing on the Alex Jones Show today, the former governor of Minnesota and host of the popular TruTV show, Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, announced he will no longer use commercial airlines due to the egregious abuses of the TSA and the government.
Ventura said he made the decision to avoid public aircraft after he found himself becoming too comfortable with being routinely searched. He said he was subjected to pat down and search three or four times a week when he trav... (more)
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a Christmas gift in store for the phone and cable industry: it may move ahead on its controversial net-neutrality regulations three days before Christmas.
An FCC source confirmed on Friday that the commission plans to push its December meeting back by a week, meaning it will fall on the 22nd of the month. That's the same meeting in which analysts say the agency may move forward on its controversial net-neutrality proposal. ... (more)
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site — regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is among the most draconian laws ever considered to combat digita... (more)
It's too early to say for sure, but Oregon Senator Ron Wyden could very well go down in the history books as the man who saved the Internet.
A bill that critics say would have given the government power to censor the Internet will not pass this year thanks to the Oregon Democrat, who announced his opposition during a recent committee hearing. Individual Senators can place holds on pending legislation, in this case meaning proponents of the bill will be forced to reintroduce the me... (more)
I see no evidence this means anything. They said that idiot "Bart Stupak" and the "Blue Dog Democrats" effectively killed the health care bill too, they all switched their votes the last minute and it sailed right through. Hopefully if this guy does have any power these articles might pressure him to actually follow through. I wouldn't put much to this at all though, if they just make some minor change they could come right back and say its wonderful. - Chris
CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - A Charlotte-area flight attendant and cancer survivor contacted WBTV after she says she was forced to show her prosthetic breast during a pat-down. [...]
In early August Bossie was walking through security when she says she was asked to go through the new full body-scanners at Concourse "D" at Charlotte Douglas International.
She reluctantly agreed. As a 3-year breast cancer survivor she says she didn't want the added radiation through her ... (more)
GRAND RAPIDS (WZZM) - Before boarding a flight in Grand Rapids, a woman says the search at the security checkpoint was violent, unnecessary and extremely upsetting.
"When I got on the plane all I wanted to do was sob," says traveler Ella Swift. [...]
"The female officer ran her hand up the inside of my leg to my groin and she did it so hard and so rough she lifted me off my heels," she says. "I think I yelped. I was in pain for about an hour afterwards. It just felt... (more)
One of the complaints frequently leveled at the mainstream press is that they don't do much critical thinking. All too often, it feels like they've simply turned into scribes, rather than people who will help everyone in the community better understand things. Case in point: Time Magazine's Alex Altman has published quite an article suggesting that the anthropmorphized "internet" is making too big a deal of the TSA's "naked or a grope" security procedures. Of course, the internet itself ... (more)
The Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently a wholly owned subsidiary of the Motion Picture Association of America, has reported out a bill that would allow the Justice Department to engage in prior restraint against essentially the entire Internet over alleged copyright infringement. The bill would allow the DOJ to force registrars to lock out domain names based on the content of a website and require all ISPs to take steps to prev... (more)
A bunch of folks sent over MPAA interim CEO Bob Pisano's incredibly misleading defense of the COICA censorship bill written recently for TheHill.com. It's amazing how many misleading or outright false statements Pisano was able to fit into a single piece but it's a testament to the level to which the MPAA must go through to support its plan for internet censorship: ... (more)
FBI Director Robert Mueller traveled to Silicon Valley this week to convince major Internet players to build "back doors" into their software that will allow law enforcement to wiretap data on their networks, says a news report.
It's part of an effort to expand the FBI's wiretapping powers to include the latest communications technologies, including social networking sites, voice-over-Internet (VoIP) telephone services and BlackBerries.
... (more)
