Saturday, October 22, 2011

I was wrong

There's a lot of fun things going on with the Transportation Security Authority - "fun" being a synonym for a farcical horrors - from yet another case of TSA agents going mad with their moderate amount of power to a satirical Playmobil Security Check Point playset posted on Amazon.com All of this has caused me dig up a post I wrote almost a year ago.

I predicted that the public outcry would continue to rise on the Sophie's Choice scenario the TSA was giving passengers of being felt up or photographed with an 80's teen movie clothing-penetrating nudie camera. Public opinion would cascade into people finally evaluating the trade-off between security and freedom, and the public would finally stand up and say the terrible cost does not justify the limited benefit and self-interested politicians would cave and interfere.

What happened instead was, nothing.

Nothing has changed, we're just where we were a year ago. Members of the general public have now absorbed the phrase "security theater" into their vocabularies and understand that a lot of these civil right violations give us no actual increases to security in return.

I still have a month to go from a full year when I made the prediction, but I'm calling it here. We're going to be stuck with this, and it'll get worse before it gets better.

2 comments:

  1. They are going to be phasing out the shoes off thing.

    Still grabbing your nuts, but you can keep your shoes on for it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. When I was at LAX to go to BlizzCon, I went through one of these nudie machines and didn't even know it, I just thought it was a metal detector. There was no notice, no sign informing me of the machines function, etc. I intended to opt out should I encounter one of these machines, but they've avoided controversy by avoiding telling anyone they're even being subjected to something new and intrusive.

    ReplyDelete