Reply #88: A nest of Hobson's choices.

[ElboRuum]

If you don't like our procedures, don't fly.

If they don't like performing the procedures or that their job is sucky in other ways, they can quit.

Easy to say if you look upon the Hobson's choice as in some way legitimate or acceptable in an informed and fair-minded population. I do not. We have a right to be secure in our persons (and "touching your junk" is beside the point) and the people who work have a right to execute their jobs in an environment which doesn't dehumanize them. If the situation itself (in this case, the implementation of these procedures) presents issues where these two mandates cannot be met, Hobson's choice is just not acceptable. Amendment #1 indicates a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In other words, the TSA (whether it wants to admit or not and whether it likes it or not) is a government agency, and therefore subject to the consent of the governed. So long as screeners are the public face of the TSA, they will be the targets of the outrage of the governed.

Until the TSA has the courage to take the privacy concerns of travelers more seriously than it does and starts responding to de facto allegations of undue burden, then it can just deal with the outrage.

Just for the record, I'm not convinced of the whole "It'll give me cancer" backscatter issue. I don't have enough information to draw a reasonable conclusion, but from what I've thus far read, you absorb much more radiation from flying itself (you are closer to the atmospheric lid, and thus are exposed to much more radiation than at ground level) than you absorb from a backscatter. But I am concerned greatly that our methods for supposedly keeping air travelers safe are "horse escaped, closing barn door anyway", and in the meantime no conversation of "OK, now you're just being silly, let's talk" ever occurs.