Prepare for a shock: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lied.
That’s the bureaucracy pestering passengers in airports while the Underwear Bomber waltzes past checkpoints onto his plane and sets himself afire. No matter: the TSA turned that flaming failure into an excuse to clamor more loudly for "whole-body imagers," i.e., cameras that virtually strip-search us.
Though the TSA pretends these pornographic contraptions are its answer to explosive briefs, it’s actually been lusting after them for years – even as passengers vehemently objected to exposing themselves to government agents, especially ones armed with cameras. And so the TSA’s propagandists swore its imagers could neither store nor transmit pictures. Screeners may leer at your birthday suit for the "short 12 or 15 seconds" they scan you, but "the minute that the passenger walks in through the [imager] and is cleared, meaning they’re given a green light, that image is gone forever."
Ahem: not according to documents recently pried from the agency’s claws. The specs the TSA supplied to the machines’ manufacturers call for the capacity to both send and store images.
I know, I know: you’re terribly disillusioned. You thought the TSA’s selfless patriots protected you, not their own voyeurism. After all, they’re in that noblest of professions, public service; they’re from the government, and they’re here to help, not hoodwink. Sure, screeners and the agency’s assorted other miscreants become a bit coarse and cantankerous at times, even cruel, but only when we inmates disagree that they’re God.
Meanwhile, some serfs are foolish enough to question the TSA’s wisdom, skill, even its intentions. Among the heretics is EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. It refused to accept Our Rulers’ word that their perverted gadgets "have zero storage capability," as the TSA’s website insists in at least three places and as its innumerable spokesfolks have assured the travelling public. Rather, EPIC’s skeptics actually prosecuted "a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit" to "[obtain] the technical specifications and vendor contracts" for the gizmos. READ MORE
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