NEWS: I Don’t Feel Safe. I Feel Violated, Humiliated, and Angry

CULTURE: I Don’t Feel Safe. I Feel Violated, Humiliated, and Angry

by Wil Wheaton

Yesterday, I was touched - in my opinion, inappropriately - by a TSA agent at LAX.

I'm not going to talk about it in detail until I can speak with an attorney, but I've spent much of the last 24 hours replaying it over and over in my mind, and though some of the initial outrage has faded, I still feel sick and angry when I think about it.

What I want to say today is this: I believe that the choice we are currently given by the American government when we need to fly is morally wrong, unconstitutional, and does nothing to enhance passenger safety.

I further believe that when I choose to fly, I should not be forced to choose between submitting myself to a virtually-nude scan (and exposing myself to uncertain health risks due to radiation exposure*), or enduring an aggressive, invasive patdown where a stranger puts his hands in my pants, and makes any contact at all with my genitals.

When I left the security screening yesterday, I didn't feel safe. I felt violated, humiliated, assaulted, and angry. I felt like I never wanted to fly again. I was so furious and upset, my hands shook for quite some time after the ordeal was over. I felt sick to my stomach for hours.

This is wrong. Nobody should have to feel this way, just so we can get on an airplane. We have fundamental human and constitutional rights in America, and among those rights is a reasonable expectation of personal privacy, and freedom from unreasonable searches. I can not believe that the TSA and its supporters believe that what they are doing is reasonable and appropriate. Nobody should have to choose between a virtually-nude body scan or an aggressive, invasive patdown where a stranger puts his or her hands inside your pants and makes any contact at all with your genitals or breasts as a condition of flying.



I do not have the luxury of simply refusing to fly unless and until this policy changes. I have to travel dozens of times a year for work, and it simply isn't practical to travel any other way. Airlines know that I am not unique in this regard, so they have no incentive to take a stand on their customers' behalf. Our government also knows this, so our Congressmen and Congresswomen have no incentive to stand up for the rights and freedoms of their constituencies against powerful and politically-connected lobbyists like the former head of the TSA. This is also wrong.

I have to travel back into the USA next week, and I'll be back and forth between Los Angeles and Vancouver for much of the next several months. When I think about all this travel, I feel helpless, disempowered, and victimized by the airlines and the TSA ... and I'm one of the lucky passengers who has never been sexually assaulted. I can't imagine what it must feel like for someone who has been the victim of sexual violence to know that they are faced with the same two equally-unacceptable choices that I faced yesterday, and will likely face whenever I fly in the future.

It's fundamentally wrong that any government can force its citizens to submit to totally unreasonable searches so we have the "freedom" to travel. It is fundamentally wrong that the voices of these same citizens are routinely ignored, our feelings marginalized, and our concerns mocked.

I don't know what we can do to change this, but we must do something. I'm writing letters to all of my congressional representatives, contacting an attorney, and reaching out to the ACLU when I get home. I am not optimistic that anything will change, because I feel like the system is institutionally biased against individuals like me ... but maybe if tens of thousands of travelers express our outrage at this treatment, someone will be forced to listen.

To add one more thing: I don't believe that all TSA officersare automatically bad people (though we've seen that at least some are). For example, I recently flew out of Seattle, opted-out, and got a non-invasive, professional, polite patdown. It was still annoying, but at least my genitals weren't touched in any way, which was decidedly not the case yesterday. I realize that most TSA officers are doing the best they can in a job that requires them to interact with people who automatically dislike them and what they represent. It isn't the individual officer who is the problem; it's the policies he or she is instructed to carry out that need to change.

* The TSA recently admitted that the amount of radiation passengers are exposed to in backscatter scanners was 10 times more than they originally claimed. The TSA claims that the scanners are still safe, but what else would we expect them to claim?
***

As a victim of abuse, airport security measures have caused me a lot of distress in the past, and since the new pat downs have been instigated I've stayed away from flying altogether (which is problematic given that my family reside overseas). I'm therefore very grateful to former SG editor and Geek In Review contributor Wil Wheaton (@wilw) for allowing us to repost this essay, which was first published on his blog on April 6th. - Nicole Powers, SG Ed

There is hope! Both NH and Texas are trying to ban them.
NH story here
Texas here

Both states want to criminalize the pat downs as sexual assault. I remeber seeing a video of the rep from NH near tears describing how he felt after going through airport security

What a shitty choice

"We have met the enemy and he is us."

Somehow the Israelis have managed not to lose a single aircraft to terrorists in decades and yet they don't do this bullshit.

And unless I'm mistaken...don't they have some of the most stringent air-travel regulations in the world?

I don't know. I do know that they have military trained psychologists who [gasp] profile passengers based both on statistics and observation and then conduct one on one face to face interviews with passengers they think are risky to assess them individually.

Just another reason I dont fly anymore

I'm worried about my upcoming flights next month.

The last time I flew I made the mistake of wearing an underwire bra... I set off the walk-through, got wanded, got scanned, and got felt up in a way that was distressing but not nearly as invasive as some accounts I've heard.

I'll be sure to wear a sports bra next time, but god forbid my pants zipper sets it off next time, as has happened here and there in the past for me. I can imagine how upsetting a crotch-check would be after how bad the breast-check was last time. Worried.

While i know some people may have to fly for career reasons, I wish more people would choose not to fly for vacation or random travel purposes. I find the practices of the TSA unconstitutional at best. It's just sickening.
I don't travel much, but it will definitely be by car, bus, train, or boat when I do.

My dad worked in Libya for over 20 years (his tenure ended, understandably, at the end of Feb), which required him to fly overseas between Canada and north Africa once a month. He didn't get blown up or taken as a hostage once in all those years, and I can assure you that his lack of being blown up cannot be attributed to pat-downs or erotic x-ray photography.

I've only ever been subjected to the rape-a-scan once, and I came very close, when the offered me the choice between cheap boudoir photography or an even cheaper back alley grope to invent a third choice whereby I put all my clothes through the x-ray and walk though security completely bare-assed so that everyone can see exactly what I'm hiding. If I didn't really need to get where I was going, and avoid a criminal record, I would have.

The TSA has been over the line for a long time now. The one that bugs me is their insistence that they can scan the copy of your hard drive, or refuse to let you fly. There's that part of the constitution where our "papers and effects" would be immune to unreasonable search. My hard drive is clearly an 'effect' and in the same spirit as a paper. It couldn't be much more obvious that it has constitutional protection.

Congress to review pat down procedure. Six-year-old girl patted down before flight.

But what happens when the turrists start hiding things up their corn-shoots? The TSA will be forced to conduct full body-cavity searches on every passenger to make sure we're safe!

I approve! Now we need several more states to do this.

It's really weird to be reading this after seeing a comedy hiphop video about handjobs that name checks Wil Wheaton.

Sorry you had to go through this Wil, hopefullly with some good lobbying the people that manage your skies in the states can put in some reform.

I saw this on the news. Absolutely absurd. I recall another child got rather upset when separated from her parents for a pat down.

i don't fly for work anymore. I drive. I am usually given the choice but after the last shithole experience i had with the TSA before body scanners were installed i decided never to fly again.

I had fed-exed my tools to the store i was going to overnight and received the parts to fix the machine the morning i was leaving.

One of our parts has 14 ice-cube relays, a few microchips and a few resistors soldered. I put it in my carry on because it was the only thing i had besides my phone and a set of earbuds. Checking it would have ended up with it lost or broken or both, i wasn't going to pay $25 to check it either.

I then sat at the security check point with multiple TSA agents and some TSA managers repeated the statement "It's a part for one of our machines, i am flying out for the day to fix" about 650 times.

I made my flight with about three minutes to spare.

Response below

I work in the security field and have done red team tests of airports in the past. The processes put in place at airports make us no safer today than we were on 9.10.01. In the past I have bypassed security measures by socially engineering TSA employees as well as have seen poorly trained screeners miss things in X-ray scans that should not have been.

If you google for data on the US Marshals red team events you will also see how many times simulate explosives and weapons were missed by screeners as well as other means to bypass security were found. Some of these issues still have not been remediated. Once again,  are no safer than we were before and one of the largest holes has been baggage screening and handling, which has yet to be fully performed nationally.

TSA is just performing what is called "security theater" to make some feel safe. In the end, they add little value and now, with their "powers" (self implied) They fee they can abuse the public with impunity. Will is just one case in many where the TSA has taken liberties and as Will alludes in the post, likely nothing will change with his calling on congress.

It's a sad state of affairs here in the USA at the moment.
U.E.