The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York's Kennedy airport. As mentioned in my previous post regarding the Top 10 Events that Threatens Liberty in 2008 that I wrote at the beginning of this year, the TSA is moving forward with the backscatter technology that can virtually undress passengers, "... by blurring passengers' faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person's gender. "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back," Schear said."

The woman stepping into the 9-foot glass glass contraption is, "Eileen Reardon of Baltimore looked startled when an electronic glass door slid around the outside of the machine to create the image of her body. "Some of this stuff seems a little crazy," Reardon said, "but in this day and age, you have to go along with it.""

The citizen who says "this day and age you have to go along with it" is exactly what's wrong with this post 9/11 country. The TSA is nothing more than a facade to pacify stupid people and make them feel safe. They do little if anything to actually make airline flights safer. Most of the absurd rules they have such as taking your shoes off, taking your belt off, throwing away your water bottles and toothpaste serve no real purpose other than to inconvenience passengers and possibly give the TSA employees a laugh at the passengers' expense. (Next time you are in an airport checkpoint removing your clothing, gaze upon the faces of your fellow citizens, and you will find a deep dreary pain on everyone. I find it incredibly depressing looking at everyone else around me, and I encourage you to take notice.) What's just as enraging at this development is the peoples' reaction to it. These devices are unhelpful and an unnecessary invasion of privacy. Why aren't people angry? Why aren't they fed up with this inconvenient, ineffective, and invasive security facade? The answer is that the average person is complacent, apathetic, and stupid. They can't think further in front of them than their own nose, and given the choice, they'd continually give up liberty for expediency to the point of living in a totalitarian state. The problem when people treat our republic as a democracy and ignore the ideals of the Constitution for expediency is the subjugation of the minority (those who understand and value liberty) by the will of the majority (the stupid and complacent masses who unquestioningly march toward a totalitarian state because they are told that it is in their best interest).
/rant

--------------
"The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen – a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life." – William O. Douglas (1898-1980), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Osborne v. United States

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." – Benjamin Franklin

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." – Winston Churchill
--------------

Article -> http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20080606/a_bodyscan06.art.htm