Really, what is wrong with these people?
An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.
Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA’s recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a “game” is potentially putting children in danger.
Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is “one of the most common ways” that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.
Randomly patting down little kids, no matter what you tell them, is stupid and ridiculous. Telling them it’s a “game” is dangerous. I can just see the pedophiles sewing themselves nice, crisp “TSA Agent” uniforms now.
In case you’re keeping track, the number of reports of sexual abuse of children is up to 80,000 per year. The number of people harmed in terrorist attacks on airplanes in the US is about 3500 in the last 10 years.
Flying has lots of risks, and terrorism is one of them (a very, very tiny one). Sadly, people are terrible at rational risk assessment. We’re terrified of things that will almost certainly never happen to us, and blithely engage in things every day that have a pretty high chance of killing us. Our national security policy shouldn’t be based on this, it should be based on reality.
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This is sick. Remember people the panty bomber FAILED. Also, I am sick of taking of my shoes whenever I fly. I always wear socks, but the thought of my clean socks walking over the naked feet is enough to drive my OCD/ICK factor into overdrive. Really people wears socks when flying, or at least through the security gates — no wear socks. Oh, didn’t the shoe bomber fail too hmmm… Why do we subject ourselves to this abuse?
By far the biggest killer in the US for people under 45 is cars. Cars kill more young people than terrorism, guns, suicide, drugs, war, cancer, heart disease, and all other causes – COMBINED.
We should work on stopping terrorism, yes, but we should focus our real efforts on the real killers – the people who drive to the airport, not the people getting on board.
How many TSA agents are pedos in the first place?
The worst part was that they insisted on calling the game “find the salami”.
More hysteria for the masses to moan over. From “TSA: Pat-downs“
“Will children receive pat-downs?
Transportation Security Officers will work with parents to resolve any alarms at the checkpoint. If required, a child may receive a modified pat-down. Parents are encouraged to ensure their children have taken all items out of their pockets as they go through the security checkpoint.”
@5: What does a “modified pat-down” entail, since you’re the expert?
Here is what I don’t get. If they really think that checking your buttcrack or labia is critical for finding explosives, why aren’t they checking children’s buttcracks and labia? A terrorist could just as easily bring a kid with them with the intent to blow said kid up. Right? So we should be checking in children’s orifices. No? Why not? Because some lines are uncrossable, even for the sake of “public safety”? Coulda fooled me. Assholes.
meanwhile, access to wikileaks.org has been completely shut down from inside the US (and perhaps elsewhere). Proxy servers don’t work. Twitter is abuzz. Tons of google searches for how to access wikileaks. Let’s hope that “insurance” file is a goodie.
@8: Word on the /b/ is that the insurance file is in a proprietary military filetype/encryption, and that it’ll be hard to make heads or tails of it.
Woah, Wikileaks is down in Japan too. I was still able to access it using Tor though.
yeah, but who knows who has the keys, right? Hopefully Assange et al. gave it to enough folks to make it truly insurance.
meanwhile:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/201…
@10: can’t get it through Tor or any other proxy server in Seattle. Even mirror sites are going down.
This is part of a new partnership with Amazon to increase the number of child assaults in the world. It’s part of an effort to bail out law enforcement. Let’s face it, law enforcement has it was too easy, this added challenge makes the choice between raising the retirement age or protecting our children that much harder.
Here’s one form of child abuse that SLOG seems to advocate–getting blown up on a plane by Al Qaeda because someone was too pissy to get an x-ray.
A person who goes on a plane without a TSA is like a person with AIDS who goes into an uninfected gene pool and has sex and doesn’t tell anyone.
If a person refuses a TSA, the other passengers should be allowed to opt out of the flight and get a full refund. The non-TSA person can then fly solo.
HIDE YO’ WIFE, HIDE YO’ KIDS
One more number that is very appropriate when evaluating this type of protocol by a government agency. Terrorists caught by the TSA (A 70,000 personnel agency) since 9/11/2001: ZERO!!!
@14 WTF dude. No one is saying erase airport security altogether. It’s the fucking genital touching and pat-downs of children that crosses the line. That back door for explosives in the undies has been open as long as flights have been around and so far, terrorism on an airplane remains extremely rare. Why the fuck do we absolutely need some government security employee (they aren’t fucking law enforcement agents) touching gentials?
I’m sure there was some idiot who wrote the words “Flying has lots of risks, and terrorism is one of them (a very, very tiny one)” prior to Sep 11 2001. They were stupid then and they’re stupid now. You’re the type of people that bitch at the TSA for trying to keep you safe and then bitch at them for not keeping you safe when something happens. I’m sure families of the 3500 killed in the last 10 years would have a different opinion about TSA pat-downs and screenings.
@18, yeah, just like MADD has a different opinion on driving than you do.
Not one person who objects to Security Theatre would have one complaint if there was a successful airplane terrorist attack. Not a single one. So stop lying about other people’s convictions, you disingenuous piece of shit.
Not that there would be another attack, since the necessary precautions to prevent a terrorist taking over a plane are all already in place and don’t occur in the airport: secured cockpit doors and a population informed that their flight will not land safely if the plane is taken over. Those two things prevent any 9/11 scale attack from happening again for the foreseeable future. Even the two dumbfucks who tried to bring bombs on their planes wouldn’t have had a very good chance of exploding more than 2-3 people. At worse, the planes would have had to make emergency landings.
Airport security is weaker now than it was before the machines. It’s well publicized that the machines don’t see inside orifices, and the TSA has publicly stated that they will not do cavity searches. Your flights are way more at risk now than they ever were before, by your stupid, shitty, reactionary logic.
These people are insane. I love the line at the end where they might change their policy for victims of sexual abuse. Do you carry a card for that or can anyone self-identify? Is that something you’re comfortable telling a complete stranger at an airport: “don’t touch me there because daddy did that for years”???? Seriously, who are these people???
NY Times online has an article about the WikiLeaks situation this morning, FYI
More security theatre, this one with The Little Ones thrown in for good measure. And Slog plays right along with it.
Airport security is like the Democratic party: you have to have it, but it’s annoying, ineffectual, and lets the GOP walk all over it. Until people actually do something about it – like taking a stand instead of having glamour fits from the comfort of their laptop – nothing will change. But Americans are too busy gassing about their freedom to do anything about the curtailing of them. Besides, they just got a sweet $150 fare to New York. What’s a little radiation or groping?
Part of this TSA hysteria is engineered to villianize government employees. The right can’t go after the cops or firemen yet – too powerful and too many of them on their side – so they start with these low-paid, non-unionized guys who can’t hide in a donut shop or firehouse. “These people” didn’t wake up one morning, and say “hey, let’s think of a creepy pedophile game, put in nasty new machines and start looking at people’s butt cracks!”. They were told by their bosses they had to do that. All this happened as soon as they started to talk about unionizing. That seems fishy to me.
But at the end of the day, say you’re a TSA agent. The job is crappy to begin with, and the politicians just made it crappier and more dangerous. But a job’s a job, it has insurance, it pays the bills, and if you quit, you probably won’t get unemployment. You’ve got a family to support, and no savings. What do you do?
You check butt cracks and pat down children, that’s what you do.
@22 I’m as pro-union as we come, and when I heard about the patdowns and enhancements I at first was ambivalent and in the “shit happens” camp. But then this–combined with comments from Napalotano herself that if needed they would expand this to trains and “buses” is when my warning bells went off. Using pedo grooming language is just taking it to insane new heights.
And, 23, you’ll notice that it’s Nepalitano and people immediately below her, not the folks actually doing the work, who are thinking this stuff up.
If they actually were unionized, the front line might – if they were so inclined – say no, we’re not going to pat down children, we’re not fondling breasts, and we want a safety study on these machines if you want us to work around them. All anti-union mythology aside, that why employers don’t like unions.
But that would interfere with the pageant that is airport security.
@8-12: wikileaks’ DNS provider pulled service, since they were essentially getting DDoS’d, too, and the have other clients to worry about. The site is still up, at http://213.251.145.96/, it’s just that that’s impossible to remember, and someone saying “Oh, the site’s at this IP address” could be full of shit and directing you to a shitpile of viruses and malware.
As a bonus, it breaks their own links, like from collateralmurder.com. Anyway, they’ve got a twitter where they’l presumably keep updating. It looks like wikileaks.ch is up.
That is wildly stupid to make it a “game”. A parent or caregiver will be with the child during a pat-down, and it’s the parent’s responsibility to explain truthfully what’s happening and why. I would assume a parent would also explain that any inappropriate touching by a person when the parent is not around is never okay.
Good post on this subject from local “how to talk to your kids about sex” educator Amy Lang: http://www.birdsandbeesandkids.com/buzz/…
If a TSA agent molests your teen or younger child (anyone 16 or younger) – call 9-1-1.
If you see them feeling up teens – call 9-1-1.
Molestation is a crime.
You’d think that before crafting these policies, long before enacting them, the TSA would consult specialists who have more expertise in things like psychological trauma, instead of JUST talking to security “experts” looking for a big fat paycheck. You’d think, but no.
@14, the machines and the patdowns can’t find plastic explosive. So your theory here isn’t any better than any of your other ones. Asshole.
On the other hand, 90% of Americans think patdowns are GREAT. Most Americans support torture too.Like the Chevy commercial used to say, “this is mah country”.
@29 or liquid two-stage explosives.
Actually, most of the time I fly, I usually carry 3 to 4 illegal objects, just to prove how ineffective they are.
Your seat tray is an easily modifiable weapon, and can be used as the outer shell staging for a directed blast explosive and igniter assembly, if you can get the liquid or gel aboard, which can be in any carry-on luggage or in solid form, easily reassembled in the lavatory.