Count me with those who will not be flying until the TSA procedures requiring either a full-body X-ray scan or a grope are rescinded. This is meaningless security theater taken to a Kafkaesque extreme, and I won’t consent to it even passively. When the airlines feel enough pain from refuseniks, they’ll push back faster than we can.
The whole gallimaufry of escalating “security” restrictions since 9/11 has been a bad joke out of Monty Python parody, achieving nothing; tiger-team tests reveal that the ridiculous ease with which weapons and bombs can be slipped through has changed not one bit.
The Israelis, targeted by terrorists more ferociously than any country on earth, have never had a single hijacking or bombing and rightly laugh at our “security”. It’s all Kabuki theater, a ritual intended to pantomime seriousness in the absence of any actual seriousness. If we actually cared about security we’d arm the air crew, and if we really cared we’d arm the passengers.
It was always bound to come to this. Once “security” was based on the premise that only planes full of disarmed sheep are safe, the full-body scanners and genital-groping were as inevitable as night following day – and, in the future, so will be body-cavity searches. But perhaps scanning and groping will prove to have been the reductio ad absurdum of that strategy; there are signs that the revolt against it might become serious enough to inflict damage on revenue that the airlines can’t tolerate.
Causing enough pain to the airlines that the TSA buckles is only the first step, though. It’s not just the regulations that are broken, it’s the pervasive sick-think behind them. I will know that illness has been cured only when I am not only permitted but encouraged to wear my personal weapons onto an airplane.