Big Brother is Watching You–Naked
The random naked eyeful is starting to replace the random groping at airport rights checkpoints. Passengers at Phoenix Sky Airport may now choose between being felt-up or seen naked by Big Brother or Big Sister. Yesterday, the Transportation Security Administration started using “backscatter” X-rays, which “can see through people’s clothes and show the body’s contours with blush-inducing clarity”, according to today’s Washington Post.
The feds insist that the images are blurred by software and discarded immediately after the tax-salaried Peeping Tom or Tammy is satisfied that the exposed citizen is carrying no weapons of plane destruction.
Sure.
All it takes is one software glitch for the already insufficient blurring to fail and give the TSA watchers an even clearer eyeful. All it takes is one unscrupulous government employee to save someone’s naked image and broadcast it to the world via YouTube.
This is dangerous. Government exists to protect all our rights, not to claim to protect some by violating others. Government employees should not take and view naked pictures of citizens. It’s that simple. And that this invasion is actually happening lays bare the enormity of federal overreach. We’ve accelerated down the slippery slope so fast that our naked buttocks are burned. Even George Orwell didn’t predict this.
Big Brother is watching you–naked.
After my misspent youth as a wage worker, I’m having so much more fun as a blogger, helping other discerning travellers plan fun and fascinating journeys. Read more …
a few years from now, prudes may be seen as outsiders. Anyone currently under 12 will grow up with cameras embedded in virtually everything they own – there’s a riftline here between old and new that’s a great deal larger than Grandma not liking Elvis, Mom not liking MTV, and me not liking Homie McWordUp.
Boing!
I have to fly on Sunday. If I’m going to end up naked on YouTube I better practice sucking in my gut. 😛
Okay but seriously, I agree. There’s almost no way the safeguards – ha! It is to laugh – on such a system *won’t* be compromised or circumvented sooner or later. Probably sooner.
Wow. Leave it to the feds to find a way to make air travel even less comfortable. Now, in addition to being herded like cattle, being blatantly lied to about arrival and departure times, strapped into furniture left over from the Spanish Inquisition, and forced to pay for atrocious food and butchered movies, we face this added indignity. Lovely.
When will the travelling public say “enough is enough!”?