New TSA scanners - Page 8 - Airline Pilot Central Forums

#71

Wildcat , 11-09-2010 05:57 AM

Line Holder

Quote:

Originally Posted by GunshipGuy

New article today.

World’s Pilots Reject Naked Body Scanners Over Radiation Danger, Privacy Breach

The article states El Paso requires everyone to go through (i.e. no "Opt Out"). Which first goes to show that TSA procedures are not consistent throughout the system (no big surprise here), and El Paso is continuing to be the most aggressive airport regarding TSA requirements.

I asked my FA's yesterday whether any had been required to go through the body scanners. Yes, they said at MEM and they weren't given the option, they also passed thru the metal detector and were frisked. So they got the royal treatment. I proceeded to explain that in addition to it being a violation of their 4th amd't right protection of unreasonable searches, it was a danger to their health. I have found as I talk to folks about these scanners, I am surprised to find out how very little the are aware of what these things are. We have to spread the word. Do not assume people know what they are being asked to do. They have no clue. If you don't care about the constitutional, privacy issues, or health issues, at least think about the impact this will have on your livilihood. Because people WILL drive or find some other mode of transport rather than go thru the humiliation of an "enhanced" pat down(good ole fashioned molesting).
The most common response..."that would make me not want to fly".

YouTube - TSA Fondles Women and Children Refusing Airport Naked Body Scanners

#72

MD-11Loader , 11-09-2010 06:49 AM

Gets Weekends Off

I opted out in ATL this morning and the TSA agents were really cool about it. They said that a lot of crews are now refusing to go through the full boday scan, and then the agent asked me my reason. I told him that there hasn't been enough testing to determine the long term effects of these machines, I am already exposed to enough radiation while smending 18 hours a day on a plane, as well as that I feel that they are a complete invasion of my privacy. It went pretty smooth, so I will continue to opt out

#73

Wildcat , 11-09-2010 07:38 AM

Line Holder

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.rutherford.org/articles_d...?record_id=683

Invasion of the Body Scanners: More Tales of Terror from the Unfriendly Skies

By John W. Whitehead
November 8, 2010

The outrageous invasion of our privacy rights that is the whole-body scanner (and its equally outrageous counterpart, the full-body pat down) was hurriedly put in place by the government, before Americans could really comprehend what it would mean and whether they were willing to tolerate it. Yet where did the impetus for installing these scanners in our nation's airports come from? And who's responsible for this unfolding nightmare being unleashed on the American people?
As Reuters reported on Dec. 30, 2009, "The path toward rolling out wider use of whole-body security scanners in U.S. airports runs through the White House.... U.S. President Barack Obama could expedite such a deployment because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) don't need legislation from Congress to start using the devices at any of the 560 U.S. airports with scheduled airline service."
In fact, legislation has been proposed to mandate full-body scanners and make them the primary screening method in all U.S. airports by 2013, but Congress has yet to act on it. So we can thank President Obama for this frontal assault on our Fourth Amendment rights. Mind you, this is the same man who insisted that "we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans." Yet in the wake of the bumbling underwear bomber's botched Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound plane, Obama directed the Homeland Security Department "to acquire $1 billion in advanced-technology equipment, including body scanners, for screening passengers at airports." In fact, Obama's Stimulus Bill, which committed more than $3 billion for homeland security projects, is funding the installation of the devices in airports across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration have been quick to do the president's bidding, aided and abetted by corporate lobbyists eager to make a profit at taxpayer expense. The TSA plans to roll out a total of 450 full-body scanners by year's end, with an additional $88 million included in the 2011 national fiscal budget for 500 more machines. And Congress, which has the power to halt this thing (or at least provide oversight), has done nothing.
All the while, the American people are being subjected to all manner of egregious searches by government agents. Since my commentary about the airline pilot who refused to go through the scanner or be subjected to a pat down ("Michael Roberts: One Man Against the Surveillance State"), I have been bombarded by emails from individuals—particularly women—who have shared their own horrific encounters with TSA agents. The following are some of the most egregious.
This first account is from a woman who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome:
I was subjected to a TSA rub down in Pittsburgh in September. There is no patting happening. The officer ran her hands over every square inch of my body, firmly pressing into my flesh in every area when I declined to have myself irradiated. Being a recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome, I am extremely aware that my body needs protection from anything that is unnatural or unnecessary, and excess radiation is on my list of things to avoid. Unfortunately, the rub down elicited some trauma issues, and when I got upset and started crying, they started the "pat down" all over again. After I received my belongings, I attempted a photo of the TSA station and officers, at which point I was apprehended, my ID was taken, I had to delete my photos at their demand and eventually when they realized I had no record, they told me to go get on the plane before I got into trouble. Why am I, a 49-year-old woman, employed for 28 years by IBM, mother of two teenagers, married for 27 years, being viewed as a terrorist? The trauma of the "pat down" has reactivated an autoimmune condition and I have spent the last 4 weeks working to bring my immune system back into balance. I can't imagine getting on an airplane with the possibility of this happening again. I would like to protest this invasion of privacy, but how?

The second is from a ticketing agent who was suspended after objecting to TSA's search of her wallet:
I just had my second run-in with TSA while attempting to go to work. I was refused the right to go to work because after I willingly handed TSA my lunch bag (which only contained my pocketbook, 2 restaurant paper napkins, and a piece of a news page crossword puzzle), they proceeded to empty my pocketbook, piece by piece, and go through my wallet, credit card by credit card, checking every nook and cranny in both my purse and my wallet. When they began going thru my wallet, I objected. I may have lost my job because of these arrogant and ignorant individuals.

The last is from a flight attendant who commutes to work each week:
This Sunday, I unknowingly went through the full body scanner. I had heard a little about the full body scanners but just never paid attention because I just thought that it wouldn't really happen. The TSA people said that the other machine was "broken" so me and one other female flight attendant would have to go through the new one.
They didn't tell me it was a Full Body Scanner. I was not made aware that I even had an option to be patted down instead. After the scan, I was still patted down on my breast area because I was wearing my flight attendant wings. I truly felt molested. As a female traveler, I already have to deal with personal safety issues. In the past, when I have gone through the security line, I have experienced two of the TSA men standing staring at me, and I could overhear them deciding whether they thought I was attractive.
I realize the fact that the security people are not really highly trained professionals is a separate issue from the fact that I am literally being stripped of my Liberties and Rights. That just makes it all the more unjust. It is humiliating to be strip searched. I haven't committed a crime, so I have not given up my rights! I have not broken any laws. I am a Citizen of the United States, and I thought that I lived in a free country where people fought to protect our Liberties. Why couldn't they have spent the money to implement security measures that involve using high levels of training that are proven to protect? The Israelis have a 40-year proven track record and they do not use full body scanners.
What are my rights? Do I even have any? I don't choose to fly. I do it because I need the money to survive. It's my job. I don't want to be strip scanned because it is an invasion of my privacy rights as a human being. If I give in to this and act like I'm fine with it, just to fit in at work and not be singled out, then what next? Will I be subjected to cavity checks? I feel sickened by this, literally. It's like the frog that gets boiled slowly or how Germany became Nazi Germany. It all is very subtle. People just go along and when we realize that we have no Rights left it is too late. I am not ashamed of my body but the reality is I am having to basically be naked in front of a group of my "peers" who I don't trust and who have no right to search my being.
I fly for a living every week. No one is more concerned about airport/airline safety than I am. One truly infuriating aspect of this whole body scan debacle is that it has been shown to fail. Far more insidiously, it eases some people's minds into a false sense of security.
I literally got ill from stress after educating myself on Full Body Scanners and that I was clueless enough to walk through one giving my rights away. In the future, I may be forced to do it several times a week just to keep my job. My rights are just being taken away, and I am now at the mercy of being stripped and it isn't making me any safer! I could deal with a few TSA agents being abusive when I had the protection and dignity of my clothing layer protecting my private areas. Now that those same people have the power to virtual strip search me and pat down my crotch and breasts, I just feel abused.
This whole procedure is as arbitrary as making me pull down my pants before I can receive my coffee from the girl at Starbucks in the airport. I am going to choose to be patted down from this point forward, but this could put me at risk of delaying a flight and mistreated by the TSA to prove a point to me. I am a very compliant, shy person by nature. Full body scanners just made my personal world all the more dangerous and unsafe for me to live in. There are other proven "Effective means" to do this without taking my personal dignity and my feelings of personal well being away from me.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit legal organization dedicated to the defense of liberty. Please consider supporting this organization. Contributions are tax deductable. Rutherford is representing Michael Roberts, the pilot who refused the scanner and pat down in MEM.

#74

johnso29 , 11-09-2010 07:55 AM

Moderator

I've said it before, & I'll say it again. I will NOT go through these scanners. If all crewmembers refuse we will slow the system down so much airline management will scream foul, & TSA will be overwhelmed with pat downs.

Several weeks ago I had no problems with these scanners, but my view has changed dramatically. My family & I won't non-rev, as I won't subject them to yet ANOTHER ridiculous re-active TSA program.

#75

Cargo Man , 11-09-2010 12:07 PM

Gets Weekends Off

Is there a way to determine lost rev due to customer concerns with TSA?
We all know poeple who don't fly or fly only when required.

#76

DashDriverYV , 11-09-2010 06:10 PM

Gets Weekends Off

Quote:

Originally Posted by gloopy

Well since I'm not on the 9 and don't have to spend the vast majority of my day working on my scan and stuff, I can afford to under simplify basic concepts in an attempt to look smart.

In a nutshell, it goes back to the fierce debate our founders had regarding whether or not to include a bill of rights. The Declaration and the Constitution basically spells out that rights belong to man as individuals, not to government or "rulers" in any form.

The ones in favor of a BOR wanted some rights guaranteed and codified in writing. It makes sense that building an entire nation at great personal sacrifice warranted putting in writing some of the very tennents that were being fought for.

Yet others argued that there was supreme danger in that concept, because they knew that whatever rights were written down, people later on down the road would point to those rights as the "only" rights we are guaranteed. They also knew that the next step would be to say that those rights could be changed or removed by law, since they were "given" by law. The founders on all sides of otherwise contentions issues all knew and agreed that the danger in that all but guaranteed future predicent needed to be avoided.

So their great compromise was to include a BOR, but to include intentionally vague and general 9th and 10th amendments that, in conjunction with the impossible to ignore Declaration, the meaning of words as understood by and agreed to by everyone at the time and the volumes of writing and live rhetoric of the day spelling out the nature of individual rights born with the individual and not granted to them by the benevolance of the state, would assure our lasting liberty and posterity for the future.

The judicial "check and balance" they wrote into the Constitution was clearly meant to uphold natural rights as, according to the written law, as justified by the inalienable natural law it was all based on in the first place, would guarantee that the courts would be a perpetual stop gap that would derail any legislative or executive effort to remove our inalienable rights, which belong to us no matter what, by merely changing the written law.

As we all know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and struggles for power ebbed and flowed through the centuries as it does today. The courts by no means got everything right all the time, but they by in large let the other two branches make the written law and in many cases struck down attempts by them to take blank check ownership of the rights of man by co-opting the very source of rights in general. In other words, we were always born with our rights. Power would sometimes shift such that kings, empires, hostile nations, wars, etc would violate the inalienable rights of man, but that could never strip man of the rights he is entitled to because he is born with them.

Take the first Amendment for example. Does that written statement alone "give" us the right to worship freely? What if the Constitutional amendment process was followed to the letter, and that Amendment was changed to say only that you have the right to choose between Islam and death. Would you simply roll over and comply? Start taking your family to worship whatever government demanded? Of course not. If the written law said you must turn over your first born to sacrifice to a volcano god, would you? Of course not. Because you don't get your rights from the Constitution. You were born with them and any attempt to abbrogate your natural rights by the process of written law is invalid if that written law is in conflict with your inalienable rights. King George was the legal ruler of the Colonies at the time in terms of the written law. But his rule was unjust because it abrogated the natural rights of man.

Fortunately, our founding document lays out a pretty difficult process for changing itself, which is an overall good thing. Of course, the legislative and executive branches at times have tried and even succeeded to very large extents in doing things blatantly "unconstitutional" and infringing on our inalienable rights in addition to the very processes in the Constitition that the rule makers derive their limited authority from in the first place. It is to no suprise then that when they do so, it is nearly without exception for the purpose of transferring more and more power from you to them.

That is where the courts come into play so heavily. When there is a conflict, we are supposed to be able to go to the courts and protest that the political products of the other two branches are not only violating the written law they get their power from in the first place, but also in violation of our natural rights we were born with. Since the courts are supposed to be apolitical, they would have no reason to legislate form the bench and strike down just laws or to uphold unjust laws that conflict with our natural rights. And how could it be possible in the first place, since such cloak and dagger activists would have to get past the other two branches in the first place? Its as an ingenious of a system of government as any ever devised and it worked well, despite its imperfections, through the centuries.

But somewhere along the line in the last few generations, the power mongers who want to be the sole proprietors of your rights, and who were quite frustrated with the concept of natural law and anything remotely related to inalienable rights, because that infringed on their ambitions of power, increasingly focused on the courts as a back door way to first take control from the Constitution on paper and from you in effect, no matter what the rest of the goverment was doing and no matter if you liked it or not.

So now we are in a political era where Supreme Court appointees can be caught on tape saying that they intend to make the law from the bench, laugh about it, say that they know they shouldn't say that but we all know its true, laugh again, and still get appointed to the highest court in the land. In one of their first rulings ever, they can immediately reverse what they said they would vote for when they were asked under oath during the confirmation process regarding fundamental individual rights as guaranteed in previous Supreme Court predicent (and one that was actually included in the BOR...can we immagine how they intend to treat every conceptual right that wasn't covered in that limited eight?) and we're supposed to say "oh well, dems the breaks".

In a nutshell, its really about ownership of rights. Are they yours, or do they belong to the government and they give you whatever they say you are allowed? The progressivists think all rights, even the ones we all or most agree we have, belong to the government and it is the government that "allows" you to do XYZ, like worship as you please. The danger in that methodology, of course, is obvious. The founders knew this, and that's why they gave us a government with tremendous roadblocks to future progressivist power grabs. The limited, constrained and divided federal power was but one part of that protections. Republican (not the GOP but the true meaning of the word) protections were built in to protect us from the progressive erosion of a mobobracy (i.e. the "tyrrany of the majority) and its no suprise that those protections have been under agressive attack from the progressivists who want us to emulate a simply majority mobocracy whereby your rights can change with the winds of the next election, or if that doesn't work, someone in the courts can just say that it wasn't your right to begin with.

Gloopy, Spot on. More people need to understand that the govenment does ot give us rights, but they are ours and the Gov't is simply borrowing them.
Side note, Penn and Teller sell a TSA Friendly constitution made from high density metal that will set off every detector. The 4th amendment is highloted for the irony of when TSA finds it on you.

#77

forgot to bid , 11-10-2010 08:11 AM

veut gagner à la loterie

look at DRUDGE REPORT 2011®

lots of tsa body scanner and flight crew stories

#78

Zoot Suit , 11-10-2010 09:06 AM

Gets Weekends Off

Yes or no....

Has an "opt out" been frisked/molested by the opposite sex? Is this going on? Can a female deny a male from frisking her?

#79

PeezDog , 11-10-2010 09:19 AM

Gets Weekends Off

I say that if we are aboard the airplane and TSA wants to come on and do one of their "security" sweeps, that we deny them that liberty because they have not been threw airport security properly. The rule says that ANYONE who wants access to the secure area and the airplane, must pass threw security right? Well if they haven't, then what right do they have to be there? Because I don't have the "right" to be there if I don't and I fly the damn thing. How do we know that one of those pukes isn't going to plant or smuggle something on our airplane? Rampers an baggage handlers as well? Everyone must be subject to the same security. I don't know how the pilots are subject to being searched, but Tyrone isn't? Give me a break.

Who does the first flight of the day stuff? I don't want to go into too much detail on here about it. I'm not sure if its TSA or someone else, so who ever knows feel free to correct me. But what security screening have they gone threw? What background checks have they gone threw? Without going into too much detail on a public forum, the form for the first flight of the day, you know the one I'm talking about? How do we know for sure? We never see that person, or know who they are.

I realize that being 100% secure is impossible no matter what. This is about being fair, reasonable, common sense, American rights, and going about security the right way. Not the way our government has imposed upon us.

#80

tsquare , 11-10-2010 09:28 AM

No longer cares

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zoot Suit

Yes or no....

Has an "opt out" been frisked/molested by the opposite sex? Is this going on? Can a female deny a male from frisking her?

I think it has to be same sex. That being said, I got a pretty thorough frisk in CPH from a female.. it was NBD.. but she didn't check my junk either. Actually I think it is quite common in Europe...