TSA Vet Admits Scanners Are a Joke. And So Are You (to the TSA).

In a recent coming-out piece for the longtime anonymous blogger behind the site “Taking Sense Away”, “Dear America, I Saw You Naked. And yes, we were laughing. Confessions of an ex-TSA agent,” Jason Edward Harrington details his six years as a TSA agent at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop.

Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines.

“They’re s***,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket.

Mr. Harrington also offers a behind-the-scenes profile of these men and women in blue, the forefront of America’s security against domestic terrorism: their primary occupation is ogling attractive females, and making fun of the unattractive—especially fat people; they racially profile; and they routinely retaliate against people whose attitudes they don’t like by “randomly” selecting us for “enhanced” screening.

And, as I have detailed previously, TSA agents share scientists’ concerns of the safety of these unlicensed radiation machines, calibrated and operated by incompetents—their concerns disregarded equally as those of us travelers:

Many of my co-workers felt uncomfortable even standing next to the radiation-emitting machines we were forcing members of the public to stand inside. Several told me they submitted formal requests for dosimeters, to measure their exposure to radiation. The agency’s stance was that dosimeters were not necessary—the radiation doses from the machines were perfectly acceptable, they told us. We would just have to take their word for it. When concerned passengers—usually pregnant women—asked how much radiation the machines emitted and whether they were safe, we were instructed by our superiors to assure them everything was fine.

The article is a valuable addition to our body of knowledge—which is vast and unequivical. But of course it will do no more to abolish the TSA and surveillance state than the numerous other whistleblowing and exposés until those whose culture and liberty is being undermined by fear-mongering grow up and decide to assert their God-give rights as a free people.

No elected “leader” is going to save us, folks: it’s up to each and every one of us—let’s go viral.

Mary L. G. Theroux is Chairman and Chief Executive of the Independent Institute.
Beacon Posts by Mary L. G. Theroux | Full Biography and Publications
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