It’s inevitable. When I went through the See-You-Naked Machine at O’Hare, the dreaded Yellow Patch showed up on my left wrist (a watch) and also. . . yes, you guessed it, the part of the body that Yiddish speakers call the tuchas.  The TSA man asked me if I wanted a “private screening”, and I knew this was going to be, well, intimate. I eschewed the private screening, whereupon the security guy not only groped both port and starboard of the tuchas, but also ran his hands up the inside of my thighs until he could go no further.

I have no idea what where this yellow rump patch comes from (please don’t suggest, as someone did last time, that I have a disease of the nether parts: a Dire Rear); but it always causes trouble.

And so it goes.

Yep, this is pretty much me:

My friend Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess who writes books and a website about how to behave civilly (and is a big critic of the Ctrl-Left), once became uncivil, but properly so. As happened to me, she was groped by a TSA (Transportation Security Administration) agent at LAX, the big airport in Los Angeles. But her groping was worse than mine, and bordered on sexual assault. It happened in 2011, but this kind of stuff is still happening, and we need to keep it in our thoughts. Amy described it in an article at the Orange County Register:

On March 31, 2011, at the TSA checkpoint in LAX’s Terminal 6, I found that I had no choice but to get the pat-down. Tears welled in my eyes – for how we’ve allowed the Constitution to be torn up at the airport door and because I was powerless to stop a total stranger from groping my breasts and genitals as a condition of normal, ordinary business travel.

I can hold back the tears … hang tough … but as I was made to “assume the position” on a rubber mat like a criminal, I thought fast. I decided that these TSA “officers” violating our Fourth Amendment rights, searching us without reasonable suspicion we’ve committed a crime, do not deserve our quiet compliance. I let the tears come. In fact, I sobbed my guts out as the agent groped me. And then it happened: She jammed the side of her latex-gloved hand up into my genitals. Four times, with only the fabric of my pants as a barrier. I was shocked – utterly unprepared for how she got the side of her hand up there.

There are more details on her website (her emphasis):

Basically, I felt it important to make a spectacle of what they are doing to us, to make it uncomfortable for them to violate us and our rights, so I let the tears come. In fact, I sobbed my guts out. Loudly. Very loudly. The entire time the woman was searching me.

Nearing the end of this violation, I sobbed even louder as the woman, FOUR TIMES, stuck the side of her gloved hand INTO my vagina, through my pants. Between my labia. She really got up there. Four times. Back right and left, and front right and left. In my vagina. Between my labia. I was shocked — utterly unprepared for how she got the side of her hand up there. It was government-sanctioned sexual assault.

Upon leaving, still sobbing, I yelled to the woman, “YOU RAPED ME.” And I took her name to see if I could file sexual assault charges on my return. This woman, and all of those who support this system deserve no less than this sort of unpleasant experience, and from all of us.

Amy calls for every woman violated in this way—and yes, it was a violation—to protest and sob, hoping that tears would arouse the empathy latent in most human beings. But I suspect the TSA is biased against hiring human beings, since very rarely have I encountered an agent who, not drunk with their power, treated me civilly and kindly. I suspect, too, that they are looking for authoritarian personalities who enjoy bossing other people around.

Amy published what she recalled of name of the agent who searched her, but didn’t know for sure. This is, of course, public information: there’s no prohibition about accusing a TSA agent by name:

I forgot to post the TSA woman’s name when I wrote this last night. I think it might have been Thedala Magee. Or Magee Thedala. I was really upset, and neither name sounds like a typical American first name or last name, so I can’t remember if I wrote it down in the right order.

It turned down that the woman’s name was indeed Thedala Magee, and when Alkon’s column appeared, Magee promptly threatened Alkon with a lawsuit for telling her story and giving her name. Magee’s lawyer demanded $500,000 in damages! Alkon got Marc Randazza, a well known lawyer specializing in civil rights violations to write back, and, I guess, the threatened suit finally sputtered out. The story of the threat and Randazza’s response was is techdirt:

Your client aggressively pushed her fingers into my client’s vulva. I am certain that she did not expect to find a bomb there. She did this to humiliate my client, to punish her for exercising her rights, and to send a message to others who might do the same. It was absolutely a sexual assault, perpetrated in order to exercise power over the victim. We agree with Ms. Alkon’s characterization of this crime as “rape,” and so would any reasonable juror.

Furthermore, even if your client did not actually sexually assault my client, Ms. Alkon’s statements to and about Ms. Magee would still be protected by the First Amendment. The word “rape” itself has been the subject of defamation cases by far more sympathetic Plaintiffs than your client. In Gold v. Harrison, 962 P.2d 353 (Haw. 1998), cert denied, 526 U.S. 1018 (1999), the Hawaii Supreme Court held that a defendant’s characterization of his neighbors seeking an easement in his backyard as “raping [the defendant]”was not defamatory. This speech was protected as rhetorical hyperbole. Of course, we need not seek out Hawaii case law in order to debunk your unsupportable claims. Rhetorical hyperbole has a strong history of favorable treatment in defamation actions. See Greenbelt Cooperative Pub. Ass’n v. Bresler, 398 U.S. 6, 14 (1970). This doctrine acknowledges our First Amendment right to express ourselves, even when employing literary license. Accordingly, even if your client’s actions were not “rape,”Ms. Alkon had every right to characterize them as such.

No free woman should endure what your client did to Ms. Alkon. Fortunately, Ms. Alkon is capable of recognizing injustice, and for the good of us all, she had the courage to speak out on this matter of public concern of the highest order. After Magee’s assault on Ms. Alkon’s vagina and dignity, Ms. Alkon exercised her First Amendment right to recount this incident to others in person and through her blog. This was not only her right — it was her responsibility.

It’s now six years later, and what has the TSA done? Have they foiled any terrorist plots with their screening, or detected any weapons or bombs that terrorists were trying to smuggle onto planes? Not that I know of; for there is not a single report of this. Now the TSA might respond that this is because they are so good at detecting bombs and weapons that no terrorist would even try. But that’s bogus, as TSA has failed test after test when the government did undercover operations seeing if TSA agents could detect planted bombs and weapons in luggage. As CNN reported two years ago, TSA screeners failed to detect 95% of undercover bombs and weapons: 67 out of 70. That record surely wouldn’t deter a committed terrorist. And, as KTRK Houston reported in April of this year, many of the agents are likely to be high:

Nationwide, 858 TSA workers tested positive for drugs or alcohol between 2010 and 2016, according to federal records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

What do we do about this? Well, the reactive stance of the TSA is just dumb: first it was liquids, then shoes off (which doesn’t occur in many countries), and now they’re proposing to ban carryon laptops, which angers me as I use mine to work on planes. And it angers me, too, to see old ladies in wheelchairs getting patdowns and full inspections.  Plus there’s the general groping: as I’ve reported here, I’ve had my rump palpated several times by the TSA, and I don’t like it one bit. But if you object, they simply treat you more roughly. These people aren’t professionals; they’re authoritarian bullies.

In the absence of any way to judge the effectiveness of this “security theater”, the TSA can do any damn thing it wants, making it more and more onerous to fly. Now I don’t mind a little security, but isn’t there some way to empirically test whether all these draconian measures and gropings actually work?

h/t: Grania