Makes me furious

This kind of think makes me positively crazy: Man boards plane without boarding pass (and now they're saying, without identification.

Especially in light of the fact that a woman dying of leukemia was asked to remove her adult diaper so she could be screened better.

(I wonder: what about a woman who is having a very heavy menstrual period and is wearing a large pad - would they be pulled aside and subjected to that kind of humiliation?)

Something is incredibly, incredibly broken here. To me, it smacks of something I sense going on in general in our country: that the rule-abiding people, the ones who would not break the law, get extra scrutiny, extra harassment, and sometimes, truly inhumane treatment...and the lawbreakers just go on their way. And of course, the response to someone being caught breaking the law is often to impose MORE laws on the law-abiding people.

I have already decided that as long as the TSA is in force in this country, I will not fly again. Sure, that means I will never see the ancestral homelands of my relatives, it means I may have to skip certain faraway conferences I'd like to present at, and I may not have the chance to say goodbye in person to a relative (though depending, I might subject myself to the TSA groping inspection for that one).

But, it just disgusts me, knowing that kids are being touched in ways that would trigger all their "stranger danger" fears, makes adults of both sexes feel violated, and people with disabilities are being taken aside because their wheelchair or canes or whatever makes the screening "more inconvenient" for the agents...and yet, people still manage to sneak through.

We've given up some liberty, and a lot of dignity, and for WHAT?