Menstruating woman subjected to TSA grope because panty-liner obscured her vulva on pornoscanner
[Via Boing Boing]
A self-described “rule follower” went through an airport pornoscanner wearing a panty-liner (she was menstruating). Because the hygienic item obscured the screener’s view of her
vaginavulva, she was made to endure a humiliating fondling, “so invasive that I was left crying and dealing with memories that I thought had been dealt with years ago of prior sexual assaults.”
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I mentioned this to my mother. The head of the TSA happened to mention that there were a lot of false positives with the backscatter. Now we know why – any liners or sanitary napkin a woman wears will result in the Gate Rape procedure.
Seems obvious to me that the people who can up with these procedures were all men. Women would have asked the obvious question.
So now we know that without changes in these procedures, any woman wearing a liner, any person who wears diapers for incontinence, in addition to breast cancer survivors, people wearing prosthetics.
The backscatter machines produce too many false positives, thus making it much easier for the bad guys to hide their intentions. The whole procedure is based on quickly screening people and then focussing on the small number that light up.
I was not able to find a breakdown of the feminine products used and how long for each period. But if, say menstruating women have 3-5 days a month they need a liner – best numbers I could find on the Google – then it seems to me that a very large number of traveling women will turn up positive every day. I mean we are talking about perhaps 10% or more of the traveling public.
This is a very poorly thought out protocol. These machines are supposed to be something all of us go through ina couple of years. Two million people fly in the US each day. There is no way they can grope that many people.
They will have to modify this in some why but it is hard for me to think how. Can this machine tell the difference between a sanitary napkin and a bomb? If not, we are going to see some real problems here as we go forward.
No wonder the Israelis do not use these machines. They are easy to circumvent by a determined bad guy. And they catch too many innocent people.They actually provide a very poor risk-benefit ratio.
A Man With A Ph.D. 