We’re on our way to Utah. I get to recruit at BYU again and with the addition of a plane ticket for Jess we get to have a brief partial vacation for very little cost to us.
At the moment we’re sitting in the airport. Today I had the privilege of refusing to go through the back-scatter machine and instead receive an unceremonious pat down. What a waste of time and money. I wish everyone would refuse to use the back-scatter machines so that they would be forced to get rid of them (or make them mandatory, which is probably more likely I suppose).
The pat down was as much of a joke for security as any other process currently in place. As far as I can tell it’s simply designed to be more awkward than the back-scatter machines so that people will just put up with the machines. It’s a normal pat down (actually I’m fairly certain I’ve received more thorough pat downs going in to concerts) with the addition of touching the bottoms of your feet and swabbing your hands with chemical detector swabs.
It certainly wouldn’t be remotely difficult to conceal something past the pat down I received. When will sanity and cost-benefit studies again be used to guide our decisions as a country?
I read your post and immediately thought of this: http://xkcd.com/651/ 🙂