TSA Worker Jailed In Body Scan Rage Incident 352
A TSA worker in Miami was arrested for aggravated battery after he attacked a co-worker for making fun of the size of his genitals. Rolando Negrin walked through one of the new body scanners during a recent training session and a supervisor started making fun of his manhood. From the article: "According to the police report, Negrin confronted one of his co-workers in an employee parking lot, where he hit him with a police baton on the arm and back."
good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you just shrugged it off then only your coworkers would know you have a small dick. Now the whole world knows.
1 Month after the institute this system... (Score:5, Insightful)
So much for the obfuscation promised (Score:3, Insightful)
So much for the obfuscation that's promised. Or maybe it was obfuscated and they just decided to pick on him.
And we expect them to behave LATER? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, they can't even this technology in regards to each other, and we're supposed to believe they won't behave the same (or worse) when confronted with the public at large being forced to expose themselves in these things?
Really?
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
The best part is that this story plays nicely with one opinion about such institutions, popular here and there - that working for TSA appeals to people who need to compensate for their emotional insecurity.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:3, Insightful)
The best part is that this story plays nicely with one opinion about such institutions, popular here and there - that working for any sort of security or law enforcement agency appeals to people who need to compensate for their emotional insecurity.
FTFY
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
and these are the kinds of people who will be looking at what are basically naked pictures of your kids? how is this a good idea again?
Re:Missing the Point (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole purpose of the scanners to emasculate and demean the people who pass through them. This should be clear to everyone.
That depends on what your packing. To be strip searched for fear of hiding a club in your pants, and then finding out the club shaped item is stock equipment wouldn't be emasculating or demeaning for the person passing through, just the person doing the search.
Re:And we expect them to behave LATER? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice punchline (Score:5, Insightful)
But if this latest incident is any indication, the scanners sound like good news for anti-terrorism and bad news for less-than-average men.
So what you're saying, NBC, is that the only people who would complain about this invasive technology are terrorists and guys with small dicks?
Well done.
After a year of solid teasing, he lost it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So much for the obfuscation promised (Score:5, Insightful)
According to gizmodo they were teasing him for an entire year.
Re:It's News, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's News, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
These devices are networked and have storage devices attached to them. The official story is that the connectivity and storage is only active for testing and training.
Oh and the official story is that the naughty bits on screen are blocked out, well this proves that the naughty bits aren't blocked out and that the TSA folks here in the US and the UK, where there have already been problems, who will be seeing travelers naked are raging morons.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0324/warning-airport-breast-xray/ [rawstory.com]
So its a rights online issue.
Re:After a year of solid teasing, he lost it. (Score:5, Insightful)
A full year?
Ok, at that point, you get to break his legs.
On a slightly more serious note, Negrin should have sued for sexual harassment. The end result would have been much more entertaining for him.
...and by doing so... (Score:3, Insightful)
...has demonstrated that the allegations are definitely true.
Re:After a year of solid teasing, he lost it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's News, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also an enlightening example of the behavior of the "trained professionals" who are supposed to not be paying attention to the size of your johnson when you walk through the scanners. It's like being a porn star, only you aren't being paid and you have no choice in the matter.
sexual harassment (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, and judging by how willing the supervisor was to make fun of his own co-worker, can you imagine what they'll say or do with your scans? Or your wife's scans? Or your children's scans?
If they can't keep their own people from cracking jokes and heads, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Or.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:After a year of solid teasing, he lost it. (Score:3, Insightful)
If he had gone to his HR dept. but he didn't, now he's the one with the charges against him.
To parphrase a previous comment
And these are the people who are meant to be protecting us??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Re:1 Month after the institute this system... (Score:2, Insightful)
Prepare for the lawsuits... Sexual Harassment 101 (Score:3, Insightful)
Based upon the available information - sounds like they should fire the supervisor, train the employees on sexual harassment, and fire Mr. Negron for assault.
Unfortunately, we as taxpayers will ultimately pay for all of it...
Re:4th Amendment (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed.
I very rarely travel by plane, but I did fly somewhere last month and I’ll be flying there once again later this month. They didn’t require me to stand in the body scanner, but if they had, I would have refused.
You can either peek under my clothing, or give me a pat-down? I don’t want your dirty looks. I’ll take the handjob.
They’re equally intrusive (okay, the scan might actually be more intrusive), but one of them emphasizes the fact that it’s an intrusive search, and the other is a quick and painless “we’ll use this machine to essentially take your clothes off but you won’t feel a thing”. If I’m going to be forced to submit to an intrusive search, I want it to appear intrusive... to me, to the people around me, and to the people forced to perform that particular search.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:4, Insightful)
and these are the kinds of people who will be looking at what are basically naked pictures of your kids? how is this a good idea again?
not just your kids, but you too. and it's not a good idea.
I think his point was that he was bringing in the "think of the children" mentality and maybe using public hysteria over child porn and whatnot as a means of destroying this intrusive and questionable method of security.
A terrorist, intent on striking against us infidels, will shove explosives up his ass or have something surgically implanted around his body. Now, how will these things prevent that? Are we going to move to full body x-rays just to fly next?
Re:What is idle for anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Or, in this case, who screens the screeners? (my Latin sucks, English will have to do)
Stories like this simply make it clear that:
a) the level of detail coming out of these scanners is somewhat better than many have been led to believe.
b) the level of professionalism of some of the people charged with operating the scanners is somewhat worse than many have been led to believe.
If seeing people naked is what it really takes to introduce real security into the scanning process, just tell everyone they have to get naked to go through security. Don't hide the fact behind millions of dollars in technology and bullshittery and try to convince us that the people operating the gear are anything other than underpaid security guards, some (the vast minority, but still some) of whom will jump on the chance to sell any images they can capture, and that the images are of sufficient clarity that they are worth capturing.
I'm not against such scanners per se, though they seem like a very expensive way to gain a possibly marginal but mostly imaginary increase in security. But let's stop bullshitting ourselves that there will be any realistic expectation of privacy once they get implement, mmmm'kay?
Re:It's News, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you just shrugged it off then only your coworkers would know you have a small dick. Now the whole world knows.
When a women is subjected to a hostile work environment, she might be told, "If you just shrugged it off then only your coworkers would know you are a slut. Now the whole world knows."
Clearly if this is said to a woman, then it is a blame-the-victim mentality and is wrong. It should also be wrong in this case, when it's a man who suffers from a hostile work environment.
No real surprise there (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really care to do it in the US though. Pretty much every TSA employee I have ever met was a cock. They feel the need to make comments because I'm an American who opted to live outside the US (I know, a real crime) and even asking a simple question like where a certain gate is apparently is enough to be quizzed and have your travel documents looked through and maybe even have your bags checked despite having already went through that when entering the country.
It's the sort of job wanna-be tough guys take. It's no surprise it turns out they have little dicks. It explains a lot about their attitudes.
Re:1 Month after the institute this system... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but when you devote more attention to one group, that means you devote less attention to another. If no one knows you're doing it, this increases your odds of catching the bad guys, but if the bad guys know you're doing it, it creates an exploitable weakness in your system. If you know a particular door to the castle is most likely to be attacked, you devote more guards to it, but if the enemy knows you'd taken guards from the other door to guard the first, which door do you think they're going to use? You ultimately weaken your defenses if you engage in that kind of allotment of resources when the enemy can see perfectly well what you're doing. It only works when they can't. That's why using a publicly available list of countries to subject travelers from to more screening actually weakens your security. You've just decreased the amount of time you spend on countries off the list (by devoting your limited resources more to the ones on it rather than distributing evenly), and provided the enemy with a list of countries that are subject to decreased security (by inverting the list). Any at all sophisticated enemy praises Allah for your gift of intentionally weakening your security.
To foil a sophisticated enemy, you need to treat all travelers exactly the same, or keep completely and totally secret what ways you're treating anyone differently, because the moment the enemy knows you're treating people differently is the moment they have a greatly enhanced chance of pulling off a successful attack.
tl;dr: Treating everyone equally is not about political correctness, it's about not being bad at security.
Re:And we expect them to behave LATER? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does not matter if you get laughed at. Grow up.
It does when it's the job of these people to deal with thousands upon thousands of passengers each day, and to do so in a respectful, professional manner. If these people are sniggering about penis size during training (and worse, abusing this person for a full year), that speaks directly to their ability to be respectful and professional.
Re:Actually, good for everyone else (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be happy to even wave my dick at that employee, if he wants a clearer look. Sure, it's only average, but I'm not ashamed of that. Plus, you don't get an oportunity to flash a rentacop every day ;)
But I can see why some people would have an objection to that. For certain muslim fundies, showing yourself naked to strangers as a woman can be your own death warrant, for example. I wouldn't want to be the Saudi Arabian woman whose scanner picture ends up plastered all over the internet. And even in the west, probably most people would burst a vein if you told them that Joe Rentacop from the TSA spanked the monkey in the bathroom on his break after looking at their 7 and 11 year old daughters naked. Even if no image was stored.
It seems to me like there is no way around the fact that it does produce a naked image, and those guys get to look at it because the magical technology to just show the guns without needing an eye-scan of the body doesn't exist. And if that wasn't enough, they have a button to take a printout.
But yeah, you're right, the fact that they repeatedly lie about it, is what gets my goat the most. I keep hearing how it'll blur stuff, or how verily nobody will even see more than a stick figure of you, but then it turns out that the picture someone had posted on the Internet had some pretty clear breasts and didn't look anything like an Order Of The Stick character either. Or the guy in this story clearly saw more than a stick figure with just the gun highlighted. It seems to me like they know that what those machines really do is unacceptable, or they wouldn't go to such lengths to lie about it.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
What most people here seem to be missing is that this incident didn't happen out of thin air (incidents like these almost never do). A SUPERVISOR was harassing him on the job, and instead of the supervisor being fired and arrested, the police, like is usual in cases of harassment, arrest the victim. According to the victim,
he had been made fun of by coworkers on a daily basis
Of course the victim of the harassment could have filed a formal complaint, but everybody knows how that always turns out. At the most he would be laughed at, but really, it's the harassers word against the harassed.
It's sad and pathetic that everybody here on Slashdot seems to be pointing the blame on the victim, like is always the case when it comes to school shootings [blogspot.com] and workplace shootings. When everybody is against you [uwaterloo.ca] then violence almost always seems the logical solution. Of course I don't expect the supervisor or the Human Resource Manager who carefully selected these assholes to be fired or charged with harassment or human rights violations, because it's not the neoconservative thing to do. Violence is cool and if you can't take daily jokes then... you must be weak in the head. But that logic, in my experience, comes from hypocrisy.
Those co-workers should just be glad that he didn't show up the next day with an automatic rifle and a duffel bag full of ammunition. What goes around comes around. Work place mobbing [wikipedia.org] should not be tolerated, and the supervisor and HR Manager should, at the VERY LEAST, be fired immediately.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:3, Insightful)
As a former TSA screener, take my word for it -- they WILL be forced to go through it. I have dealt with screening celebrities when they were stupid enough to come through D/FW airport. They got NO special treatment.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I can see, people who end up in long-term private security jobs (the ones we are likely to come in contact with, not some almost mercenaries / private special forces) are way too often:
a) rejected during the process of police recruitment
b) then rejected during the process of municipal police recruitment
c) then rejected during the process of jail duty recruitment
d) then rejected from "higher trust" private security, like internal one in the banks (you might really swap a/b/c/d, the order here might differ)
e) now they finally found somebody who won't care that much about their background and poor psychological evaluation
Yup, certainly contributes to making those private security firms responsible...
Re:After a year of solid teasing, he lost it. (Score:1, Insightful)
People who are clever enough to sue for sexual harassment? Not TSA agents.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep seeing all these great press releases about how the definition on the images is too low to be indecent, and yet this incident happens.
If it possible to end up making fun of a man for the size of his genitals, the system is too intrusive. Period.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:3, Insightful)
And you also hear much, much more about predatory pedophiles stalking random children; not that by far the biggets and most common threat of such type to children comes from close family and "friends" of that family.
A bias in reporting; cases with decent private security aren't so visible, their personnel put into much less extreme situations overall.
Re:After a year of solid teasing, he lost it. (Score:2, Insightful)
1. HR in most organizations is mostly (if not 90%) staffed by women. Most guys are not going to talk about something like this to a woman. Not even their wife.
2. HR departments exist mainly to protect the organization from the employees. They are not there to help employees.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:4, Insightful)
The one who wound up in legal trouble (and out of a job) for armed assault and battery? Don't care, that's what happens when you commit armed assault and battery
The one who wound up on the wrong end of armed assault and battery for harassing someone over a bodily characteristic that they have no control over? Don't care, that's what happens when you do that
There are no good guys here and there are no victims. There's an asshole and the asshole who beat the crap out of him for being an asshole.
Re:good idea there, buddy (Score:2, Insightful)
Because a lot of America and other countries is based around having a big dick, biggest car, biggest this fastest that, big big shock n awe, and if you aren't packing 8 inchs which is SMALL for porn stars, but PLENTY/too big for many women, you cop shit.
It's stupid, childish, and its the way society is. It's a common insecurity for men to not be the magic 8 inchs or more, and being bullied about it IS psychologically harmful to many.