WASHINGTON – Nearly a week before the Thanksgiving travel crush, federal air security officials were struggling to reassure rising numbers of fliers and airline workers outraged by new anti-terrorism screening procedures they consider invasive and harmful. Across the country, passengers simmered over being forced to choose scans by full-body image detectors or probing pat-downs. Top federal security officials said Monday that the procedures were safe and necessary sacrifices to ward off terror attacks. “It’s all about security,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said… At the San Diego airport, a software engineer posted an Internet blog item saying he had been ejected after being threatened with a fine and lawsuit for refusing a groin check after turning down a full-body scan. The passenger, John Tyner, said he told a federal Transportation Security Administration worker, “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested.” Tyner’s individual protest quickly became a web sensation, but questions also came from travel business groups, civil liberties activists and pilots, raising concerns both about the procedures themselves and about the possibility of delays caused by passengers reluctant to accept the new procedures… The new machines show the body’s contours on a computer stationed in a private room removed from the security checkpoints. A person’s face is never shown and the person’s identity is supposedly not known to the screener reviewing the computer images. Concerns about privacy and low-level radiation emitted by the machines have led some passengers to refuse screening. Under TSA rules, those who decline must submit to rigorous pat-down inspections that include checks of the inside of travelers’ thighs and buttocks. The American Civil Liberties Union has denounced the machines as a “virtual strip search.”

I say this in all sincerity.  My general philosophy on all things is to come down on the side of maximum freedom.  Our ancestors left everything they had in the world behind and put their lives on the line to escape tyranny and oppression.  And they didn’t do it so someone could tell them they couldn’t drink a Four Loko or eat a Kentucky Fried Chicken Double Down.  As a rule, the more the government makes you do (or says they’ll do for you) the more I resist.

That said, I can work up any empathy with the people who are all pissed off about tighter security at the airport.  I’ve never understood these asswipes who act somehow they shouldn’t be searched or it’s a personal insult to them that they have to take their shoes off or whatever.  I’ve always believed that if you want to paw through my carry-on or stick your nose in my smelly New Balances, knock yourself out.  All I ask is that they check everybody else too.  Check me, check the old man, check the baby, check the 20 year old with the beard reading the Koran, check the Asian teenagers and the British family… check everyone.  I’m not one of these jerkoffs who act like it’s my sacred right to carry little bottles of shampoo & conditioner on the plane with me.  We’re all going to be trapped in an aluminum tube 30,000 feet in the air for the next four hours or so.  And I’d like to know for sure that neither me nor you nor anyone is carrying a sphincter full of C4, thankyouverymuch.  The last I looked, air travel was an option, not a constitutionally guaranteed freedom.  If you can’t handle it, drive.  Or charter your own plane.  Or get out and walk for all I care.  Because if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, the people who bitch the loudest about airport security are the people I’m most worried about flying with anyway.

Though I will admit that if I was a TSA employee checking out body scans on hot chicks like the one in this picture, there’s no doubt in my mind I’d end up jagging off to the pictures.  Any guy who says he wouldn’t is lying.  And it’s only a matter of time before we get our first Celebrity Body Scan Porn.  That alone is a reason to support this thing.