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After going down in a spiral of paranoid stupidity—called out for saving body scan images, ridiculed for patting down an almost-naked woman or nailed for harrassing a kid at airport security—the TSA has reached a new low. It's surreal. Here's what a traveler recorded on February 13, after his train trip to Savannah: The only bad thing on our trip was [the] TSA at the Savannah train station. There were about 14 agents pulling people inside the building and coralling everyone in a roped area after you got off the train. This made no sense! Poor family in front of...

  BALTIMORE, January 17, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Maryland police and state troopers have lost their appeal to get immunity from a lawsuit filed against them by pro-life protesters they arrested and strip-searched in Bel Air, Maryland, according to a federal appeals court.The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Maryland in its jurisdiction, rejected an appeal by Bel Air police officers and Maryland state troopers who claimed they were acting in good faith when they arrested pro-life demonstrators with the Defend Life “Face the Truth Tour.” Defend Life is a Maryland-based pro-life group, which conducts an annual event...

County Settles Case of Pro-Life Advocates Strip Searched Bel Air, MD -- Harford County officials have settled a case involving a federal lawsuit attorneys filed on behalf of pro-life women who were shackled and strip searched after peacefully protesting abortion in Maryland. http://www.lifenews.com/2010/12/27/county-settles-case-of-pro-life-advocates-shackled-strip-searched

The beleaguered head of the Transportation Security Administration said today that at least one airport passenger screening went too far when an officer reached inside a traveler's underwear, and the agency is open to rethinking its current protocols. An ABC News employee said she was subject to a "demeaning" search at Newark Liberty International Airport Sunday morning. "The woman who checked me reached her hands inside my underwear and felt her way around," she said. "It was basically worse than going to the gynecologist. It was embarrassing. It was demeaning. It was inappropriate." That search was against protocols and "never"...

A video is being widely circulated showing a shirtless boy receiving secondary screening from a Transportation Security Officer (TSO). A passenger filmed the screening with their cell phone and posted the video on the web. Many are coming to their own conclusions about what's happening in the video which is now perched at the top of the Drudge report and being linked to in many other blogs and tweets. We looked into this to find out what happened. On November 19, a family was traveling through a TSA checkpoint at the Salt Lake City International Airport (SLC). Their son alarmed...

A Charlottesville-based civil liberties group is suing the federal government over its use of full-body scanners at airports.The suit, filed on behalf of two pilots who refused to submit to screenings, asks the court to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Agency from continuing to use the technology as the first line of airport screenings, arguing that the imaging and pat-down procedures violate the fourth amendment.“Forcing Americans to undergo a virtual strip search as a matter of course in reporting to work or boarding an airplane when there is no suspicion of wrongdoing is a grotesque...

Instead of boycotting the airlines, holiday travelers should suck it up and stop whining about X-rated body scans and groping pat-downs, according to terrorism experts and passengers at Logan International Airport who say deep frisk searches are just a fact of flying life during the war on terror. “You just have to bite the bullet,” said Andrew Thomas, a University of Akron professor and an airline security expert. “The bad guys are just watching this unfold.”

Nov 17 2010 10:00 AM Russell Senate Office Building - 253 WASHINGTON, D.C.—The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation announces the following full committee hearing on Transportation Security Administration oversight.

A constitutional attorney preparing to legally challenge the Transportation Security Administration's enhanced screening procedures – which reveal a virtually nude image of passengers – says airline passengers have Barack Obama to thank for the process. "Legislation has been proposed to mandate full-body scanners and make them the primary screening method in all U.S. airports by 2013, but Congress has yet to act on it," John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, wrote in a new commentary. "So we can thank President Obama for this frontal assault on our Fourth Amendment rights. Mind you, this is the same man who insisted...

NEW YORK (AP) -- The only Guantanamo Bay detainee to be prosecuted in civilian courts told a judge Thursday that he will waive his right to attend his September trial on terrorism charges if strip search procedures are not changed. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, charged in the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, told U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan of his plans to boycott his trial during a hearing in Manhattan.

Nation's Perverts Endorse Full-Body Airport Scanners A woman waits patiently for her luggage after undergoing the airlines' new WYSIWYG scan. RENO, Nev. (CAP) - America's largest organized group of perverts and degenerates has released a statement wholeheartedly supporting plans to install full-body scanning equipment in the nation's airports. "Any device that can prevent terrorism while at the same time allowing you to see through people's clothes is A-OK in our book," said Nigel Friedrichsen, president of the Reno-based National Association of Perverts (NAP). "That's the definition of win-win. Um ... At least our definition." The scanners have been highly controversial,...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a strip search of a 13-year-old schoolgirl by administrators looking for banned medication was unconstitutional.The high court held in the 8 to 1 opinion that a male assistant school principal in Arizona and a female nurse violated student Savanna Redding's rights when they ordered her to partially undress in a fruitless search for a tiny amount of Ibuprofen pain relief pills.Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented in the "regrettable decision" by the majority, reveling in the details of the teen drama.The conservative justice even questioned whether Redding was really strip-searched - arguing that...

The US Supreme Court has ruled that school staff broke the law when they ordered a 13-year-old girl to strip while searching her for painkillers. The Arizona school, which bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs, suspected Savana Redding, then 13, of carrying ibuprofen. After no drugs were found in her bag, she had to remove her clothing, and then move her bra and underwear. However, the court said individuals could not be held liable in a lawsuit. The school principal acted on a tip-off from another student that Savana was carrying ibuprofen. Justice David Souter said: "What was missing from the...

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Thursday school officials violated an Arizona teenage girl rights by strip-searching her for prescription-strength ibuprofen, saying U.S. educators should not force children to remove their clothing unless student safety is at risk.

A male prisoner can be strip-searched by a female guard even if male officers are available, a federal appeals court has ruled. In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed an Arizona inmate's claims that jail officials had violated his rights by having a female guard trainee search inside his shorts and pat down his genitals. The inmate, Charles Byrd, was in Maricopa County's minimum-security Durango Jail awaiting trial in October 2004 when officials ordered searches of everyone in his unit after a series of fights. Byrd was ordered to strip down to...

A male prisoner can be strip-searched by a female guard even if male officers are available, a federal appeals court has ruled. In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed an Arizona inmate's claims that jail officials had violated his rights by having a female guard trainee search inside his shorts and pat down his genitals. The inmate, Charles Byrd, was in Maricopa County's minimum-security Durango Jail awaiting trial in October 2004 when officials ordered searches of everyone in his unit after a series of fights. Byrd was ordered to strip down to...

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Privacy advocates plan to call on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to suspend use of "whole-body imaging," the airport security technology that critics say performs "a virtual strip search" and produces "naked" pictures of passengers, CNN has learned. The national campaign, which will gather signatures from organizations and relevant professionals, is set to launch this week with the hope that it will go "viral," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which plans to lead the charge.

When she was a 13-year-old student at Safford Middle School in Arizona, Savana Redding was strip-searched by school officials in search of - this is no joke - ibuprofen. Now she is suing the district and the officials for violating her Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. It is not good for Redding that while the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on her case last week, Justice David Souter commented, "My thought process is I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can't find anything short of that, than to have some other...

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear the case of a young Arizona honor student who was strip-searched in the eighth grade by school officials looking for ibuprofen pills. Savana Redding and her mother have been fighting the Safford Unified School District in Safford, Ariz., since 2003. That's when Savana - then a 13-year-old honor student - was called to the principal's office. "Once they got me into my underwear I thought they would let me put my clothes back on," she told CBS News correspondent Hattie Kauffman. "But then they told me to pull out my bra and...

The case of a 13-year-old Arizona girl strip-searched by school officials looking for ibuprofen pain-reliever will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The justices in January accepted the Safford school district case for review, and will decide whether a campus setting gives school administrators greater discretion to control students suspected of illegal activity than police are allowed in cases involving adults in general public spaces. The case is centered around Savana Redding, now 19, who in 2003 was an eighth-grade honors student at Safford Middle School, about 127 miles from Tucson, Arizona. Redding was strip-searched by school...