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One grope too far

As officialdom goes to extremes about security at airports - last night in Sydney, Australia, 2000 people were evacuated from a terminal at the airport because 16 people had got through the scanner without being checked, and then those 2000 had to spend the night in Sydney - the TSA in the USA has gone to heights and lengths which ought to cause riots at airports. There are limits, as Maureen Dowd rightly highlights in her latest op-ed piece "Stripped of Dignity" in The New York Times:

"A young computer programmer on his way to a pheasant-hunting trip last November offered a cri de coeur about government groping.

“If you touch my junk,” he told the T.S.A. agent at the San Diego airport just before he abandoned his trip, “I’ll have you arrested.”

It’s hard to feel safe in the skies when you have to worry not only about terrorists but our own air-traffic controllers conking out, watching movies and making boneheaded mistakes. A controller’s error on Monday evening put Michelle Obama’s plane frighteningly close to a 200-ton military cargo jet.

Ever since the Thanksgiving rebellion over intrusive new pat-downs that some have dubbed “gate-rape,” Americans have been debating security requirements versus privacy rights.

Consternation crackled again last week when a Kentucky couple posted video of their 6-year-old daughter being given the deep probe by a female T.S.A. agent in New Orleans.

“We felt that it was inappropriate,” the girl’s mother, Selena Drexel, told ABC News. “You know, we struggle to teach our child to protect themselves, to say ‘No, it’s not O.K. for folks to touch me in this way, in these areas.’ Yet, here we are saying, ‘Well, it’s O.K. for these people.’ ” "

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