Death By Double-D's and Other Liquid-Like Pursuits

So the current hysteria is that women should leave their gel-padded bras at home when they fly because, after all, they might be explosives, blah blah blah.

So now it occurs to me... In most cases, there's not a lot of functional difference between "the gelatinous padding in vanity bras", and "the gelatinous padding in breast implants". Even more curious, from a security standpoint, is that there's really no way to scan the breast implant for explosives the way you could a bra (by taking it off and passing it through the x-ray machine that also shows up explosive materials, etc.)

It seems to me that it would be trivial for a doctor to both "implant a 'pacemaker'" (or some similar electronic device, maybe like an insulin pump), as well as gelatinous explosives conveniently located inside a female traveler's breasts as implants. Next thing you know, we'll be saying that if a woman's breasts have been ... augmented ... she's going to be denied passage.

Diabetes is common enough that I have to believe hundreds of people a day travel with insulin pumps or pacemakers, maybe more, and it would be fairly hard to detect that sort of bomb design with all but the most invasive of airport screening procedures.

Heck, you don't even need an extrernally accessible set of electronics. Bluetooth chipsets are cheap these days. There's a hell of a bluetooth device to try and mate your Treo to.

What's the point of my little thought experiment? The point is that it's trivial to get explosives on board a plane, along with the electronics you need to set them off. Keeping padded bras off of airplanes isn't going to make anyone "safe".

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a TSA rep on the way back from GenCon on Monday. He was setting up his little folding table at the gate for the "random liquid searches", and he made a comment to the effect of "I know a lot of people may disagree, but this is definitely the right move to make."

I had to call "bullshit" on him, and told him that was the biggest crock of shit on the face of the planet. "No, really!" he says.

I told him, "If you really thought there was the slightest chance that anything you were randomly removing was dangerous, you wouldn't be dropping it unceremoniously into a large wastebasket filled with other might-be-explosive liquids, you'd be waving everyone out of the terminal area, and a bomb squad would be here to take care of it. This is just smoke and mirrors level misdirection to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy because 'You're doing something about it', even if that something is just forcing people to buy more shampoo."

He looked at me with a calm, steady eye and said, "I'll be honest, I'm not senior enough to explain it well enough, but if the people above me think this is the right thing to do, then I have faith in them that they're doing it for a legitimate reason."

And thus, I began to have flashbacks to History class, and began to achieve a whole new level of understanding of "the mind of the World War II German Foot-Soldier". Blindly obedient to "whatever crap got shoveled their way", and naïve enough to believe anything, there's a whole lot of similarities to the German grunts and TSA lackeys.

Although, in fairness, he was nice enough to "randomly search my bag" before the Southwest Airlines boarding cattle-call started, so I didn't lose my spot in line. Being the #2 person in the "A" line, and losing that spot for a random search would have been highly annoying, but he had compassion enough to do it in such a manner as not to screw me. Even naïve idiots can be nice, it would seem. :-)