The Daily Patdown: Your Daily Dose of Security Theater

December 19, 2010 2:05 PM

The Daily Patdown: Your Daily Dose of Security Theater
Just launched a new photo blog about TSA patdowns. Seeing ordinary people treated like criminals is sad, disturbing, and -- surprisingly -- sometimes funny. If you are outraged by patdowns, please share this link via Twitter, Facebook, etc.
posted by mokolabs (5 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by Burhanistan on December 20, 2010: The Daily Patdown: Your Daily Dose of Security Theater

Wow. That was far more disturbing than I was expecting.
posted by COD at 3:02 PM on December 19, 2010

Yeah some of those images are quite upsetting. That poor old lady in a wheelchair. The man who had to drop his pants!

Bloody hell.
posted by gomichild at 9:52 PM on December 19, 2010

Kickass. I was thinking of doing the exact same thing, but mine was going to be TSAotrageoftheday.com or some such. The only thing stopping me is that I have too many irons in the fire. There should be a legal limit to the number of domains one controls. I managed to use willpower this time, but nice to see someone else doing it.

I was going to link to one new article or site a day and just let people comment.
posted by cjorgensen at 4:36 PM on December 20, 2010

gomichild, the guy who took the pants-dropping photo has some backstory here:

We were shooting this pat down and the traveler was visibly frustrated at how long it was taking. As the TSA agent prepared to search the guy’s waistband, he dropped his pants. The TSA agent seemed a little stunned.

We tried to talk to the traveler when he was finished with the search, but he ran off to his gate, declining to talk to us.

I get what mokolabs is trying to do with these uncontextualized photos; there's a really powerful cumulative effect and the patdowns are obviously bullshit, etc. But sometimes the complete lack of context in a simple Tumblr photoblog is going to be misleading.
posted by mediareport at 6:12 AM on December 24, 2010

I like it!
posted by Kloryne at 9:30 PM on February 13, 2011