In horrific detail, women accuse U.S. customs officers of invasive body searches

Grotesque. Something I noticed several years ago (with the second Iraq War) was the mainstreaming of behavior that previous seemed to stay hidden in the prison system among prison guards and the worst level of corrupt cops. If you were surprised by Abu Gharaib then you clearly weren&#x27;t paying attention to exactly the same sort of thing happening in prisons in the South.<p>We seem to be progressively empowering more and more fearless bullies in all walks of life; even mall cops and campus cops now act like they are cleaning up a riot in a Supermax.

&gt;&gt; In 2000, the Government Accountability Office found that two years earlier, black American women were nine times more likely than white counterparts to be X-rayed by customs officers after airport frisking, although they were less than half as likely to be found with contraband compared with white women also X-rayed.<p>Which I guess, tells us two things:<p><pre><code> a) Law enforcement agents never learn b) Smugglers do learn</code></pre>

Don&#x27;t we read the same stories about CBP and TSA every 2 or 3 weeks? Does anybody know if this happens so frequently in other democratic countries?<p>I can&#x27;t imagine that a story like that would surface in Finland, Spain or Canada without shocking the entire population, who would immediately demand that the problem be addressed.<p>Assuming I&#x27;m correct, what is so different about the US that we can&#x27;t seem to be able to fix this?

I see a number of people conflating the TSA and CBP&#x2F;ICE. Just so we&#x27;re clear: TSA is a makework security theater program of a bunch of $15&#x2F;hour people standing around doing not very much. TSA is not a &quot;real&quot; federal law enforcement agency. CBP&#x2F;ICE, on the other hand, will definitely fuck you up if you anger them while crossing the border. CBP has access to a whole bunch of federal databases and ways to profile and track people that TSA doesn&#x27;t. 4th amendment rights pretty much don&#x27;t exist at the border.

My tinfoil hat theory is that the people up top know if they allow stuff like this to happen just frequently enough that the people who care about civil liberties are well aware of it and the general public isn&#x27;t that that will keep the civil liberties crowd from standing up for their rights and getting the general public to do the same but not so frequently that politicians get interested in cleaning them up. It&#x27;s like the ATF, they just keep the terribleness at a low simmer and nobody cares.

Apparently, Israel is part of the EU and so, I cannot access this moronic website.

I&#x27;d rather have more drugs in the country than people being invaded and subjected to these sorts of indignities out of hand.

It seems like once a month we get a report about the TSA or Homeland Security falling down on the job. Is there a school for TSA or DHS? Can it be overhauled? It seems like an external government agency needs to be brought in to evaluate pretty much every agent they have on payroll and classify them into &quot;OK&quot;, &quot;Retrain&quot;, and &quot;Dismiss&quot; groups.<p>The problem is their might be too many in the &quot;Dismiss&quot; group for it to work without sacrificing screening capacity and efficacy.

The news article only got half of the story.<p>The other half is that when they don&#x27;t get an arrest, they break into your phone or car looking for evidence since they have the contents of your pockets or purse. And sometimes planting it.

Wonder if TSA&#x2F;CBP has to submit to one of these searches themselves before they&#x27;re allowed to perform one? Kind of like with Tasers or tear gas.

Jesus, four fingers!?

Yet another article not available in countries subject to GDPR, would be great to headline [US ONLY] for media not prepared to serve content to EU, much like the paywalled mentions.

Why can&#x27;t we call this what it is, govt sanctioned rape of minors.

This is the whole article for me:<p><pre><code> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. </code></pre> Thank you GRPR for preventing this website from invading my privacy! I prefer the polite notice to intrusion. To those users in the target locale, beware this website&#x27;s practices.

Perhaps this sounds snarky but as a not-buff roughly middle-aged male, I have never had to deal with this....<p>I do think that there are far better ways to do screening. I haven&#x27;t been subject to such searches while overseas, that I can recall.<p>Which clearly puts it in the category of security theater vs. actual security.