TSA agent Tiffany Applewhite touched my genitalia

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And my breasts. She’s a TSA “team leader” at the Delta TSA checkpoint at LAX. I had to ask her for her first name because her nametag only says “Applewhite” and “team leader.”​

There is not a shred of probable cause to search me at the airport because there is no reason to believe I am anything but what I am — an advice columnist, author, and blogger flying with my boyfriend to New York, where I’ll have a business meeting and go with him to some events honoring his boss, Elmore Leonard. But in order to complete normal business travel, I have my body violated just about every time I take a plane.​

I had my breasts and vulva and the rest of my body groped by Tiffany Applewhite, a tall, light-skinned black woman with tight-permed hair. She asked me if there were any sore areas on my body. Hmmm . . . maybe the gropenfrau would take it easier if I said so. So I said my breasts and vagina. She said she’d be gentle in those areas and only use the back of her hand. Well, that makes it all fine, then, doesn’t it?​

She instructed me at one point in how to lean over so she could correctly violate me in the name of “security.” I didn’t do it quite right — partly because I was being violated at around 5 o’clock in the morning, and partly because I’ve never been in prison.
Oh, and they again used the punishment and intimidation factor of making you worry your stuff is going to be stolen if you get the patdown — leaving your belongings out on the x-ray belt unguarded. They just “don’t have personnel to watch it,” they told me — as, in fact, they always claim. Yet they can spend billions on useless machinery.
“You chose the patdown,” another TSA agent who chose it for me added (when he told me to go through the cooker instead of the metal detector).
Read any George Orwell, you loser? You (expletive deleted) earning money for violating people’s bodies and rights?
Caught any terrorists lately — or EVER?
Of course not, because the TSA has not caught a single terrorist, ever.
Beyond the fact that the problems we had on 9/11 were due to our not expecting terrorists to perform suicide missions, the TSA is staffed by untrained robots on track to get a government pension. These people couldn’t catch Al Zawahiri if he crawled up their (expletive deleted) and whistled.
They have, however, stopped some really good pot from reaching its destination and being smoked. (Not that they have the right to do that, either.)
The TSA is a jobs program for unskilled workers and a way for government swells to funnel money to their friends who own the companies that make the scanners and other equipment useless in catching terrorists. (Jonathan Corbett showed how absolutely child’s play it was to defeat the body scanners.)
And ultimately, as I wrote in my op-ed about the TSA, this is about obedience training for the American public — teaching us to be docile as our rights are taken from us.
I cried as I was screened and told them they were horrible for violating our rights. I will at least make a spectacle of myself and in turn of what they’re doing.
Don’t go quietly, please. And name names of those who violate you — post their name and a picture of them if you can find or take it. (To avoid a libel suit, be absolutely sure it’s the right person — there are a number of Tiffany Applewhites, and most of them are regular people who don’t appear to grope people’s genitals for a living.)
If more people screamed and yelled and protested in some way, we might be able to make some change. In so many ways lately, our constitutional rights are being eroded. Keeping quiet will not end well for any of us.