Anthem for Our Age: Don't Touch My Junk

Krauthammer: Let's end 'absurd taboo against profiling'
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 19, 2010 12:54 PM CST
Anthem for Our Age: Don't Touch My Junk
John Tyner is the software engineer who posted an Internet blog about his airport patdown, during which he warned the TSA worker not to "touch my junk."   (AP Photo/Rebekah Butler)

The "if-you-touch-my-junk" guy is gaining traction as the poster boy of the anti-body-scan movement. Charles Krauthammer takes up his cause today, declaring that "don't touch my junk" is, in fact, "the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter." It applies to everything from Obamacare to Google Street View. Maybe not as elegant as Don't Tread on Me, but perfect in the "age of Twitter," he writes in the Washington Post.

More to the point, it highlights the "idiocy" of the TSA strategy. Until we get over this "absurd taboo against profiling"—especially "when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known"—we're all going to suffer. That includes pilots, who wouldn't exactly need a box cutter to take down a plane, he points out. Robert Poole in the Daily Beast also cites the touch-my-junk guy (real name John Tyner) in calling for an end to the scanner "nonsense." His solution involves "evidence-based profiling" that divides travelers into high, medium, and low risks. Click here for details on that. (More airport security stories.)

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