Excerpt from a long rant by Mark Morford —
See, we’ve been going about this invasion-of-privacy thing all wrong. From Bush’s illegal wiretapping to Facebook’s wily account settings, the panic over personal privacy has been, until now, mostly about data — your home address, credit card number, PIN, SMS chats, your filthy lawn appearing on Google street views, that sort of thing. It’s all vague and rather abstract; we can’t actually feel anything.
But this is different. This is literal. Nothing, apparently, sets us off more than some unhappy TSA worker — an increasingly unenviable job, you gotta admit — yanking you out of line and giving you the delightful option of getting your entire body X-rayed from ass to nipple, or being groped all over in case you might be carrying something explosive in your pants.
Is that not amazing, by the way? That a solitary “Christmas underwear bomber” has now changed the complexion of the entire country and inconvenienced tens of millions with a single failed attempt? Yes, all this groping is because of one guy, and he’s not even Justin Bieber. How incredible is that? Who says an individual can’t make a difference? Who says the terrorists haven’t already won?
You will remember it was also one single failed attempt that causes us all to remove our shoes.