The United States of Fear, by Tom Engelhardt

The National Security State Cops a Feel: Taking Off the Gloves - and then everything else. Take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your "safety" will mean your humiliation, your degradation, and by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too. Just ask Rolando Negrin, a Transportation Security Administration screener, who passed through one of those new "whole body image" scanners last May as part of his training for airport security. His co-workers claimed to have gotten a look at his "junk" and mocked him mercilessly, evidently repeatedly asking: "What size are you?" and referring to him as "little angry man." In the end, calling it "psychological torture," he insisted that he snapped, meant that he went after a co-worker, baton first, demanding an apology. This anecdote illustrates just how low this country has now sunk, how psychologically insecure we have become, while supposedly guarding ourselves against a global danger. We live, it seems, in a national security "homeland" of little angry bureaucrats who couldn't be happier to define what "safety" means for you and big, self-satisfied officials who can duck the application of those safety methods.