TSA Opt-Out Day A Hilarious Non-Issue (But Were The Machines Turned Off To Prevent A Scene?)

Now that Wikileaks has everyone in the US angrily jumping up and down, there’s one story that’s bound to die a death: the TSA. It’s pretty clear that the so-called Opt Out Day was a failure of XFL proportions, but the reason it was a failure may actually because the TSA simply wanted to avoid a scene. Twitter was full of reports saying that those silly machines were turned off just to expedite holiday travel.

It wasn’t just Twitter. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said that were was “limited, if any, use of the controversial full-body scanners” at the big airport down there.

Same deal at Newark International Airport in New Jersey: scanners were largely turned off, meaning that people never even had the chance to opt-out of anything.

So we’ll look back on last week, and the week before, as the few days when we as a nation paid any attention at all to what’s going on with the TSA. This week’s boogeyman is Wikileaks, so I wouldn’t expect much on the TSA for at least the next few days.

I suggest we use our newfound free time playing all those games we bought from that Steam sale.