Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame) relates his latest run-in with Airport Security - being famous, he wasn't just thrown in jail:
Last Thursday I was flying to LA on the Midnight flight. I went through security my usual sour stuff. I beeped, of course, and was shuttled to the "toss-em" line. A security guy came over. I assumed the position. I had a button up shirt on that was untucked. He reached around while he was behind me and grabbed around my front pocket. I guess he was going for my flashlight, but the area could have loosely been called "crotch." I said, "You have to ask me before you touch me or it's assault."He said, "Once you cross that line, I can do whatever I want."
I said that wasn't true. I say that I have the option of saying no and not flying. He said, "Are you going to let me search you, or do I just throw you out?"
I said, "Finish up, and then call the police please."
Federal V.I.P. Penn [via Boing Boing]
This is by no means his first encounter; he previously wrote about this handy travel tip while carrying his Bill of Rights, Security Edition cards:
I set off the metal detector and then used another trick of mine of walking over to the person wanding and saying, "If I didn't set off the detector where do I go?" and they just dismiss me and save me some time.
As early as 1991 he was clearly not going to play along with the charade:
All they ask you to do at security is to turn on the laptop and show something on the screen. They just want to see it print something to the screen (We all know that a bomb with a laptop taped on top of it could print something on it's screen but that's not important now). That's all they want to see, something on the screen. So let's give them something on the screen. Add this to your autoexec.bat after it's loaded everything else:echo READY
echo ARMING . . .
echo ARMED
echo 0:17:00 UNTIL DETONATIONGo ahead, do it.
A Good Idea That You Might Go To Prison For
Posted by ashleyniblock at January 04, 2003 08:20 PM