Record keeping; it brings up an image of a cavernous domed ceiling, streaks of sunlight filling a dusty room with rows of books and boxes stacked higher than it is possible to reach.  An old man sitting at a long wooden table, with a pair of tiny wire framed glasses half way down his nose, reading something to himself in Latin.  All is calm and tranquil, then silence is broken from shouts of German, as a squad of Nazi soldiers pour into the room, followed by a tall blonde leggy woman with a wicked, beautiful smile that hints at pure evil.  Indiana Jones may have played a part in how I view records and historical information.  The reality is far from that these days, maybe something more of a glass box full of microwaves.

I admit, my nerdy side is overwhelmed and awed by the look and design of modern server rooms.  There is a certain appeal to technology, it’s rapid design growth and the constant state of fluctuation.  A library that housed centuries worth of research and literature for generations is now an electronic marvel that remodels it’s looks every couple years.  Though its true beauty is not design, but what it is designed ‘to do’, the same ‘to do’ that transformed the look of my cherished living room stereo.  No longer adorned with a turn table or cd player with a mound of media piled around it, now just a simple little laptop.  Hours of sorting and searching for songs and albums now happen in the blink of an eye.  A source that could only serve a handful of people in a single room can now serve thousands of people around the world all at the same time.

More important than spreading art and information around the globe, I feel, is the distribution of fact or truth.  It is a concept that is always in debate, depending on whom you ask, but I believe real truth is attainable and with our advancement of record keeping and increasing accessibility, very close.  Having information at my fingertips has shaped my life on a personal level much more than I could have ever imagined.  Once, the fool for believing an urban legend, always the doubter in the future.  Of all the preposterous stories I’ve heard, I go and believe KFC is breeding mutant chickens, I must warn my friends!  Oh, the shame.  My new life motto, “Доверяй, но проверяй”, a Russian proverb saying “Trust, but verify” and with help from the internet, I do.

At no point, do I appreciate this more than around election time.  Reading countless articles, being bombarded with commercials and watching laughable debates jumble information stored in your head.  Deciphering fact from fiction on the fly is just simply too much to process for the human mind alone, especially with its built-in sense of compassion and trust that needs to be overcome to think rationally.  When someone looks you directly in the eye and speaks about a tragic issue that personally affected them in the past, with such conviction and belief, it’s hard to say, “hold on, let me Google that, um… actually no it did not happen like you remembered it”.  Websites like FactCheck.org attempt to use this method in refuting political claims and boasts made by egotistical candidates, often times disputing their claims with stored video media of themselves just a little while earlier.  As with any information source, they themselves have to be fact-checked, but the general concept still applies.

While we have archived information for thousands of years in various ways.  Only now can such a large percentage of people, access such a high portion of it, so easily.  It’s often said, “those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it”, but for the longest time it has been so easy to ignore due to a bit of difficulty or laziness.  Thanks to huge strides made in just a few short decades, that last bit of difficulty is being erased and that image of a graying elderly scholar sitting in a library, baffled by the sound of his stamp, is being replaced with Ipad wielding hipsters sitting in an organic coffee shop.

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Everyone’s favorite travel buddy, the Transportation Security Administration, got a little more bad press today as they denied Senator Rand Paul from his flight in Nashville.   According to Rand Paul staff members and father, GOP Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, a false positive had set off the airport scanners.  Airport security then denied Paul another scan and required that he must go through a pat down procedure.  After refusing, stating it was an infringement on his rights, Paul was then made to wait in a security area for an indefinite amount of time and forced to miss his flight.  He later rescheduled his flight to Washington and went through another set of scanners without incident.

The TSA backed down the detail of the body scanner since their debut, which had caused a huge uproar as the machines took not only, very invasive images, but had been later found storing these images.  Something the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security said was an impossibility with their machines.  But, that doesn’t mean it is not done by someone else, as that was later proved in 2010 as the US Marshal Service, a subsection of the Department of Justice, admitted to storing tens of thousands of body images from courthouse security machines.  While the agency has stated that these photos will never be released to the public (well no more than those leaked), it makes me question if people should have the right to access to these photos.  Are security scans of US Citizens, taken at a public courthouse considered public information?  I mean, don’t we have a right to know what information is being gathered on us by our own government on publicly owned property?

With the less accurate images, TSA officers have moved towards a much less popular method of security, the pat down.  Huge explosions of outrage flare up every time a new viral video pops up on Youtube with what appears to be TSA agents doing immoral or visually disturbing acts.  A video of an agent patting down a mother and her six year old daughter has received almost 2 million views.  As more stories surface, such as the man who had his bladder bag broken and leaked all over his clothes or the breast cancer survivor in North Carolina, who was forced to remove a prosthetic breast by airport security, you begin to wonder if there is a solution to all this.

The TSA has been slowly rolling out a new version of the millimeter wave based scanning system, Advanced Imaging Technology, that replaces the backscatter x-ray scanners that posed a radiation risk.  The new machines are supposed to increase foreign object detection and increase privacy by completely removing the actual image of the person and replacing it with a standard generic outline.  Even without the software update, the image results are much less anatomically detailed than the competing x-ray scanners.  TSA states, when given the choice, as many as 98% of travelers chose the new system over a traditional scanner, metal detector or a physical search.  While that statistic looks very promising, it’s easy to get good numbers when your alternatives are a good groping and blast of radiation.  Even still, it looks like there is finally some sort of progress.  All we need is one more really good TSA scandal to push the funding for a complete roll out.  Where is a Betty White airport frisking when you need one.

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