Jonathan Corbett’s video has over 800,000 views in the last couple days, despite YouTube censoring it for a while (possibly because the title has “nude” in it).   The Travel Underground thread is the epicenter. The rough chronology:
- the original post had a great headline
- Lisa Simeone on TSA News was the first to blog about it
- It got hot first on Twitter: 2000 hits in the first 2 1/2 hours after he posted it.
- A couple hours later it hit #1 on Hacker News, getting 10 hits/second. Then Slashdot, Reddit, Mashable, the Daily Mail … after which Drudge and the Guardian, CNET, The Consumerist,
- TSA’s less-than-compelling response threw gasonline on the flames and sparked coverage from GizModo, Wired, The Next Web, Reason, and once again Hacker News … plus lots more.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt and Steven Frischling on Flying With Fish point out that there’s nothing new here: security experts have been talking about the scanners’ high error rate and vulnerabilities to exploitation for years. But video footage makes it very compelling. And the spread through the tech community highlights that the same kind of grassroots coalitions that mobilized against SOPA are possible on other civil liberties issues — like the TSA, for example, and the PATRIOT Act and FISA next time they come up for renewal.
There’s plenty of other learning too, so it’ll be interesting to watch things unfold. Stay tuned!