Update: The % has increased to 98.67%

In a U.S. News & World Report online survey, 95% of travellers think the U.S.'s TSA has gone too far with it's policies of invasive pat-downs that have become grope-downs, and scanners that produce naked-like photos of travellers, using radiation.

Survey respondents were asked, "Is TSA going too far with air security measures?" (survey results ; poll)

In addition to the required airport security stops, the TSA has started stopping travellers in bus and metro stations, requiring them to be searched, with recent deployments in Tampa and Washington, D.C., with the support of local police departments and government transit organizations, which are being trained to support further roll-out of these search stops.

The TSA's scanners use radiation which causes damage to DNA, according to scientists. While TSA administrators have compared the radiation to the sun's radiation, the radiation employed by the machine is different and affects the body and skin differently. No extensive medical tests have been performed with such kinds of radiation, leading scientists to report that its effect on travellers, including children, pregnant women and the elderly, is likely very different from radiation from the sun. It is possible that TSA-scanner-induced cancer could kill more people than have been killed by terrorists.

In contrast with the untested deployment of the radiation scanners to airports across the U.S., significant medical testing over a period of years would normally be required of a private company to get FDA approval for a new medical pill.

While the TSA continues to say that the machines cannot record images, the machines do have that capability in accordance with the specifications required by the government in their purchase.

TSA agents viewing the scanner photos are permitted to bring cell phones with cameras into their work area. They are also able to communicate verbally with agents bringing passengers into the machines, which has led to a number of unprofessional comments being overheard. TSA agents also have access to security camera videos of the scanner area, enabling them to match faces to scans at a later time. 

I'm a HUGE fan of Amazon Web Services.

Which is why Amazon's AWS blog post describing why they cancelled Wikileaks-related use of EC2 has me confused, concerned and even a little scared -- because I'm building a service using EC2 with user-generated content.

They say:

"For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.”"

However, I can only find this wording in their WEBSITE Terms of Service ( "Amazon Web Services LLC and/or its affiliates (“AWS”) provide this site to you subject to the following conditions.").

Doing a quick search, I can't find the wording in their Service Terms, Customer Agreement, or Acceptable Use Policy which govern the actual web services themselves -- or what they call in the blog post: rented computer infrastructure. If they are going to apply their website terms of service to use of EC2, it would seem to rule out any use of AWS and EC2 for social websites with user-generated content.

For those of us who are literally buying into the AWS platform, this is a major concern. Furthermore, the tone of the blog post gets into making assumptions, political judgments and moralizing -- rather than focusing on legal agreement issues, which make the decision-making appear to be politically motivated.

"Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy."

Is Amazon now going to be making judgments about the credibility of its customers to handle an extraordinary volume of content? And this from the very company that's supposed to be selling us infrastructure on which to build scalable solutions, amazing stuff like EC2 and mturk?

If I have any factual errors or have made any bad assumptions in this post, please let me know.