The Transportation Security Admiinistration blog team has launched on Instagram to tout the guns and illegal items it confiscates at airport security and already has a lot of fans — a pretty hefty 44,010 followers as of this morning. Not as popular as cute kitty photos, but that’s a curiously large number of folks with an interest in gun photos.

Below is from a feed created of the most recent photos from @tsablogtream, created via Webstagram’s embed tool at http://web.stagram.com/tools/.

If you want to tuck the image feed into your Feedly or whatever you’re using for RSS these days, use this URL.

Mother Jones harvested some of the best comments that airline passengers have given as part of public feedback for the Transportation Security Administration over its “Advanced Imaging Technology” scanners.

Some 3,500 comments have been submitted to the TSA about the scanners, some of which are being replaced with devices that are said to offer greater privacy. About 1,500 comments are available for review on a government site.

Among the highlights showcased by Mother Jones:

• No to scanners. You want to see my junk? Fine. But first buy me a drink. –Jack A. Webber
• I am a stroke survivor…I am a rape survivor… I take a train or drive, because I’m not willing to put myself in the hands of people who bully and try to railroad me through machines my doctor has strictly said to stay away from. -T.A.
• I am an 82 year old Jewish woman with an artificial hip. That makes me a prime terrorist suspect according to the TSA. I need to be frisked every time I fly. That is a disgusting procedure. I doubt that Janet Napolitano would want her mother or her grandmother to be subjected to it. -Joan B. Berkowitz
• I spent over 36 years on active duty in the United States Navy. Had numerous very high security clearances and was a qualified Nuclear Weapons delivery pilot. Being “frisked” or forced into an X-ray machine and treated as a common criminal [is] disgusting to someone who dedicated a large portion of his life to the defense of the united States. –Terry Farnell Carraway  
• You’re really asking us if we want you to be checking out our genitals in the name of national security? -Alec

See the full list. 

(Hat tip to Natalie Jones for sending along the Mother Jones link).

It’s one thing to get a dose of radiation — and a nearly-nekkid-as-a-jaybird depiction of yourself made available to a technician — once in a blue moon at the airport, but how about every day when you walk into your job at a federal office building? 

Federal Times reports that the controversial “backscatter” scanners that the Transportation Security Administration is removing from airports might wind up in federal buildings.  To wit: 

“We are working with other government agencies to find homes for them,” Transportation Security Administration spokesman David Castelveter said. “There is an interest clearly by DoD and the State Department to use them — and other agencies as well.”

You’d think doing that would eventually cause a ruckus. And at least one congressperson has weighed in already.  “The American public must be assured that these machines will not be used in any other public federal facility,” Federal Times quotes U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., as saying.

(HT to TheAtlantic.com and Skift for the bread crumbs that led OTB to the story)