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Tuesday, November 23, 2004

The perqs of being an airport security screener
Posted by Jill | 7:31 AM

You get to grope women at will in the name of national security:

At a security checkpoint recently at the Fort Lauderdale airport, Patti LuPone, the singer and actress, recalled, she was instructed to remove articles of clothing. "I took off my belt; I took off my clogs; I took off my leather jacket," she said. "But when the screener said, 'Now take off your shirt,' I hesitated. I said, 'But I'll be exposed.' " When she persisted in her complaints, she said, she was barred from her flight.

Heather L. Maurer, a business executive from Washington, had a similar experience at Logan Airport in Boston recently. And a few weeks ago, Jenepher Field, 71, who walks with the aid of a cane, was subjected to a breast pat-down at the airport outside Kansas City, Mo.

These women and a good many others, both frequent and occasional travelers, say they are furious about recent changes in airport security that have increased both the number and the intensity of pat-downs at the nation's 450 commercial airports. And they are not keeping quiet.

In dozens of interviews, women across the country say they were humiliated by the searches, often done in view of other passengers, and many said they had sharply reduced their air travel as a result.

[snip]

With the new rules, security personnel are given more latitude to select whomever they want for secondary screenings, whenever they want, and to conduct more intrusive pat-downs and more thorough examinations of carry-on bags. In both cases, travelers have the right to seek a private area, and women can request female inspectors.

A provision in the new rules - which says that a screener's "visual observation" of a passenger is enough to order a secondary screening - seems to single out women, something that many women searched attribute to a belief that bras are good places to conceal nonmetallic explosives.

The provision states, "T.S.A. policy is that screeners are to use the back of the hand when screening sensitive body areas, which include the breasts (females only), genitals and buttocks."


I would like to see a study done of the relationship of bra cup size and the age of the female in question to the likelihood that a female will be groped in the name of looking for explosives.

Meanwhile, I'm sure teenaged boys will be reassured that as long as they use the back of their hands, it's not really a grope.
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