WASHINGTON (PNN) - April 15, 2015 - The recent story of two Amerikan Gestapo Transportation Security Administration division screeners at Denver International Airport manipulating full-body scanners in order to grope men’s crotches is disturbing, but it came as no surprise to me.
Over the course of my six years with the TSA, the leveraging of rules and surveillance tools to abuse passengers was a daily checkpoint occurrence. Has the TSA screener searching your luggage suddenly decided to share with you the finer points of official bag-search procedure just as your final boarding call is being announced? There’s a good chance that he or she just doesn’t like you. Or in some cases, as we’ve seen, it may be that the screener finds you attractive and wants to use the TSA rules as an excuse to get his or her hands on you.
Amid all the jokes in comment sections, it’s easy to forget that the groping of these dozen or more male passengers by two conspiring TSA screeners is sexual assault, plain and simple. While it’s easy to focus all the blame on the two unsavory screeners who are now no longer with the agency, perhaps the bigger issue here is a systemic one. There are far too many federal hands on people’s private parts in airports.
What most people don’t realize is that the full-body scanners the two agents used to assault those passengers - the scanners that millions of people pass through each day - are practically useless. The TSA, in its rush to replace the controversial “nude” radiation scanners that they phased out in 2013, swapped out one poorly functioning line of machines for another. The current millimeter wave scanners, with their outrageous false-positive rates, regularly cause unnecessary pat downs. The agent running his or her hands over you after you pass through the scanner is almost never doing it for a good reason.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the sexual assault of male passengers at Denver International via full-body scanners is that the victims will likely never even know they were assaulted, since so many passengers have their private parts fondled when passing through the scanners anyway. It’s difficult to tell where airport security ends and sexual assault begins these days. Pat downs of people’s sensitive areas should be much rarer than they are at the airport.
The TSA should scale back its use of the ineffective full-body scanners. While there is a need for the capability to detect non-metallic threats on passengers going through checkpoints, forcing every passenger to get inside costly, poorly functioning full-body scanners is not the answer. The TSA apologists who claim that 100% full-body scanning is the only way to prevent a terrorist from sneaking non-metallic weapons aboard an airplane haven’t given the matter much thought.
Though if the TSA were to do away with the faulty full-body scanners tomorrow and revert back to walk-thru metal detectors, there would still be half a dozen ways a passenger could find his or her crotch being patted down per the TSA’s current system, including:
- The presence, oftentimes mysterious, of an “SSSS” on a passenger’s boarding pass, which prompts enhanced screening, including a full-body pat down.
- The determination by one of the TSA’s controversial Behavior Detection Officers that a passenger is acting suspiciously while standing in line.
- False alarms on the explosives trace swab that fascist terrorist officers use to swipe passengers’ hands and luggage.
Of course, there is also the elephant in the room of every behind-closed-doors TSA agency meeting. That is the fact that no technology currently on the TSA checkpoint is capable of detecting an improvised explosive device stashed inside a body cavity. There simply is no way to stop a “butt bomber.” The idea of 100% safety that TSA agents try to sell us with their commands to step inside full-body scanners is just an illusion.
Adequate deterrence against a theoretical terrorist with a non-metallic weapon on his person is all the TSA can and need provide at airports. One or two full-body scanners per terminal, through which the occasional passenger could be randomly directed (alongside passengers on watch-lists), would provide that adequate deterrence. The vast majority of the traveling public need not pass through a full-body scanner, and need not be groped at all.