Originally Posted by
tehiota
I thought about that; however, there are plenty of people that legitimately cannot pass through WBI without requiring a pat down. So in your line of 20+ protesters that theTSA is punishing by taking their time, now have to queue up anyone in a wheelchair or with a metal (ex: hip) implant.
How is that going to look when grandma/pa misses her flight home to thanksgiving because the TSA was too slow ? She submitted to WBI after all. You sure can't put her ahead of the line of the queue either without an uproar.
In the end it is very simple: As TSA team lead, relax the pat-down rules (inofficially) a little bit for tomorrow, make sure that there are no bad scenes (especially if there are cameras around) and then increase the security level on Thursday again. I would not ever officially state that the NoS are not going to be used but I would just take it down a notch.
In the end you as the TSA want to be able to say: "we didn't alter our policies a single bit" and you want to news media to say: "it's not all that bad even on Thanksgiving there were no bad lines".
Let's face it: the TSA has not yet ever caught a bad guy(TM) so they can easily relax security for one day and then claim that all went well and all is fine. I would also avoid by all means to give the impression that opt-outs are punished tomorrow and wait with the retaliatory pat-downs for Thursday....
But then, it's the TSA and who knows, maybe they will try to proof a point tomorrow and that would be a nightmare.