Originally Posted by
saizai
a) No. Screening currently requires patdown. You consent to, or are warned of, that fact when you enter. Therefore they are allowed to do a patdown, even though any patdown at all necessarily involves touching you, which (without your consent) might otherwise be assault. Touch necessarily involves a minimal amount of physical force. The question in Linlor was what amount of force is consented to / noticed, required, and/or unreasonable.
b) You're talking about battery (an actual bad touch), not assault (a reasonable fear of bad touch).
c) Qualified immunity doesn't make something not assault, it just immunizes the assailant from negative consequences for it.
I do not consent to having my genitals probed by TSA and given the fact that 1. TSA refuses to advise that your genitals will be touched, using instead the completely misleading term "groin" and 2. in the Linlor case TSA claimed: "…contact with Plaintiff's genitals, if any at all, was incidental and occurred through the course of a typical security pat-down", therefore, any touching of the genitals should be considered battery and "relieve" TSA screeners who probe the genitals of any immunity.