Originally Posted by Bart
That's the policy. The only catch is that we have to swab you immediately and not allow you to mix in with other passengers awaiting secondary screening. Still, this is do-able and should be done at airports across the country.
I think the problem here is consistency.
PWM got it right. After my wife's bad experience with the shoe carnival at DCA, she refused to take her shoes off and get the secondary. She was quite relieved when it was just a quick swab and she was done.
IAD, on the other hand, completely botched it. At 615, they had a half hour wait, and the line wasn't even that long. When I complained for getting the full treatment because of my shoes and mentioned the new procedure, he said that having someone doing that would have slowed the line EVEN MORE. Now how can something that speeds up the line by not having to do secondaries slow things up?
Agreed again. And again, that's the policy. The only disagreement I have with the policy is the upper-torso pat-down that is supposed to be done after the hand-wanding. I think this should be a judgment call based on the thickness of the clothing. In other words, if you're wearing a T-shirt or dress shirt, it would be pretty obvious if you were concealing anything underneath. If you're wearing a sweatshirt or layers of clothing on the upper torso, then would it make sense to pat down the upper torso for concealed explosives. Unfortunately, current TSA procedures don't allow us this flexibility.
I agree with the reasonableness with what one's wearing. That's awful that TSA doesn't give you guys more leaway.
What should happen, according to procedure, is that they search until they find the item spotted in the x-ray, and then re-run the bag in the x-ray to ensure there's nothing else rather than do a complete bag search. The screener also has the option of doing a complete bag search, but that should be for small, relatively simple bags where it would make more sense to search the bag completely rather than x-ray it again (some bags are lightly packed and others are crammed with all sorts of stuff).
Which is what happened to me in SFO. Communication could have been a little better though so I knew what was going on without me having to play 20 questions with the screener.
Well, you already know my view about the shoe screening policy. I think we can scale it down to a random sampling rather than a mandatory screening on top of the ETD-sampling as discussed above.
Agreed.
We disagree. If I'm going to rely on technology that scans someone's body, then looking at a cartoon representation of that person's body doesn't cut it. Has nothing to do with seeing someone's pubes or other body features; has everything to do with making sure that the image I see on the screen is that of the person being scanned. There's probably a technology possible that reasonably meets both of our concerns half way. The objections to the current technology is Puritanical. I don't give a damn about the ACLU or NAMBLA. Our society is ridiculously silly when it comes to the slightest possibility of someone viewing nude or semi-nude bodies under any circumstances, even at the doctor's office. In this regard, the Europeans are much more enlightened and practical about these matters.
I think you're being a bit extreme when calling it Puritanical. I don't think the majority of people have a problem with "gettin nekkid" at the appropriate time, whether that's the doctor or "other" activities. You'll always have weirdos that do though, but I highly doubt that's the majority. I think they have a problem with the virtual strip search that's going on, which I happen to think is a violation of the 4th amendment.
LEO's can only do strip searches in certain circumstances. As TSA has no LE authority, I think it's stepping beyond their scope to conduct a strip search, whether real or virtual.
Super