Look up the Stanford prison experiments. We saw the same behavior in wartime prison settings. Making people strip naked is about power and humiliation, not sexual attraction. IMO, this is one of the biggest problems with TSA. They think they have power and authority. The clerks need a reality check, just like the Stanford subjects did.

The issue at hand is power tripping; it's not sexual. This is not limited to groping either. It's about forcing submission. The groping is just the humiliation part of the equation. Most of the problem is what we mock as "respect my authoritah." This explains, to me at least, why so many enjoy being the barkers.

You should work around a factory for a while. Walking up behind someone and grabassing them is considered great fun by certain cruel coworkers. I had one that thought this was extremely funny until I filed a sexual harassment complaint, and after he had about three brutal interviews with human resources, I decided to let it go (so to speak). It never happened again.

And, we will not even start to discuss what happens in the sports locker rooms in high school and college.

It is not the sexual part. It IS the power and intimidation.

A wonderful story! You have my admiration. I've done similar things, but you handled this situation perfectly! Kudos.

My favorite approach now when asked to play the name game is to say that I don't want others to hear my name, but I'm willing to whisper it. The TDC person almost always agrees. I then get uncomfortably close to him or her (it works equally well with either gender) and whisper my name slowly and breathily into his/her ear, as if I'm trying to seduce him/her. You have no idea how creepy that is. Hopefully, they learn something from the experience. I also point out how stupid the whole thing is as I walk away.

Bruce

Perfectly stated, as usual.

Bruce

First time I was asked to play the name game
 

28 Dec 2013 Departing JFK Terminal 4. Really long lines at around 7:00pm. Took about 15 minutes to just to get to the TDC, even though I was in the business class line - there initially was only one TDC for both lines. TDC is asking people's names (asking everyone from what I could see and hear). When it's my turn, I politely say that it (my name) is on my ID (border crossing card) and my boarding pass. He asks again, and I repeat what I said. He asks me to step aside (there is really no room for standing aside), hands me back my boarding pass and ID, and calls for a supervisor. I wait about 8 minutes. A supervisor finally shows and asks the TDC what the issue is. The TDC tells him. The supervisor asks the TDC if the documents check out ok. The TDC says yes. The supervisor takes my boarding pass and ID, looks at them, and marks my boarding pass and then returns them to me. The supervisor says nothing to me during this encounter. Off I go to the next stage of security theater.

They have 2 lines x-raying luggage which both feed into the same NoS. Great! There is a metal detector but it appears that they are only letting pre-check people go through it. So when my bags are about to go through the x-ray machine I tell the TSA clerk that I will be opting out. He tells me to stand aside. I do. Of course, there really is no place to stand and when I stand where he tells me, I am blocking the people from the other luggage x-ray line from accessing the NoS line. He tells me to move. I say if I move, I cannot see my bags that have come out the other end of the x-ray machine. So I don't move and direct people behind me to go around me. After about 5 minutes (I suspect it would have been a longer wait had I not been blocking a line), a woman TSA clerk calls me over to point out (but not to touch) my x-rayed bags. She then directs another TSA clerk (the TDC that I refused to play the name game with) to move my bags to their table for hand searching and she directs me to the other side of the table, where she explains the pat-down procedure. I ask her to please change her gloves. She does and then does the pat-down. Then the other TSA clerk (the name game guy) hand searches my luggage. This takes a while because my luggage is full of all kinds of little individually wrapped items (from Christmas). At some point, I realize that he has become really annoyed at me because I did not get annoyed at them for making me go through this nonsense. I say this because he was asking me what was in the little packages rather than unwrapping them - he had unwrapped a few, but another TSA clerk said something to him about how long was he going to take to do this hand search.

So all in all, this little adventure in security theater took a little over an hour.

I then went to the lounge, boarded my flight and arrived in AUH, where I had to go through security there (transit). The contrast was amazing. I was treated like a human being in AUH and was even told that I did not have to dispose of my half-full water bottle.

And my family wonders why I hate flying in the US.

I'm sorry, but I think asking you to say your name is EXTREMELY reasonable - many people on fake ID's won't remember what name they had put on the ID. I've been in clubs that use this same technique to catch teens with fake ID. It works, and it's not intrusive at all, sorry.

Yes, teenagers with fake IDs may forget the name on it. But terrorists? If you were a trained terrorist on a suicide mission, would you forget the name on your fake ID? I think not. The whole exercise is absurd.

Bruce

Extremely unreasonable, the above.

In the US there aren't that many WEI-carrying terrorists with intent to killing civilian passengers to make such effort reasonable; and the very few terrorists with such intent in the US haven't needed fake ID to kill people on say 9/11. The name game didn't reliably stop even a Richard Reid-level idiot misusing ID.

Now for the reasonable: ID checking by TSA is not needed to interdict contraband WEIs from getting onboard planes , whether or not the WEIs are being brought on board a plane by the extremely rare terrorist, a duped patsy or otherwise.

I don't get it. With all of the intrusive security you face at an airport, how is saying your name out loud worthy of such a fight? It takes two seconds, and if your ID isn't fake, involves revealing absolutely nothing they don't already know.

I know I'd sure prefer that to, well, just about anything else the TSA does.

But it's stupid, provides no real security and is just one more useless imposition by the TSA on the rest of us. Maybe it's just the straw that broke this camel's back.

Bruce

Full disclosure: when asked, I say my name. I choose not to fight this particular fight.

Having said that, I'll offer a list of reasons that some would choose to fight this fight:

1. As you note, it reveals nothing relevant to the screening process. It is therefore wasted effort. Whatever it is that the TDC is supposed to be accomplishing, adding another useless task only distracts from the TDC's other duties.

2. It wastes time, both for the TDC, the passenger, and every other passenger in line.

Anecdote: the first time I encountered this procedure was in SFO a couple of years ago. My wife, my two children, and I approached the TDC together and handed him our four boarding passes and two IDs, all of which have the same family name. It was painfully obvious that we were traveling together. The TDC split us into two pairs, one parent with each child, and asked me to take one step back with my child. The TDC then, fully within my hearing, asked my wife to state her last name. She did so, and he made the magic squiggles on her pair of boarding passes. He then asked me and my child to step up to the podium and state my last name (which is the same as hers). I complied, and he made the magic squiggles on my pair of boarding passes.

Exactly what did that charade accomplish, other than wasting our time and the time of every person standing in line behind us?

3. Since it's a waste of time and effort, it's also a waste of money. TSA is funded by a combination of general tax dollars and fees placed on airline tickets. Either way, it's funded by public money. And the public has an interest in ensuring that this public money isn't wasted.

4. Many have reported here (including in the original posting in this thread) that it's possible to transit a checkpoint without saying one's name, simply by refusing. Since this seems to be true, what's the point in asking everyone to say it?

5. It contributes to the notion that "identity matters" regarding airport screening, when it really doesn't. Identity verification is supposed to be used to ensure that passengers on the no-fly list aren't allowed past the screening checkpoint. It's been demonstrated many times that it's incredibly easy to circumvent that check at most checkpoints.

6. It reveals the person's name to anyone within earshot. Some people would prefer not to have everyone around them know their last name, for a wide variety of reasons.

7. The "real" reason for requiring passengers to state their name has absolutely nothing to do with passengers who don't know their names. It's been reported here by insiders that the "name game" is actually punishment for airport checkpoints who fail to actually perform the normal duties of matching IDs to boarding passes properly. It's rather preposterous to say "you aren't following our procedures, so we're going to give you even more procedures to follow."

1) It's not reasonable if it doesn't have any demonstrable positive effect, which it doesn't
2) Only a nervous teenager buying beer will forget their fake name; an actual international terrorist boarding a plane with a bomb isn't going to be tripped up by a minimum-wage flunkie ordering him to say his fake name out loud, especially when it doesn't catch anyone by surprise because everybody in line ahead of you has been ordered to say their name.
3) It absolutely IS intrusive to force a person to say their name out loud in a public place, particularly when that is accompanied by an order to state your destination, as it often is.

In short, it DOESN'T work, and it IS intrusive. Sorry. You're just wrong.

1.5 million people per day fly in the US. If each person takes 2 seconds to say their name, that's 3 million seconds, or 50,000 minutes, or 833 hours of lost productivity per day, the equivalent of 20 40-hour workweeks. In a year, that's 304,045 hours of productivity lost because of a 2-second nuisance that provides no security benefit whatsoever, or the equivalent productivity of 146 full-time jobs (at 2080 hours per year), wiped out of existence.

So, yeah, 2 seconds may not mean much to you, but if you think it through, it means a lot when you add it up.

Oops, almost forgot the money...

Those 2 seconds that the TDC is stealing from you are also 2 additional seconds it takes for them to do their job. So, over the course of a year, TSA has to pay TSOs the equivalent of 146 additional full-time jobs, just to play the Name Game. I believe a TSO's average salary is in the $30,000 range (someone correct me if I'm wrong), so going by that, 146x$30,000= a wasted expenditure of $4,380,000 in salary alone; add benefits to that and you can just about double it to around $8.6 million in direct costs, wasted by TSA every year on the Name Game.

And while the TDC may already know your name, because they're reading your ID, the people in line around you don't know your name or your destination, and when you're traveling, it's best to keep it that way, both for personal and professional security.

It's useless, wasteful, and counter-productive. Still think those 2 seconds don't matter?

How much time would be lost if all of those 1.5 million people per day played the OP's silly game?

None, because the game would stop. TSA would not continue doing it if everyone resisted. You know that.

Bruce

Well, all I can tell you is that I have friends who have been bouncers, and the "name game" DOES work. I know some of you say there's a difference between a teenager and a terrorist, but what do you base that on? I'd sure put the intelligence of a teenager who just wants a drink and to dance higher than the intelligence of someone who'd end their life on a promise of 14 virgins to be given to him by Allah.