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Strip Searched by a Body-Scanning Machine

2 years ago

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Woman Up Editor

Historically, I'm a great traveler but a really terrible line-stander. I get restless and crane around at airports nosily trying to see what's taking so long.

Unbidden, I take personal interest in the stressed-out vacationers, business travelers, and occasional unaccompanied minors whose immediate needs conflict with the ever-changing, rule-based protocols of police and inspectors.

By the time I get to the front I will have formulated countless ideas for monitors to improve their job performance. I've learned my astute efficiency suggestions are rarely received as welcome advice, however, and are particularly frowned upon by employees of the Transportation Security Administration.

Lately there has been a lot of concern among WomenUp writers over extra security screening proposals resulting from a terrorist's Christmas Day bombing attempt on a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit. Ria Misra wondered at the effectiveness of selective screening for travelers from 14 countries on the terrorist watch list. Singling out all citizens of these non-western countries feels uncomfortably close to racial profiling, she worried. Jan Bataille confirmed that civil rights groups are outraged by the regionally directed scrutiny. An American-Arab Anti-Discrimination leader pointed out:"All of a sudden people are labeled as being related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from."Alex Wagner added to our discomfort assuring us that "there is such thing as bad security," relating her experience of bureaucratic bumbling and ineptitude in airports from Mumbai to Newark, reminding her and us that despite delays and inconvenience, "no one is really, truly any safer at all."

Equally troubling is the ever more intrusive individual screening that run-of-the-mill American passengers must undergo. I totally understand the logistical difficulty the airline industry has delivering its service (and the rest of us have consuming it). Moving tens of thousands of people through the air every day between hundreds of countries and in and out of airports administered by countless jurisdictions is complicated enough. Unanticipated, until this century, was the additional burden of assuring that anyone buying a ticket to ride cannot potentially turn an airbus into an ambush. The terrorism that ushered in the 21st century requires an ever more vigilant level of transportation security.

The latest new thing Homeland Security is excited about is state of the art body-scan machines. The innovative millimeter wave and backscatter x-rays may be effective at getting a very close look at individual passengers, but they cost a fortune and, privacy proponents say, are akin to a digital strip search. I'm sure the sleek, slightly medical-looking probes are effective, but I cannot imagine that their increased use will be much comfort to grandmothers and small children flying to Dubuque.

About two years ago, on a trip out of Baltimore's Thurgood Marshall BWI Airport, I headed for the shortest security line and was happily waved into a queue that seemed unusually well staffed. Long accustomed to metal detection scanners, I was a bit mystified when the TSA agent steered me into a small x-ray booth about the size of a bathroom stall. The officer was communicating by phone, she told me, with somebody reading my scan. "Do you have an under wire in your bra?" she asked ... "Yes," she confirmed to her unseen partner at my surprised nod. "That's a necklace; I see it," she then told her mouthpiece.

I later learned I had participated in experimental technology in which "images are detailed, clearly showing a person's gender." So detailed in fact, the head of the airports' security team told USA Today, "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back." Evidently my mother's South Sea pearl on a chain was not considered dangerous enough to prevent me from boarding my Southwest flight because there were only a few more questions to confirm that my off-site examiner was viewing the naked-ish form of a harmless female passenger. I was released to catch my plane, thinking to myself I should have asked them to print out the image for my medical files.

Filed Under: Terror, National Security, Woman Up, TSA Screening

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