Scanners, pat-downs draw protests from air passengers

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Nearly a week before the Thanksgiving holiday air-travel crush, federal air-security officials struggled Monday to reassure rising numbers of fliers and airline workers outraged by new anti-terrorism screening procedures they consider invasive and harmful.

Across the country, passengers simmered over being forced to choose scans by full-body image detectors or probing pat-downs. Top federal security officials said that the procedures were safe and necessary sacrifices to ward off terror attacks.

“It’s all about security,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

Despite officials’ insistence that they had taken care to prepare the American flying public, the flurry of criticism from private citizens to airline pilots’ groups suggested that Napolitano and other federal officials had been caught off guard.

At the San Diego airport, a software engineer posted an Internet blog item saying he had been ejected after being threatened with a fine and lawsuit for refusing a groin check after turning down a full-body scan. The passenger, John Tyner, said he told a federal Transportation Security Administration worker, “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested.”

Tyner’s individual protest quickly became a Web sensation, but questions also came from travel- business groups, civil-liberties activists and pilots, raising concerns both about the procedures themselves and about the possibility of delays caused by passengers reluctant to accept the new procedures.

“Almost to a person, travel managers are concerned that TSA is going too far and without proper procedures and sufficient oversight,” said Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, an advocacy group representing corporate travel departments. “Travel managers are hearing from their travelers about this virtually on a daily basis.”

Jeffrey Price, an aviation professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, said two trends are converging: the regular holiday security increases and the addition of body scanners and new heightened measures stemming from the recent attempted cargo bombings. Also, several airports are short-staffed, which will add to delays, Price said.

Homeland Security and the TSA have moved forcefully to shift airport screening from familiar scanners to full-body detection machines. The new machines show the body’s contours on a computer stationed in a private room removed from the security checkpoints. A person’s face is never shown, and the person’s identity supposedly is not known to the screener reviewing the computer images.

Concerns about privacy and low-level radiation emitted by the machines have led some passengers to refuse screening. Under TSA rules, those who decline must submit to rigorous pat-down inspections that include checks of the inside of travelers’ thighs and buttocks. The American Civil Liberties Union has denounced the machines as a “virtual strip search.”

On Monday, top security officials were out in force to defend the new policies. Napolitano wrote an op-ed piece in USA Today insisting that the body scanners used at many airports are safe and any images are viewed by federal airport workers in private settings.

Napolitano later said in a news conference at Ronald Reagan National Airport that she regretted the growing opposition to moves by the federal government to make flying safer. But she said the changes were necessary to deal with emerging terrorist threats such as a Nigerian man’s alleged attempt to blow up a jetliner bound from Amsterdam to Detroit last Christmas Day. Authorities allege that explosives were hidden in the suspect’s underwear.