Since PhDork and I were both traveling on trans-continental flights this weekend, we had a moment of “Uh…TSA WTF?” before we headed to the airport, which we chatted about as I packed my suitcase. I fly a lot—nine round trips in the last sixteen weeks, both domestic and international—so I get plenty of quality face-time with TSA agents, including being scanned and patted down, although those seem to happen randomly and inconsistently.
The body scanners don’t bother me—there’s an argument that they allow the TSA to “see you naked”, but, having seen the scans, I think the images look like blurry photo-negatives, not a nude person. The pat-downs I am less crazy about, but they have been fairly rare for me, seeing as how I don’t fall into any of the categories that might encourage the TSA to give me extra scrutiny. But on a flight from Heathrow this winter I was patted down—there was a temporary super-high alert for all flights into the US and we were all patted down and had our carry-on luggage picked apart by hand. A lady ran the backs of her hands hands between my shoulder blades, under my arms and up the inside of my legs. The agent was professional and I didn’t find it violating at all—I was more annoyed that pat-downs slowed the boarding process so that our flight left an hour late. But I do not have active PTSD or a history of being harassed by the authorities; if I did, I might feel differently.
The problem with the debate about TSA is that in many cases, relatively little attention is being paid to practical questions like “Does this make us demonstrably safer?” or “Why is the TSA so fucking insensitive to people’s genuine concerns?” No…it’s boiled down to a man telling a TSA agent “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” Don’t touch my junk! has become the new I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!—the new rant of the angry white person, in a time when our 24-hour news cycle seem to be devoted almost entirely to the rants of angry white people, especially angry white dudes.
Truth is, the unwelcome touch is still rare for men, and that’s a privilege very few of them have ever realized…until now. If you’re a woman, and you’ve been in a crowded place, or on public transportation, there is a 100% chance that someone has touched your junk, or tried to, without your permission. If men united and protested as loudly over women being the victims of unwanted touching as they do over the TSA pat-downs, the world would be a different place. As Amanda Hess put it: GROPING! It happens to straight dudes too, now, so everybody pay attention.
There’s also more than a little underlying gay panic to the backlash. I’ve heard a fair bit of the snickering sexist “But hey, if it was a LADY giving me the pat-down it would be okay…” Because the off-chance that a man might brush his hand against your junk is so gay! Cue the panic!
The panic is entirely one-sided, of course; I haven’t heard male libertarians protesting at all about women being patted down by women. Presumably there’s nothing gay about that that requires panic—or they’ve been watching too much internet porn and think women touching each other is hot. (Or, as stated above, they simply don’t give a shit about a woman’s perspective). Never mind that for women who have been sexually assaulted, a pat-down can be triggering and traumatic even if done by another woman.
A black male friend who has been stopped for DWB snarked: “The Man’s doing a random stop-and-frisk on white folks now? Poor, poor white folks.” I’m sure a fair number of people who’ve been harassed by the TSA for Flying While Muslim would agree, and I can’t blame them. I’ve noticed that the majority of my (often Southern) libertarian and conservative friends who are up in arms over these pat-downs are the same one who have no problem with brown people being subjected to extra government scrutiny at airports, when building houses of worship, while driving in Arizona, etc. It’s all in the name of public safety and defending freedom…unless someone might touch their white, privileged junk.
Baltimore, where I often fly, was an early adopter of the enhanced electronic screening and I have opted out from the beginning, more out of fear of the extra (totally unnecessary) radiation than civil liberties concerns, though I do like to force TSA workers to go through the awkward process of hand searching me. I have to go thru invasive searches all the time when I enter federal detention facilities in the US so I’m used to it.
I agree that the question, is this making us any safer? Is the best one, and it is for this reason that I like to force the seach — to make it more time and cost consuming to do the searches, in the hopes that will force a reconsideration of the cost benefit analysis of them.
This whole screening process is a joke, albeit it an unfunny one. Becky, I take your point about the images produced by the scan, but if the possibility exists that they could be saved and passed around, I think that’s a valid concern.
You’re absolutely right.
But…silver lining? I think it’s awesome that there’s finally something we can all agree on. I’m thrilled that the Right is outraged over this too, hypocrisy aside. Of course, if we can’t get it changed but quick, even that will no longer be heartening…but I’m hoping something the entire population, including the vocal Tea Partiers, can agree on will result in something actually getting done.
On the one hand, the fact that our security has devolved to this, when the terrorists have clearly moved on (packages on cargo planes, anyone?), shows that full-body scanners and pat downs and random luggage screenings all fall into the category of “false sense of security.” It doesn’t take a terrorism expert to note the salient fact, that terrorists rarely strike the same place twice, and even when they do, it’s never in the same manner. This Keystone Cops approach to security is merely making travel more frustrating, and creating much greater security threats (trains, buses, ships, etc.) out of other modes of transport.
On the other hand, if we relax our security, we allow the terrorists a new window of opportunity at some point in the future. The problem with what we have done is not that we have done it, but the manner in which it was done. The full-body scan may or may not be safe; more testing would have been appropriate. Better training of TSA agents, to look for suspicious behavior or activity, and target those people exhibiting such, would be more useful than patting down 8-year-old children and 90-year-old senior citizens.
Becky you hit so many high points with that post: attempt to eliminate risk vs. cost in time and money, the unwelcome touch as yet another privilege white men are unaware of, and gay panic. Meanwhile you are travelling. Awesome.
Honestly it might be a false sense of security but I always feel a lot safer flying out of Heathrow where they actually bother to check stuff then I do flying out of JFK where everyone is half asleep. I’ve never got over the fact that throughout the 90s I was allowed to fly internally all over the US with no id despite clearly not being American. The laxness at US airports always astonished me given that I was used to tight security just flying from England to Scotland because of the IRA campaigns.
Also you know I used to fly alot and now I have to do it long haul with kids and honestly checks just don’t bother me. I don’t care about being patted down, I don’t mind taking my shoes off, I have no issue with restrictions on what I can take on the flight or on taking my computer out. Yes, it takes longer to board but honestly seeing as you sit on the damn plane for about 40 minutes before take off anyway I can’t even get that bothered about that.
What I do hate however – people who can’t read basic signs saying what they can and can’t bring and thus waste everyone’s time bitching about having to throw the stuff away that it’s clearly stated they can’t bloody bring. Learn to read, idiots.
Also people who don’t take their shoes off until the last minute as though they’re magically exempt and yes people who make a big deal about being patted down. Sorry but there’s a huge difference between the recent case where the three year old was terrified by it and being a middle aged male being patted down. In my opinion they should grow up and find something worth while to complain about.
Finally to end my rant while I don’t find TSA staff bad, could America please give everyone who works on Homeland Security some sort of training, they have to be the worst advertisement for entering a country ever. Not to mention the most terrifying.
Right airport rant over.
I hate that my first comment here is nitpicking (because I’m huge fans of you guys!), but here goes. The images you linked to come from a millimeter wave scanner. Backscatter xray images have much higher resolution.
@567Kate: Right you are. Here’s a link to a backscatter Xray image. I do not think it comes close to seeing someone naked, though. People are getting worked up over the idea that nude images are being collected by the gubmint, and that simply is not the case, IMO.
@emilyanne: I agree about Heathrow—the IRA forced the UK to have good anti-terrorism measures long before the US figured out that we need them to. And if anyone’s ever traveled into or from Israel, especially on El Al airlines, they would realize how lax and scattershot our security procedures actually are by comparison. The TSA in general is just a poorly run organization. Their employees are badly paid, badly trained and have very high turnover.
@Melissa: The thing I find most galling about the fact that liberals and Tea Partiers find common ground on this issue is that you just know if liberals were the only ones to object, the response would be OMG liberals are soft on terrorism!!11!eleventy!!
The images are nude enough for the worker to see quite a lot of definition in the genital area, thereby outing pretty much every trans person who hasn’t had every possible surgery. Ditto to the groping. Not all of us can take such an easy-breezy attitude toward being seen even a little naked.
@vivamus: That’s true about transpeople, and it’s an issue that I’m sure the TSA and media haven’t adequately addressed. I don’t think I’m being “easy-breezy”, though, and I don’t dismiss those concerns simply because I’m cisgendered. I’m simply saying that these images are not nude photos and it’s misinformation to say that they are.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Katie, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: Singing the TSA Blues http://bit.ly/bNyBrt [...]
Yeah, for me it’s really a combination of several things: 1) the backscatter machine might be really unsafe, 2) there’s no way to opt out — the TSA is starting to arrest and fine people if they get there, get selected for secondary screening, and then try to just say they won’t fly, and 3) it doesn’t work! None of this stuff works! There are basic logical flaws in every single security measure they’ve put in place. The cargo issue is of course one of them. The body cavity issue is another. The fact that you can, oh gee, take several 3 oz bottles of anything you want onto the plane makes it so that the liquid explosives thing is null. It’s completely inane. Moreover, I’m just not sure it’s worth it. The chances of a successful terrorist attack are so small that I actually think we all need to chill out about it a little.
Back in late 2001, when anti-terrorist travel panic was still in its first, freaked-out flush, I was patted down before a flight from Portland, ME to NYC. As a sexual assault survivor, this was so triggering that I cried, in spite of myself, before, during, and after the (relatively innocuous) search. The only concession airport staff made to my panic was to substitute a female agent for a male one, but not until I requested it. And, of course, everyone except my then-boyfriend clearly perceived my reaction as ever so slightly drama-queenly. It seemed to occur to absolutely no-one that a bodily search might have any sort of negative impact on a person who’d been assaulted. But then, it’s been my longtime experience that this ignorance extends into every aspect of public life, from media to the medical world.
So now that guys, and in particular white guys, are subject to the same exact behavior, it’s a cause celebre? Surely some of these men have been sexually victimized as well, and I won’t dismiss that. But there’s a bitter part of me that wants to hiss “Now do you get it?” into the ear of every aggrieved male passenger whose epiphany light-bulbs are flickering. Because, frankly, I don’t think that the TSA violations DO enlighten them to women’s ordinary experiences of violation, any more than the sort of white man who feels threatened by an African-American president suddenly understands racism.
Sorry to be ranty. The subject is infuriating.
@baraquiel – I agree about the scattershot approach entirely. I would agree about the terrorist thing as basically it’s true but I’m always a little wary of saying so having been in Canary Wharf when it was blown up and in Manchester when the city centre was hit. Then again maybe the IRA were just more effective terrorists…
My husband grew in Derry with stop and search, a strong military presence and regular bomb attacks and so he’s pretty blase about current security as it’s nothing like being pulled over by soldiers with guns at 13 and having your bags pulled apart at their whim.
But that said I do get that there are triggering issues with sexual assault here and I’m sympathetic to the transgendered/naked issue. What I’m not sympathetic to is a bunch of white conservative men bitching about their supposed rights violations. US security used to be utterly crap, now it’s disorganised and ineffectual but actually that’s still a step up from what it was.
The internet just lost my comment. I’ll try again. Sigh.
I have lots of issues with the new screening. I shouldn’t have unnecessary x-rays, the pat down would be triggering, the pat down would cause me pain all over (invisible disability), I have a disabled child who finds even a regular metal detector difficult to do sometimes, would not be still enough for a body scan, and would melt down over being touched. And if he pushes back or smacks their hand away, we’ll be dealing with assault charges (he’s 13).
The issue with people with disabilities is also outrageous. Did you see the guy with the urostomy bag, left covered in urine by the TSA? The breast cancer survivor having to show her prosthesis? Having non-medically trained people doing these invasive screenings is going to lead to even more humilation than disabled flyers usually face.
Not to mention my outrage at trans and intersex people being exposed by either screening method.
I’m pissed the conversation is centered on either ‘don’t touch my junk’ or TEH GAY. Also, one I see in comments is ‘I don’t want my wife / gf / daughter getting screened this way’, once again centering the hetero-male view.
And finally, if I wanted to blow up a plane, I’d simply stuff something internally. Drug mules have been doing it for decades. This screening is idiotic.
@emilyanne – “I would agree about the terrorist thing as basically it’s true but I’m always a little wary of saying so having been in Canary Wharf when it was blown up and in Manchester when the city centre was hit. Then again maybe the IRA were just more effective terrorists…”
They had *way* less ground to cover and were closer to it to boot. There are 350+ airports in the US that have regular service and thousands of flights per day. Compare that to the number of successful or even nearly successful airplane-based terrorist attacks — the ones that get as far as the airport where the TSA would be able to do anything. It’s just not a realistic fear. I’d be more scared of being trampled to death trying to shop on Black Friday than of getting blown up flying home the next day.
There are basically three options for airport security.
First, there’s the detain-the-Arabs profiling policy, as evidenced in Krauthammer’s charming column in the Post this week. Right wingers love this one because it lets old white folks stroll through while addressing the “real problem,” foreigners (or maybe citizens!)with unusual names.
Second, there’s the glib, unthoughtful argument that passengers should be unencombered from ticket to gate because “the terrorists will find a way somehow,” and therefore all security measures are “Kabuki” and therefore a waste of time. I don’t really get this. Sure, people can send explosives in packages, and it’s pretty well substantiated that prevention is most efficiently and effectively pursued in the ex ante phase by intel rather than TSA checkpoints, but I’d imagine a terrorist cell would be elated if all it had to do was evade scrutiny in the planning phase and then arm its attackers with run-of-the-mill military hardware or dynamite or C4, conveniently stowed in the rollerbag. That’s a hell of a lot easier than cooking up something in your freaking shoe or underdrawers. I mean, if you’re a circus, does it make sense to rely on your tightrope walker’s impeccable training and top-of-the-line tightrope to cover for the fact that you refuse to buy a cheap net that will keep her from breaking her neck in 70% of falls?
So the third option, somewhere in between, seems to me to be the most sensible. I used to not care about the body scans, but now I care that so many people care, if that makes sense (kind of a recent development). This thing is sort of a cost-benefit harm reduction exercise, and if society is going to clamor enough such that it seems to be evident that the scans do more harm than good, I’ll go with it. But I just don’t see that in terms of metal detectors and carry-on scanners, which must have a pretty significant winnowing effect, don’t really take that long (minus the shoe and gel requiremtn, which seems overboard), and are minor inconveniences rather than legit civil rights issues.
@baraquiel, i’d agree if as I mentioned before I didn’t consider the US’s security to be so crap. I mean I don’t really seriously consider that I’m going to be blown up but I also don’t get particularly fussed about security measures because given how shite they are and have been in US airports I consider any sort of measure an improvement.
@BearDownCBears, I agree with you. Although honestly I’m not seeing the shoe problem, it takes five minutes to take your shoes off and put them on again. What’s the big deal?
My take is that most people just want to make their flights and have one more gripe (along with lines, prices, food etc). I bet most TSA’ers do the best they can (how can anyone do what they do over and over and etc), but nobody’s learning any empathy for the already-groped. You either believe groping is wrong or you don’t, something like this wont change it. Naturally headline grabbing junk lines are good for getting attention, because ‘junk’ is just fun to say isn’t it!
The solution is the Israeli method: people trained in observation asking questions of passengers. While I don’t love everything the Israeli government does, in airport security, they get it right. No racial profiling, no body scanners. Just trained people asking questions.
@EmilyAnne
Taking the shoes off and putting them on is time consuming and difficult, and sometimes painful for parents dealing with several kids, the disabled, which in my family is both a parent and a child.
@BearDownCBears – I’m not saying they should do nothing. I’m just saying that I think doing only things that definitely make a difference (eg the metal detectors and bag x-rays) is better than doing blatantly stupid shit and I’d rather we just stick to the things that are proven to be at least remotely functional rather than adding on these absurd hoops to jump through. TSA policies are designed to catch stupid terrorists, because they’re obtuse and reactive. Terrorists adapt. All the TSA does is scramble to make it really, really difficult to do something that a terrorist has *already* done and probably won’t do again in the future. The stupid terrorists are not the ones I’m worried about because they have the highest chance of getting caught *every* step of the way, not just at the airport.
@KJ – Yep, I agree. Having read about their procedures, I find them admirable in their simplicity, elegance, and success rate(!).
@KJ: But could we actually implement it in our massive airline network? I suspect transportation would grind to a halt and security lines would grow exponentially. I’m by no means an Israel expert, but this post made me think that it’s kind of impossible in the US of A:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/tag/transportation/
Sometimes scale matters. It’s like discussions about trying to graft the Swedish tax code and benefit system onto America without even a universal health care system as a primer.
For me it’s about the blatant flouting of the 4th Amendment but that’s hardly something new.
I agree, becky, with everything you say about the male response to being groped but I’m still pleasantly surprised that this issue is causing an uproar. I expected the general public to just roll over and play dead on it just like every other personal freedom that has been rolled back under the auspice of “terrorism prevention.”
@bdcb: totally with you.
I was surprised about the “don’t touch my junk” thing coming to the forefront because my first exposure to the recent problems with TSA screenings was this rape survivor’s experience. (It’s worth a read if you have a few minutes and won’t be triggered by it.) People were talking about the TSA and I was thrilled that people were noticing her story… and then I realized that it was about white men, again.
I’ve also seen a lot of jokes–you know, the “this problem is not as serious as you think it is, you idiots” kind of joke (at least it’s “you idiots” and not “stupid women”!)–framing the pat-downs as fun and sexy. Those are invariably from white men as well.
The whole kerfluffle reminded me of this video I saw a little while ago of a white pastor who was ill-treated by the border patrol – TW for burning anger, incredible self-righteousness, and description of being ill-treated by the border control -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUzd7G875Hc&feature=player_embedded
Of course, the tactics which have been used and perfected on minority populations since, um, Reconstruction? Dred Scott?, are going to bleed over into the mainstream. You didn’t hear these guys complaining when it was black teenagers who were being harassed, they felt safe because the police were keeping criminals off the streets, and if the kids hadn’t committed a crime yet, it was just a matter of time until they did. Blergh.
@Ms M – while I sympathise with the issue with a disabled child, I have two children under three and a third on the way and travel long haul all the time and quite frankly shoes are not that big a deal in my personal opinion. Travelling with children is going to be a hassle regardless. I do however understand that it is more difficult in your situation.
On reflection though I wanted to add it’s worth bearing in mind that a) I’ve grown up with these sort of checks my whole life so i don’t find them that odd – I first used body scanners in 1995 on a trip to South Africa and I come from a nation where queuing is ingrained. So it’s probably only natural that I don’t get that fussed by security stuff, I have after all been brainwashed regarding it.
I’m flying in January to visit my partner’s family and I’m already getting nervous and upset about it. As a sexual assault survivor, I am petrified that I’m going to lose it in the airport. Last Wednesday, I found that link that Clare K. R. Miller posted, and just reading it gave me flashbacks and brought me to tears.
I’m trying to come up with good coping mechanisms to get me through this. My normal plans (playing the piano, petting one of my cats) can’t be done in an airport setting.
Does anyone have any suggestions or tips for getting through this in one piece? Chants, meditation, breathing exercises, anything. Please. (I considered wearing an adult diaper to help block the contact, but I’m worried it would just lead them to strip-search me.)
@Skada: First of all, it’s fairly unlikely you will be patted down. So while I’m not saying “don’t worry, it ain’t gonna happen”, chances are, it will not. As much as I fly—roughly 30 separate flights in this past year—I have only been patted down once, and that was at Heathrow last January. I don’t know what you look like or what your nationality is or where you’re going or if there’s something about you that might make the TSA want to scrutinize you, but the VAST majority of people aren’t patted down. If you go through one of the 3-D scanners, as long as you have nothing in your pockets, you should be fine (when I was in Richmond earlier this month, I went through one, got bitched at because I’d left a tube of lip balm in my pocket, had to take it out, show it, and that was it). I have never been patted down or scanned on a 3-D scanner at JFK, Newark or LaGuardia, which are the airports where all my flights begin and end—in fact, as Emilyanne says, they don’t seem nearly as vigilant as you’d expect.
All of which is to say, you are right to be concerned if you think a pat-down will be triggering, but I’d hate to think of you panicking for the next couple months when it’s very possible that what you fear will not happen at all. (And I say this as someone who tends to work herself into a bit of a lather about things for weeks in advance).
My personal air-travel de-stressing trick is to put little drugstore-bought foam earplugs into my ears. Airports tend to be loud and chaotic and made of hard surfaces that reflect sound, and I find that if i can turn the volume down a little, I relax automatically. Thus far, no one has asked me to take the earplugs out at security. I basically wear the damn things all the time when traveling–I can hear what I need to, but the usual racket doesn’t make me as stressed.
Also, if you really feel like this could trigger a panic attack, get your doc to prescribe you a mg. or two of Ativan or Xanax or your preferred anti-anxiety med for when you fly. I think half the folks at airports are on them these days, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The obvious solution to more secure airports would be *gasp* staffers who are actually trained in security, as opposed to the uninterested parrot-monkeys who currently seem to make up most of the TSA. Staffers who ask questions, react reasonably, explain procedures and give options; in short, who treat people like people while watching for suspicious behavior.
But they’d have to pay these true security personnel more, and pay for the training…so machines it is.
Meanwhile, I get to figure out a plan-of-action for getting my grown Autistic brother through a pat-down without him being detained for assaulting the agent! (Because we WILL be pulled, and they never listen to me, and chances are good he will flip out.) >_<
If we were serious about security screenings at domestic airports, then we should aggressively PROFILE travelers.
Since every act and attempted act (of which we are aware) of terrorism in the last decade has been perpetrated by MALES under 35 years of age, let’s emphasize THAT salient fact.
[...] metro cars in other countries as well, including Egypt, Japan, and South Korea. As I mentioned in my post on the TSA pat-down furor, if you are a woman who regularly takes public transportation, uninvited groping is inevitable, and [...]
At most airports it seems that the majority of passengers are still funneled through the metal detectors and only a select few are made to choose between the scanner or enhanced pat downs.
But there are a few places where the scanners have replaced the metal detectors entirely so your only choices are to be blasted with radiation or groped (the security check point I went through two weeks ago at San Diego airport was like this). I was surprised at how upset I was about the situation. I am concerned about the radiation from the scanners, and I think the grope is just totally inappropriate. It’s all the more galling because I don’t see how these measures enhance our safety. I didn’t know at the time that I could opt out of the scanner (there was nothing posted about this, and certainly no one told me I had any other option) so I went through it. Apparently the scanner revealed something suspicious about the top of my head so a TSA agent had to pat down my head afterwards. I was like, really?! Fucking ridiculous.