Hands Off, Officer

Is your love life less than satisfactory? Well, apparently there’s a new hotspot for similarly minded singletons: Boston’s Logan Airport.

Recently, Katherine E. Felkins ’08 got a first-hand experience while flying home for Veterans Day weekend from Boston to Philadelphia. At Logan Airport, she was selected for a secondary screening. Felkins says she was physically patted-down by a male screener who asked her to remove her sweater. Despite being forced to reveal a “tight t-shirt [that made it clear] I wasn’t hiding anything under it,” screeners decided “they had to pat [my] chest down and everything.” The whole process, she concludes, was “just humiliating.”

And she’s not alone. Ever since the Transporation Security Administration (TSA) implemented new airport security rules in 450 commercial airports in the U.S., women across the country have been subjected to increasingly invasive searches that many decry as bordering on harassment. A recent New York Times article quotes one woman, Heather L. Maurer, who says that after a male screener gave her a full body pat-down, “he lifted my shirt and looked down the back of my pants.” Another, singer Patti LuPone, was forced to remove her shirt even though she protested, saying she was wearing nothing but a “thin, see-through camisole” underneath. In front of the entire airport, she was physically examined, including her “groin area and breasts.”

Since September 22, when the new rules took effect, the TSA has already received 250 official complaints, although personal accounts suggest the number may be underreported. The rules were implemented after two Chechen women boarded planes in Russia with bombs at the end of August, killing 90 people. Previously, passengers were randomly selected for secondary screenings, which consisted of having a magnetometer run around the body. Under the new rules, screeners have the discretion to select whomever they want based on “visual observation,” and conduct more intrusive searches.

These searches are physically and emotionally violating, for obvious reasons. But what’s even worse is the screening system’s huge potential for abuse of power, by allowing screeners to select whomever they want based on “visual observation.” In addition, while the new protocols may have good intent, in practice they clearly violate basic standards. For example, although female passengers are allowed to request a screener of the same sex, they often have no choice. Felkins says that a male screener did ask her if she felt uncomfortable being examined by a male. Worrying about missing her flight, she looked around for female screeners, but seeing none in sight, replied, “I guess not.” Furthermore, TSA policy allows passengers to request a private room for examination. But Felkins says she was never informed of that possibility. Worst of all, there’s almost nothing women can do about it. If they complain or refuse to be examined, they often end up being barred from their flight.

Since the original complaints were publicized, TSA has responded to public pressure, restricting invasive chest pat-downs to cases where handheld detectors are set off. But oversight measures should be improved so that TSA knows about the problem before Jay Leno mocks it on the Tonight Show. And there are still issues to be addressed: hiring enough female guards so that requests for same-sex screeners can be fulfilled, and making the procedures more transparent to keep passengers informed.

Of course, objections to the TSA policy need to address the opposing perspective, summed up nicely by a poster in response to the NYT story: “Cry me a river. I don’t want to have to be trying to rip a terrorists [sic] throat out at 35K feet because she didn’t want to be touched.” Hero complex aside, this view would seem to be logically correct; after all, isn’t being groped a small price to pay for the security of the American People? Except we’re not getting what we paid for. First of all, searching the wrong people is a waste of resources. We aren’t any safer because a TSA screener has decided that some blonde nineteen-year-old isn’t hiding ten pounds of C4 in her thong. Instead, they should focus on developing search systems that can examine all passengers equaIly and efficiently. Secondly, screeners focused on trying to get a free peep show are apt to miss the terrorist with a bomb in his shoe, because apparently he’s not sexy enough to warrant a search.

But the most convincing reason to scrap the new system is that security and personal privacy don’t have to trade off. New x-ray scanners have been implemented at London’s Heathrow Airport that can detect solid objects under concealed clothing. While these images are anatomically detailed, they are viewed by same-sex screeners, are anonymous, and are not stored. Why can’t the same thing be used in U.S. airports? Well, according to a TSA spokeswoman quoted in a Reuters story, “There are a number of privacy issues that need to be addressed.”

Finally, there’s the all-American solution: a class-action lawsuit. In a nice modern-day example of Hammurabi’s Code, women who have been humiliated by being forced to take their pants off, can now retaliate by suing the pants off TSA. The New York Times reports that Norman Siegel, a prominent New York civil rights lawyer, has started looking into possibilities for a class-action lawsuit.

While most of us may have traveled unscathed this winter break, there’s still intersession and spring break coming up. Which is why I’m passing on a useful tip posted on the Internet. Airline regulations currently ban passengers from carrying deadly weapons like pepper spray, so it seems we’re defenseless against molesters. But not to worry: Eat enough bean burritos at Felipe’s before you go, and you have your very own organic version!

Sanby Lee ’08, a Crimson editor, lives in Thayer Hall.