Former TSA Agent: Groping Scandal Is Business as Usual
The recent story of two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport manipulating full-body scanners in order to grope men’s crotches is disturbing, but it came as no surprise to me.
Over the course of my six years with the TSA, the leveraging of rules and surveillance tools to abuse passengers was a daily checkpoint occurrence. Has the TSA screener searching your luggage suddenly decided to share with you the finer points of official bag-search procedure just as your final boarding call is being announced? There’s a good chance that he or she just doesn’t like you. Or in some cases, as we’ve seen, it may be that the screener finds you attractive and wants to use the TSA rules as an excuse to get his or her hands on you.
Amid all the jokes in comment sections, it’s easy to forget that the groping of these dozen or more male passengers by two conspiring TSA screeners is sexual assault, plain and simple. And while it’s easy to focus all the blame on the two unsavory screeners who are now no longer with the agency, perhaps the bigger issue here is a systemic one: There are far too many federal hands on people’s private parts in airports.
(The TSA agents involved have been fired, and a spokesman for the agency has said: “All allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated by the agency. And when substantiated, employees are held accountable.”)
What most people don’t realize is that the full-body scanners the two agents used to assault those passengers — the scanners that millions of people pass through each day — are practically useless. The TSA, in its rush to replace the controversial “nude” radiation scanners that they phased out in 2013, swapped out one poorly functioning line of machines for another. The current millimeter wave scanners, with their outrageous false-positive rates, regularly cause unnecessary pat-downs: The agent running his or her hands over you after you pass through the scanner is almost never doing it for a good reason. (Read more from “Former TSA Agent: Groping Scandal Is Business as Usual” HERE)
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