Max, you should be interested in this.
In December I put my 17 year old son on a flight from Pittsburgh to Atlanta for a fencing competition. They have the new millimeter wave ‘naked’ scanners here, the kind that can supposedly tell if you have a packet of explosive powder in your pocket. They actually aren’t very good at that, it seems. We watched him go through the scanner, which involved standing between two walls with his arms raised for 20 seconds. Then he was walked off, accompanied by three middle-aged TSA men, to a closed room nearby. After three minutes had passed I asked the nearest TSA guy what was up with my son; he said that something must have appeared on the scanner, and that he had been taken for a further search to a side room ‘for his privacy and comfort.’ I asked to speak to a supervisor, who came promptly, and said that by regulations he shouldn’t be explaining this, but a ‘groin anomaly’ turned up on the scan, and that was the reason for the check. He said it might be just a wad of dollar bills in his pocket. He asked if we would like him to check further; I said yes, of course, it had been five minutes now. He talked to the men at the room, and my son came out, and went on to catch his flight.
My boy was angry. Nobody told him what was going on, except the scanner turned something up and that a search was needed. When he went in two men stood at his sides, looking at him, while the third made a great show of pulling on latex gloves, snapping them while he walked behind my son. Intimidation, suspicion, reticence, and rudeness marked every bit of the process. He patted him down, and ran the gloved hands behind his belt, and sent the gloves out for an explosives residue scan. That came back within a minute, negative for explosives. Everybody seemed more suspicious than before, however. The boy was patted down again, more thoroughly, with the TSA man asking, ‘Is this you? Is this you?’ when he encountered what could have been a bomb or a pack of dope but was in fact genitals. None of the three men seemed in any way reassured after this search, either, and gave him orders to keep his hands in the air, and they left the room, him with hands still raised. At that point the TSA supervisor showed up, checked the boy’s driver’s license, asked if he was in fact 17, and set him free.
I don’t know how long he would have remained in that room while three pushy men nursed their suspicions, had he not been 17 and as a minor improperly detained. What was clear was that the TSA inspectors, once suspicion was aroused, had no clear idea of how to resolve their doubts, and that every check that failed to indicate guilt simply made them more nervous. Having him alone in a private room simply made it easier for them to carry on their Keystone Cops investigations. They didn’t seem to have gotten a clear idea of what the scanner saw, which could have been a penis pushed to one side. Who knows? A key part of security is to keep everyone ignorant of the process and of the criteria by which they work. Evidently this includes the TSA men themselves, who were running on fear and the mild thrill of lightly abusive police coercion.