Law Life: TSA body scan or pat-down? Yes, please

By Diana Smith
The Daily Record Newswire

Of my immediate circle of friends, I was the only person who flew to see family over Thanksgiving.

Being a frugal flyer, we left Raleigh on Thanksgiving Day. And during my layover in Houston, I happily responded to all of the text messages that people sent wishing me a happy Turkey Day. (I also felt immensely popular, which made up for the fact that my husband dragged me out of bed at 3:30 a.m. to catch the first flight of the day.)

But of all of the warm wishes, my favorites came from the people who know my sense of humor best: “So, did you get the erotic pat-down?”

“No,” I replied regretfully. “Guess I’m not hot enough.”

Seriously, that’s the attitude I’ve adopted about the Transportation Safety Administration’s new airport body scanners and search procedures. This whole hullabaloo about whether the TSA is violating my civil rights by giving me a pat-down is, frankly, a bunch of hooey.

Hundreds of thousands of people walk through security at airports every day, particularly during the holiday season.

You wait in lines behind tons of folks, all of whom stand just a little too close and take forever to untie their shoelaces and plop their Nikes into those dreary gray tubs before sending them through the X-ray scanner. By this time, you’re also hot and even starting to sweat despite the fact that it’s 20 degrees outside and you spent 30 minutes waiting for the bus to pick you up at the park-and-ride.

Not to worry there, though, because you have to take off your coat and put that in the dreary gray tub as well.

So there you are — barefoot, coatless, laptop-less, lacking purse or wallet. You are, for all intents and purposes, functionally naked.

By the time you’ve exerted all of the effort necessary to strip most aspects of your daily self away, does it really matter if you have to walk through a little machine that might display your (ahem) assets a little more clearly?

Or are you worried that they’re deficits?

I curiously watched a couple of folks get the pat-down while I scurried along past the TSA people.

Yeah, the agents’ hands get a little farther “up there” and “under there” than they have in the past. (I can attest to this fact personally — for some reason, whenever I flew the now-defunct Independence Air, my ticket was marked with an “S” that flagged me for a security screening. Every. Single. Time.)
Back to the pat-downs I observed.

Yes, they’re more intimate. But nothing I saw even approximated what I would call a violation of someone’s civil rights.

So when I read that a North Carolina lawyer filed a lawsuit earlier this month saying the new TSA procedures violated his and his family’s Fourth Amendment rights, all I could say was, ‘Oh, for the love of Pete.”

How many court challenges will now come from indignant people who feel the junk in their trunk is so sacred that it shouldn’t be grazed over in the name of travelers’ safety?

If I were about to board a plane with a child (as were the attorney and other person named in the suit), I’d much rather get groped than worry about having to make sure my oxygen mask is securely fastened before helping my child get his or her mask on during a crisis 36,000 feet in the air.

Don’t get me wrong. If a security officer ever has to feel me up, I’ll cringe and feel the hot flush creep from my neck to my cheeks. I completely, totally 100 percent get that it’s embarrassing, particularly as a woman.

I had the same reaction years ago when a doctor told me I had “birthing hips.”

But to me, it stands to reason going through the scanner (which is impersonal, and is said to show the “contours” of the body) would be much preferable and more anonymous than refusing and thus forcing agents to do their jobs and proceed with the manual search.

You’re talking about a couple of agents viewing those “contours” rather than an entire mass of people going through security who, like me, were curious and ogling to see the new safety procedures in action.

That’s not to mention that the chance of physical violations of the policy by agents, which no doubt is possible, would be vastly lessened by just stepping through those scanners.

Plus, it’s the holidays. Let’s not be Grinches.