WASHINGTON — As the busiest travel week of the year kicks off in the United States, American outrage about new airport security measures is reaching such a fever pitch that even President Barack Obama has asked authorities to consider less invasive screening methods.
The latest tale of a passenger degraded by airport security emerged this weekend when a bladder cancer survivor told how he was recently left humiliated, weeping and drenched in his own urine when officials in Detroit inadvertently broke the seal of his urostomy bag during a pat-down.
“I am a good American and I want safety for all passengers as much as the next person,” Thomas Sawyer, a 61-year-old special education teacher in Lansing, Mich., told MSNBC.com of his pat-down ordeal after a full-body scan revealing the urostomy bag alarmed security officials.
“But if this country is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.”
Across the country, similar stories are making headlines.
Parents have complained about having to choose between exposing their children to body-scanning radiation or to subject them to being frisked.Rape victims have reported feeling traumatized by both the scans and the patdowns.
And a North Carolina flight attendant called it “horrific” when a TSA official ordered her to remove her prosthetic breast during a pat-down.
Civil libertarians argue that both body-scanning and pat-downs violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures.
John Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, said Sunday he understood why Americans find the extensive pat-downs and new full-body scanners — called “naked scanners” by critics — an invasion of privacy.
But he reiterated his stance of the last several weeks: authorities must stay one step ahead of terrorists, whose schemes continue to involve jetliners. Pistole has said body-scanners would have caught the would-be Christmas Day underwear bomber last year had he boarded a flight in the United States instead of Amsterdam.
Under the new rules, any passenger refusing to go through a body scan must submit to a pat-down. Pat-downs can be enforced if body scans raise concerns among the TSA officials who pore over the images.
Both procedures are here to stay because TSA screeners are “the last line of defence in protecting air travellers,” Pistole said on CNN’s State of the Union.
A day earlier, Obama said he asked TSA officials to explore whether there’s a less intrusive method of screening airline passengers.
Obama said he had told the agency that “you have to constantly refine and measure whether what we’re doing is the only way to assure the American people’s safety.”
Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she doesn’t relish the idea of a pat-down.
When asked Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press if she’d submit to one, Clinton replied: “Not if I could avoid it. No. I mean, who would?”
One Internet grassroots group is encouraging travellers to refuse body scans on Wednesday, the day before American Thanksgiving, a massive holiday in the United States that sees an estimated 24 million Americans descend upon the nation’s airports to fly home to loved ones.
Instead, the organizers of “National Opt-Out Day” are urging travellers to insist upon a more time-consuming pat-down as an act of protest. That would slow down security lines and cause major headaches for airlines and security officials.
The Facebook page for the protest states: “The goal of National Opt Out Day is to force change on the TSA and get the travel industry working for us. Opting out will overwhelm the TSA rent-a-gropers and force the roll back of both the porno scanners and the enhanced groping.”
Steven Horwitz, a transportation economist at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., said civil disobedience is likely the only public reaction that could prompt the TSA to rethink its policies.
“It’s about the only way to get the message across, either that or not to fly at all. The only way to deal with it is low-level civil disobedience, and then the airlines will start to feel the pressure, and they’ll complain. And then maybe something will change.”
Horwitz has another damning argument: the TSA’s new rules are likely to cause more people to drive than fly, something that could lead to more car-related deaths this Thanksgiving.
“Driving is much more dangerous than flying since you’re far more likely to be killed in an automobile accident than you are in an airplane,” said Horwitz. “The most dangerous part of air travel is driving to the airport, and they’re basically encouraging people to drive.”
He’s heading home to the Midwest this week and will insist upon a pat-down.
“I have my own little strategy prepared,” he said. “I’ll take the pat-down just because I’m curious, but I will say something. I have my little pocket Constitution, I will make it clear that these procedures are a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and I’ll demand they do it in public where everyone can see.”