About ten years ago I was in the security line behind a high school women’s soccer team. I noticed that as they approached the scanner there were more and more TSA agents clustered around the monitor. By the time they entered the body scanner there were a dozen agents watching intently. There were multiple passes for some of the girls, but nothing requiring additional wanding or a physical search.
I’m sure that the (male) TSA agents were only concerned with the safety of the highly-athletic teenage girls.
Those are the old ones that were phased out. They use millimeter scanners now instead and the software conceals the specific details of the person’s body.
That's good for the present, feel a bit weird about the past though, and leaves me wondering what kinds of records are kept and able to be gone over in more detail in the future
It was certainly a big deal at the time. People were refusing to go through them and boycotting flying. I suspect public outrage is part of the reason TSA rolled them back.
At Denver International Airport the TSA agents were found to be not only doing this but deliberately entering teenage girls’ details as male so it’d flag an anomaly in the groin area and entitle them to repeated pat downs.
That doesn’t explain why the number of TSA agents clustered around the monitors increased from four to twelve just before the fit teenage girls went through the body scanner and all dispersed as soon as they were through.
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u/LocalInactivist 29d ago
About ten years ago I was in the security line behind a high school women’s soccer team. I noticed that as they approached the scanner there were more and more TSA agents clustered around the monitor. By the time they entered the body scanner there were a dozen agents watching intently. There were multiple passes for some of the girls, but nothing requiring additional wanding or a physical search.
I’m sure that the (male) TSA agents were only concerned with the safety of the highly-athletic teenage girls.