TSA Travel in 3 Bullet Points

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Here are three things I learned about the TSA over the Thanksgiving holiday.

• TSA may not tell you you’re being scanned. In my case, an agent simply motioned for me to walk between two black panels and told me to raise my arms “for a few seconds.” He had not done this to the two passengers before me, and he did not tell me raising my arms was for a backscatter scan. I asked if this was for a scanner, which he confirmed. I decided to opt-out due to conflicting information on radiation levels.

• During my “enhanced pat down,” I learned the TSA does use new blue gloves for every passenger. Hurray!

• The TSA agent frisking me obviously hated conducting the search as much as I hated receiving it. While grimacing and frowning, she didn’t go so far as to touch my vulva with her hand, but she did get to my upper thighs. I was wearing a miniskirt, t-shirt, and flip-flops and the agent was annoyed about the skirt because it altered the procedure somewhat. In my defense, it was 80 degrees and humid in the airport, and I was quite comfortable (aside from the strange woman stroking my bare legs) while the agent was sweating through her TSA standard-issue polyesters.

Overall the pat-down wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. It was a bit embarrassing, and it’s sort of amazing the agent was able to pat me down without revealing my “assets” to the rest of the passengers, since I was wearing a short skirt. I did think about getting scanned, but a pat-down only lasts a few minutes and radiation is forever. But as recent news reports show, many people did decide to go through the scanners over the Thanksgiving holiday… just not nearly as many as the TSA would have you believe.

The TSA reports how many people opt-out of scanners, and the total number of travelers. So at LAX, less than 1% of all travelers opted out of being scanned. But as my experience is an example of, not every traveler is asked to be scanned. Nate Silver points out that this makes the TSA’s data presentation problematic: “TSA’s data is not really worth very much without knowing how many passengers had the option of opting out—meaning, that they were asked to pass through full-body scanners than metal detectors.” I would additionally be interested to know how many passengers are even told they are going to be scanned, or informed they CAN opt-out. As I found out this weekend, just because you do have a right to opt-out doesn’t mean your local TSA agent will tell you about it.

 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate