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Airline passengers are likely to become a lot better acquainted with the Transportation Safety Administration, though maybe not in ways they will like: The TSA has announced a new policy that requires its employees to give a more “comprehensive” pat-down to passengers it detains for security screenings.
In the past, TSA employees had some leeway in what type of physical search they used on a passenger.
(WATCH: A glimpse at the new TSA pat-down procedures. Courtesy of RTV6 The Indy Channel and YouTube)
The new policy eliminates that leeway and instructs agents to do a thorough, full-body pat-down on every passenger they pull aside, which may involve agents making contact with passengers’ private areas.
“I would say people who in the past would have gotten a pat-down that wasn’t involved will notice that the [new] pat-down is more involved,” TSA spokesman Bruce Anderson told Bloomberg News on Friday.
Even airline employees, who normally breeze through security as “known crewmembers,” will face more random checks, according to the new directive.
(In the wake of a scathing report on security lapses, the TSA is implementing what they call a “universal procedure” that aims to make secondary checks more “uniform”. Courtesy of NBC News and YouTube)
The change is the result of the fact that TSA agents found a record number of firearms during routine screenings during the week of Feb. 20: 79, more than four times the previous one-week record of 18.
Anderson said the new searches will not slow down security lines overall, although they will definitely slow down passengers who are pulled aside.
The TSA screens roughly 2 million passengers a day in U.S. airports. There are no figures on how many are pulled aside for closer scrutiny.
The traveling public greeted news of the policy with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, judging from the posts trending Monday morning on Twitter.
Travel writer and frequent flier Joel Stratte-McClure, who called the new policy “groin scrutiny,” posted an account of his own experience at the airport in Redding, Calif., when he left for Egypt late last week.
Stratte-McClure said TSA agents told the waiting passengers: “You’re not going to like the new pat-down regulations. We don’t like it either.”
Original post http://travel.aarp.org/articles-tips/articles/info-2017/tsa-new-security-pat-down-fd.html
