[Scan-DC] American airport staff admits racial profiling

[Alan Henney]

Interesting comments about the TSA radio channel.  Has anybody been able to hear TSA still?  Last I tried, it had gone encrypted.


The Sunday Guardian (India)

February 8, 2014 Saturday

American airport staff admits racial profiling

LENGTH: 613 words

DATELINE: London 

London, Feb. 8 -- Millions of passengers have long suspected it. Now their suspicions have been confirmed. US airport security staff routinely stare, and smirk, at images of naked passengers on full body scanners. The Daily Telegraph reports that John Harrington, a former US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer from 2007 to 2013, alleges that until 2010 passengers were targeted on the basis of their nationality. 

Writing on the website Politico, Harrington said: "The (full-body scanners) were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Women who'd had mastectomies were easy to discern - their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixellated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area." Sometimes, a security offer would "identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels." TSA staff developed a special vocabulary: "Alfalfa" means an attractive female passenger while "retaliatory wait time" is what happens "when a TSA officer doesn't like your attitude. There are all sorts of ways a TSA officer can subtly make you wait longer to get through security - the punitive possibilities are endless, and there are many tricks in the screener's bag."

But Harrington claims most TSA officers "felt the agency's day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust," saying "it was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show." On one occasion, Harrington "had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group - a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security."

Harrington admitted that until 2010 "All TSA officers worked with a secret ... Selectee Passport list" consisting of 12 countries "that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening." Harrington memorised the list "like a little poem": Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Cuba, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and North Korea. Passengers from these nations "were automatically pulled aside for full-body pat-downs and had their luggage examined with a fine-toothed comb." The list is striking for the countries it omits; the list "was purely political, of course, with diplomacy playing its role as always. There was no Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a list of states historically known to harbour, aid and abet terrorists." It was mainly Middle Easterners who faced "special screening" because most TSA staff "didn't know Algeria from a medical condition." He added, "Each day I had to look into the eyes of passengers in niqabs and thawbs undergoing full-body pat-downs, having been guilty of nothing besides holding passports from the wrong nations."

But do full body scanners, which cost "about $150,000 a pop" work? This was the question one TSA officer asked their instructor. The instructor shrugged. "They're ****," he replied.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from The Sunday Guardian. For any query with respect to this article or any other content requirement, please contact Editor at htsyndication at hindustantimes.com