1. They make you wait while they get someone to do the work.
2. They offer to take you somewhere private (I declined).
3. They tell you the routine ("I'm gonna go up your leg until I feel resistance").
4. They wipe their gloves and put them in a chemical detector.
5. They let you go.
Only once did I have to get an extra exam where they detected some chemical on me and had to do that whole wipe down + chemical test process on my carry-on. It wasn't a big deal.
In 2017 I finally got TSA Precheck. So I've very rarely had to go through this since then (flying w/ non-Precheck friend, flying at non-Precheck airport).
EDIT: My experience is from US only. I missed that the parent's description was from the UK.
I have not tried to opt out of a pure-EU/UK scanner, so your point is still valid. I suspect Toronto may work the same way.
I _always_ opt out of backscatter machines. I’m British so I’ve flown Heathrow and Gatwick and Luton (etc), normally the process is painless. I wait a fair while longer than others, sitting/standing publicly as people pass me by and it feels awkward, but not enough to stop me.
I have never been denied boarding for my choice. But I make sure I have time to be harassed. Just in case.
The pat down is very humane, they tell you what they will do and they use the back of their hands a fair bit.
Then they brush the glove and put the cloth they brushed with in a scanner, then you’re free to go.
However, I’ve been to a couple of airports that have... aggressive.. security. Heathrow was one, they made me feel so small, as if I was causing trouble, implying I was hiding something.
Eventually I told them that I worked on the backscatter x-rays, and claimed that while they were safe for normal use, they were not safe for use with the added radiation of flying and that the world would be defaming it in a decade as, I said it was this generations asbestos.
They stopped pestering me then, since that incident it’s been my go-to response.
It’s not true as far as I know, but, it /is/ an added dose of radiation right before you get some more radiation, so it’s not exactly a complete fabrication.
Now they’re using millimetre wave scanners which are less radioactive, but have other considerations like the activation of moles on skin, or their relative ineffectiveness of finding handguns in underwear (as per TSA reporting) or 54% false positive rate (as per Germany’s report)
It's also a crapshoot - you may have an aggressive officer, or a friendly one. I've been patted down twice for absolutely no reason; not a second screening, the guy just went over me two times.
I keep wondering why we have chosen to sacrifice freedom for some small measure of security. More importantly, I don't really believe airport security stops much - it's security theater.
The only shitty part is when agents let your stuff go through the scanners but you’re stuck behind the machines. I’m always trying to crane my neck to make sure no one walks off with a laptop.
Usually the TSA agents are very nice. I ask them about their days, how things are, and then I’m on my way.
I like to exercise my rights just to make sure they keep being available, and there’s not much better to do inside the airport anyways.
Before our last trip, I read about the facial ID thing, and I was worried because my passport was expired (we were traveling domestic). Fortunately, it seems neither of the airports we went through were implementing it yet, so I'll have time to renew before it's a thing.
I just wish we can all come to our senses and realize that the TSA doesn't really make us safer and that it just makes everyone mad. Unfortunately, people just seem to put up with it.
Because people don't feel like they can make any real impact, and for those who can (our representatives), it's political suicide. The TSA is a giant waste of money but turning the front line of security back to airports would extremely easy to attack as weak on crime, inviting in terrorists, etc. (But who knows, maybe the sight of the TSA line makes terrorists give up in frustration because they're too busy to wait an hour or more just to hijack a plane.)
It was never about security, it was only ever about job creation. 9/11 was a convenient excuse to put lots of underqualified/underskilled people to work overnight.
For a politician to go against that now, they get doubly fucked on both the "made America less safe" and "got rid of thousands of jobs" fronts.
> Because people don't feel like they can make any real impact
I'd say this generalization applies to a lot of topics that we're having with democracy. That people don't feel that it's democratic. I think there's this weird feeling where most believe we're both in a democracy and autocracy (which may not be untrue, but the less we try to fix it with democracy the harder we'll leave to autocracy)
Indeed. What makes us safer are 2 things:
1. Secured cockpit doors 2. Passengers
Now, if someone tried doing something bad/unsafe/terrorist, everybody would jump them, and stop them from doing the thing. That's how shoe-guy was stopped. The passengers about killed him.
It used to be the chokepoint was departure. Now the TSA shoves a chokepoint to "terrorize" at the lines in front the scanners. And wherever you move the scanners creates yet another chokepoint. I'm surprised someone of ill intent hasn't done something at the lines of people.
But in the end, there's little we can do. Ideally our politicians should reconsider their roles, but thats 'reducing security yadda yadda', and political suicide.
The 2016 Brussels bombing did involve explosives in the check-in area of the airport.
When the machines first started being used there was some expose on them where pics from the machine were leaked, and you could clearly see that even people waiting in line within about 10 feet of the machine or so were scanned, and you can clearly see their bodies appear in the images, just as you can those who were in the machine itself.
Now, being scanned outside of the machine probably doesn't give them as good an image as outside of the machine, and they won't get an image of both sides of your body, but nevertheless your body will be covered to some extent with radiation from the machine.
I've always opted out of the machines at the airport, and they've always made me wait in a chair within 10 feet or so of the machine. So I know I'm getting some radiation dose from it, but really don't know what to do about it.
Hopefully, the cost of supporting this useless security theater will make it infeasible eventually.
The newer scanners use millimeter wave RF, which is non-ionizing and much safer. The primary concern with RF is classic thermal effects, which shouldn't be significant at low power levels.
There's still plenty of room for research on the topic, but no direct causal link to any health effects have been found with these systems at present.
(That said, the TSA agents are also standing next to the baggage x-ray machines all day. And I do still see backscatter x-ray body scanners in use in other countries.)
You need real legislation to fix this problem.