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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

It sucks, but you really have very few alternatives, only 1 of which will actually get you onto the plane so you can get to where you're going and most of which will ensure you'll never get on a plane again.

The procedures may be stupid, but people do weight the options and can be surprisingly rational given that set of choices.

Given a choice of "get scanned and get on the plane" or "instigate an armed overthrow of the TSA checkpoint" I'm probably going to go with getting on the plane myself.

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I opt out of the nude scanners every time I fly. I've never had an exceptionally unpleasant experience with the nut-gropers, but I'm a young, white, male so your experience may vary.

I have a dream of everyone opting out, overloading the system and requiring a fundamental change. But I'm always the only person doing it.

At a previous job I traveled a few times a month. I opt-ed out each time or found a line with only a metal detector. After the new pat-down rules were released, I opt-ed out, got the new pat-down and realized that the pat-down was far more abusive and uncomfortable for me than the scanner. I now use the scanner.

Of course, the new pat-down rules were specifically designed to make the experience bad enough that people wouldn't opt-out anymore.

I used to opt for the grope (also never had a particularly bad experience), but kind of threw in the towel after the airports switched from backscatter to millimeter wave.

I've opted out over 50 times (and I try to help collect data about screening methods on FlyerTalk, though I keep thinking this needs to be organized better -- there are so many people collecting it in separate places, including different FlyerTalk threads and different web sites). I think it's interesting that the attitudes of screeners, as well as the thoroughness of their pat-downs, has varied so much. (Some of them have tried to talk me out of opting out, others have been very matter-of-fact, others have fairly vocally criticized the body scanners or TSA itself.)

Three times there was another person opting out within my sight and at least twice I got to talk to a fellow opt-outer (opter-out?). As I recall, their concerns were always more health-related than privacy-related, unlike mine, so I had a bit less common ground with them than I first expected to.

On two consecutive flights (more than a week apart and from different airports) I alarmed the ETD and got detained and subjected to multiple pat-downs and a hand-search of my luggage. I still haven't figured out what caused it, but I put my shoes and backpack through the laundry and it's never happened again. One hypothesis is that I might have gotten a drop of plant food on my shoe, which has made me much more paranoid about touching fertilizers.

You can always opt out. You'll get a pat-down instead and they'll make you wait 5-10 minutes, but I always do that unless I'm running very late. If enough people do, they usually get fed up and open the metal detectors.

Back when they had the backscatter x-ray machines at Sea-Tac, there always seemed to be one lane where the metal-detector was being used instead.

Don't know if this was a coincidence (I don't fly that often), or if they hoped that trouble-makers would chose that lane, and save them from having to do too many pat-downs...

You can research this a bit on FlyerTalk -- the term favored by body-scanner critics for this situation is "SDOO" (self-directed opt-out, when passengers have a choice of screening methods based on which line or checkpoint they choose). SDOO opportunities appear to be getting rarer in the U.S. over time.

TSA is also giving people an incentive to sign up for TSA Pre because (at airports that support it) the Pre line is always metal-detector-only. Right now they are "testing" Pre and randomly directing large numbers of passengers through the Pre line, but the theory is that it will be available only, or mainly, by subscription in the future, which includes some kind of background check. I'm not very comfortable signing up for one kind of government information collection to avoid a different kind, but people who don't like the scanners and don't have that objection might be interested in signing up for Pre.

There is the third option of "comply so that I can get onthe plane, but vigorously campaign (or at least write a single letter to my elected representative) to change the policy".

>It is disappointing just how compliant people are with the stupid procedure

Well sure, but this above statement makes me think you want to see people do a more immediate demonstration against the system.

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