My experience, is that sometimes you get patted down and sometimes you don’t. When you don’t get patted down, you just walk through the metal scanner. When you do, they use the back of the hand and explain everything thy are going to do. I’ve never been groped or see anyone get groped. None of the TSA people look like they enjoy their jobs, much less that they are getting thrills from it. I travel about 12-15 times a year, domestic and intrntnl.
If one opts put of the full body scan, one is subject to a pat down that is far more rigorous than the one you have described.
I can do pat downs. I am trained in it,and there are various levels, dependng on the persons qualities you are searchng. An inmate of a prison who knows how to secret things about his body is treated much differently than say person who is arrested for DUI. The current pat down is quite rigorous, and the areas behind the scrotum are pressed for hard objects, along with the butt crack being pressed or fingered.
Now this rigorous search can be down quickly and innocuously if done professionally, but it seems the TSA staff are not trained well and they are clumsy.
Also you can imagine whether discretion would be exercised to pat down a woman in a burqua with her husband present? That violates every tenet of an orthodox Muslim faith and its culture. It is unlikely given the discretionary nature of such TSA classifications, and this needs clarification.
I have no objection to a rigorous pat down, but I do have a problem with it if it is not applied across the board to all racial and ethnic groups.If there is a functional exemption for Muslims, then I protest vigorously.It would fly in the face of the defined “security concerns” of Homeland Security and the TSA.
Frequent traveler? Some of us have to fly a lot more than once a month and it is getting totally insane. They haven’t used the back of the hand type search for a while, there are two different types of xray machines and the pat downs are invasive.