Free Republic

Introducing the American Traveler Dignity Act Mr. Speaker, today I introduce legislation to protect Americans from physical and emotional abuse by federal Transportation Security Administration employees conducting screenings at the nation’s airports. We have seen the videos of terrified children being grabbed and probed by airport screeners. We have read the stories of Americans being subjected to humiliating body imaging machines and/or forced to have the most intimate parts of their bodies poked and fondled. We do not know the potentially harmful effects of the radiation emitted by the new millimeter wave machines. In one recent well-publicized case, a TSA...

If you have gone through airport security at O'Hare, Midway or any other major airport recently, then you know that there is new screening equipment in place and procedures to search travelers. Thousands of pilots who fly jetliners are angry about those changes. There are two issues; two major pilots' unions say the full-body scanners are untested and potentially unsafe because of the radiation they expose travelers to. And the second issue is the new procedure for hand searches by Transportation Security Administration officers at airport checkpoints. Both have produced scathing memos about the TSA from the pilots' unions.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Machines to screen airline passengers can store and transmit images, making them open to possible abuse, a U.S. group critical of full-body scanning says. The federal Transportation Security Administration currently has about 40 body-scanning machines in operation at 19 U.S airports and wants to add 150 more this year and 300 in 2011, CNN reports. TSA says the scanners are not networked and that each machine works independently without the ability to store or send graphic images of human anatomy.