Boycott could mean havoc for holiday air travelers

Just a small percentage of passengers who take up a proposed boycott of full-body scanners on the day before Thanksgiving (tomorrow) could mean maddening delays and painstakingly long lines, according to industry experts.
 

“Just one or two recalcitrant passengers at an airport is all it takes to cause huge delays," said Paul Ruden, a spokesman for the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA). "It doesn’t take much to mess things up anyway."
 

The national Opt-Out Day is set for Wednesday, which the AP says is the busiest travel day of the year.
 

Body scans take as little time as 10 seconds. People who refuse, however, have to submit to a full body pat-down — which takes much longer.
 

The protest was conceived in early November by Brian Sodergren of Ashburn, Va., who built a one-page website urging people to decline the scans, according to the AP.
 

"If I was an airport guy, a screener, a traveler — I’d be concerned about the boycott,” said security expert Garry Berry.
 

Not all airports have the machines, but Berry estimated that up to one-fifth of passengers will be asked to go through the refrigerator-sized machines where they are available.
 

Public interest in the protest accelerated after California resident John Tyner resisted a scan and groin check at the San Diego airport with the words, "If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested."
 

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has a new pat-down procedure that includes a security worker running a hand up the inside of passengers’ legs and along the cheek of the buttocks, as well as making direct contact with the groin area.
 

Pat-downs often take up to four minutes, according to the TSA’s Web site. They could be longer, however, if passenger questions are raised.
 

The AP estimated it would take about 15 minutes to put 100 people through a body scan but at least six hours to pat down the same number of travelers.
 

Wrote Bill Richardson, a former law enforcement official:
 

“The American people have been more than tolerant of the TSA’s intrusions in the name of airline security, but the agency may have finally tipped the balance between in-flight protections and violating the protections we have under the Constitution. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to have a guy in an airport tell me to ‘bend over and spread em’ in order to fly to New York City to visit my son.”
 

The AP also raised the question of how did an agency created to protect the public become the target of so much public scorn?
 

“After nine years of funneling travelers into ever longer lines with orders to have shoes off, sippy cups empty and laptops out for inspection, the most surprising thing about increasingly heated frustration with the federal Transportation Security Administration may be that it took so long to boil over,” it said.
 

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not subjected to security pat-downs when she travels, said she wouldn’t want to go through such scrutiny.
 

"Not if I could avoid it. No. I mean, who would?" Clinton told CBS’ "Face the Nation" in an interview.
In episode after episode since the TSA was founded, they have demonstrated a knack for ignoring the basics of customer relations, while struggling with what experts say is an all but impossible task.
 

The TSA "is not a flier-centered system. It’s a terrorist-centered system and the travelers get caught in it," said Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University who has tracked the agency performance.
 

Even some Washington lawmakers say the TSA has gone too far. Florida’s John Mica, a longtime critic, is urging the state airports to ditch TSA entirely and opt for screeners from the private sector instead.

By David Wilkening