Latest suggestion to cope with troubled TSA

The boycott was a bust but the latest effort to cope with new TSA rules is another alternative: Get the government out of the airline security business.
 

The planned Thanksgiving boycott to protest new TSA rules requiring body scanners obviously failed but opponents of the measures — as well as the new required pat-downs — are hardly giving up.
 

Some lawmakers are suggesting privatization. The same with opinion makers. And at least one more US airport says it is moving in that direction.
 

Federal law allows airports to opt for private-sector screeners.
 

Orlando Sanford International Airport has decided to get out of TSA screening. This facility should not, however, be confused with the much-larger Orlando International Airport. About 35 million passengers pass through that airport, while the smaller airport in an Orlando suburb only has about one million yearly passengers.
 

Larry Dale, director of the Stanford Airport Authority, told radio station WDBO:
 

“All of our due diligence shows it’s the way to go. You’re going to get better service at a better price and more accountability.”
 

“The push (to privatization) is being led by a powerful Florida congressman, who is a long-time critic of the TSA and counts among his campaign contributors some of the companies that might be an alternative,” says the AP.
 

He is Florida House of Representative John Mica who this month wrote letters to the nation’s 100 busiest airports asking that they request private security guards.
 

“I think we could use half the personnel and streamline the system,” Mica said, calling TSA a bloated bureaucracy.
 

A GOP lawmaker said this week that the full-body scanners now employed by the TSA violated the Fourth Amendment to the constitution, which protected against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
 

During a one-minute speech on the House floor, Rep Ted Poe (Texas) also blasted former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff as a “political hack” and accused him of profiting from the proliferation of the devices.
 

Poe said: ‘There is no evidence these new body scanners make us more secure. But there is evidence that former Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff made money hawking these full body scanners.’
 

Senator George LeMieux, who represents Florida, also objected:
 

“I’m frankly bothered by the level of these pat-downs. I wouldn’t want my wife to be touched in the way these folks are being touched. I wouldn’t want to be touched that way.”
 

A potential problem arises, however, because when an airport applies and is accepted into the private program, they receive the same screening from a private company instead of TSA officers. That’s the only difference.
 

But a spokesman at the Sanford airport said the move would give the airport greater oversight of security operations.
 

Government studies show that private screeners perform better than federal workers.
 

Seventeen airports in the US already use private screeners. Some newspaper columnists have been writing that more airports are starting to head in that direction.
 

TSA’s new security measures introduced at Thanksgiving raised various concerns not only about privacy but about health. There have been reports that radiation exposure from the full-body scanners at US airports could lead to increased risks of cancer. Scientists quoted recently have widely divergent opinions on the risks involved but the TSA’s refusal to validate its own tests on the subject have also raised concerns.
 

The technology works by bouncing X-ray beams off a person’s body to create a full image showing contours and any bumps or protrusions from potential weapons. But the TSA said the amount of radiation was just a thousandth of that received during a chest X-ray.
 

By David Wilkening