Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie had to experience the new stricter TSA security rules yesterday at Los Angeles International Airport as she headed to board a flight to New York
Being a celebrity gets you a lot of free stuff and extra privileges – but not when going through airport security.
Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie had to experience the new stricter TSA security rules yesterday at Los Angeles International Airport as she headed to board a flight to New York.
The 35-year-old star had to de-layer and go through the new full body scanners just like everybody else.
The singer was spotted putting her bags through the hand-luggage scanner before taking off her many layers of scarves and other accessories so she could step into the scanner.
She was watched by a bodyguard and accompanied by several friends as she boarded the flight bound for JFK airport in New York
NewsOK | Tammy Banovac, clad in undergarments and sitting in a wheelchair, failed to pass the Transportation Security Administration screening process Tuesday.
ROBERT MEDLEY
NewsOK
December 1, 2010
A woman who missed her flight at Will Rogers World Airport Tuesday when she showed up in a wheelchair, bra and panties, passed through the airport screening process this morning and has left the city.
Tammy Banovac, clad in undergarments and sitting in a wheelchair, failed to pass the Transportation Security Administration screening process Tuesday when security officers detected traces of nitrates on her wheelchair.
Tuesday night Banovac said she chose to wear her underwear because of an unpleasant experience two weeks ago at airport security. She is typically hand-searched at airports because she uses a wheelchair, she said, and she felt violated by the more invasive searches employed at airports recently.
“If it happened anywhere else, it would have been sexual assault.”
Banovac said she was trying to board a flight to Phoenix on Tuesday when she was pulled aside at security for a more thorough search.
She said TSA employees told her equipment detected traces of nitrates, which are used in bombs, on her clothing and luggage. She said a TSA supervisor told her to leave the airport and “come back tomorrow” after more than an hour of hand searches and questioning.
An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.
Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Dec 1, 2010
An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.
Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA’s recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a “game” is potentially putting children in danger. Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is “one of the most common ways” that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.
Children “don’t have the sophistication” to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator, he said.
The TSA policy could “desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children,” Wooden added
Following an outcry last month over the use on children of "enhanced pat-downs" -- which involve the touching of genitals -- the TSA announced a new "modified" pat-down for children under 12. However, as the LA Times noted, the new rules are "unclear" on whether TSA agents can touch children's genitals.
Addressing the controversy over pat-downs of children last month, TSA regional security director James Marchand told the press the TSA was working on new practices to make children more comfortable during the pat-down process.
"You try to make it as best you can for that child to come through. If you can come up with some kind of a game to play with a child, it makes it a lot easier," said Marchand, promising to make it part of TSA training.
Wooden, who has testified before Congress on child safety issues on numerous occasions, says he was told by a TSA agent that the practice has been used.
"How can experts working at the TSA be so incredibly misinformed and misguided to suggest that full body pat downs for children be portrayed as a game?" Wooden asked in an email. "To do so is completely contrary to what we in the sexual abuse prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past thirty years."
He added: "This policy is also incredibly insensitive to the countless victims who have already been traumatized by unwanted touching in their lives and could be re-traumatized by such pat-downs."
On Tuesday, TSA administrator John Pistole said the agency may change its screening rules for victims of sex abuse. He also said the TSA had no plans to continue expanding the airport screening process.
"I think we are at the most thorough that we will probably be in terms of our physical screening," he announced.
A civil liberties watchdog group has filed a Freedom of Information Act request in an attempt to shed more light on the TSA’s efforts to disrupt a day of protest aimed at full body scanners and invasive pat-downs by largely curtailing their use for one day only last week.
In response to the national outcry surrounding invasive pat down measures, the TSA has been forced to refine its airport security procedures, but has simultaneously entrenched its policy that requires government permission for all Americans who wish to fly, creating what critics have labeled a Communist-style system of internal checkpoints.