FSTargetDrone wrote:A few things from the OP I am unclear on:
On its Web site, the TSA warns that passengers "may be additionally screened because of hidden items such as body piercings, which alarmed the metal detector."
"If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search," the site says.
...
TSA spokesman Dwayne Baird said he was unaware of the incident. There is no specific TSA policy on dealing with body piercings, he said, "as long as it doesn't sound the alarms."
If an alarm does sound, "until that is resolved, we're not going to let them go through the checkpoint, no matter what they're wearing or where they're wearing it."
So what is the justification for asking anyone to
remove any body jewelry, especially when it's obvious that it
cannot easily be removed in the first place? Is it simply an issue of metal=bad? Is it not enough for a visual inspection to see that the nipple rings are
probably not lethal weapons? I don't know, Maybe these genius security types were concerned the piercings were attached to explosives hidden in her breasts?
Seriously though, if it isn't an issue of the piercing somehow being
dangerous, well, why else does it need more than a cursory inspection?
I mean, if it's a question of the piercing somehow being a danger to passengers or the flight crew, well, they better not allow people to carry magazines on board. Someone might pull an Ash and attempt to kill a seat mate with a tightly rolled-up periodical.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I get the feeling that this is a classic case of a bureaucratic entity executing process for the sake of the process, instead of whatever the process was designed to attempt to prevent or remedy. When the policy was written, they probably had this image that if a given piercing was big enough to set off the detectors, it might be useful as a weapon . . . but they would leave it to the agents on the ground to make the final determination.
Except there's always a tendency to take a perfectly useful policy or process and make following the letter of it more important than the spirit. (After all, if we let those non-management snots have too much freedom, they might make a call that'll get his or her management in deep shit. Not to mention, there are those dreadfully pedantic people with zero capacity for independent critical thinking who will do precisely what the rules and regs say to do and treat it as gospel.) Instead of leaving things in the hands of local agents, those higher up will instead say "Thou Shalt Do This, Because it is
Policy." followed by a "If Thou Do Not, Then Thou Shalt Verily Be
Fired!"
So it eventually stops being a matter of protecting people from people with weapons getting onto airplanes, and more a matter of not doing anything to violate the letter of the regs. So by God, if the regs say remove it if it sets off the detectors, we'll make them remove it, no matter how obviously inoffensive it is because we'll get into deep shit if we don't.
As an example of how pervasive this sort of thinking is: Where I work, they originally had a policy for corporate-owned laptops to have antivirus and encryption installed. Originally, the aim was to protect company data, and the employees from harm from malware, and the penalties for slipping up were appropriate to this aim. And then it mutated into this jackbooted mandate of "You will do this because we told you to, or we will fire you." In some cases it's become a positive pain in the ass, because on some machines you either can't install the latest antivirus and encryption either because the machine is supposed to be used for testing and you want the software environment to be as clean as possible, or it's equipment on-loan from customers or contractors, or the equipment is simply too outdated, but has to be kept out of contractual obligations.
