Full body scan? Thank God, we missed it

While frustration is growing among many Americans over tight scrutiny involving full-body scans at a number of airports, some Indonesians who recently flew to the United States escaped such measures.

It may have taken a while for the Transportation Security Administration, which is responsible for transportation security, to trigger public furor since it began deploying advanced imaging technology in 2007.

In March 2010, the agency deployed 450 advanced imaging technology units, according to its official website www.tsa.gov.

This latest advanced technology comes in the form of a full-body scanner that produces a virtually naked image.

“I returned to the US [to San Francisco] from Indonesia in August. But I’ve never been through that [device],” fresh US graduate Mutia Intani Terian told The Jakarta Post Monday.

“If I had to do it, I’d do it... I’d pretend it was an ordinary X-ray machine. But If I could choose, I’d rather not go through it,” she said, adding that such a measure violated one’s privacy.

Ariyanto Heru Leksono, 34, who flew from Indonesia to Los Angeles and returned to Indonesia via San Francisco airport, said he did not go through a full-body scanner in either airport.

“I had no experience of being scanned by a full-body scanner. It was just ordinary scanning, like the procedures we have here,” he told the Post. In Indonesia, travelers are required to pass through a security gate and perhaps undergo scanning by a hand-held detection device.

Private employee Ariyanto went to the States between Oct. 30 and Nov. 6 for a work assignment, he said.

Indonesian journalist Nograhany Widhi said she went to Washington and Atlanta in March as part of the World Health Organization’s entourage, and to New York in September as part of Indonesian Vice President Boediono’s entourage.

But she said she did not have a full-body scan during her trips. She currently stays in San Francisco.

Businessman Chris Kanter said he flew to New York and Washington recently but was not subjected to such security measures either.

Body scans take as little as 10 seconds, but people who decline the process must submit to a full pat-down, which takes much longer, Associated Press reported.

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, it reported.

Public interest in the protest boomed last week after a California man named John Tyner famously resisted a scan and groin check at the San Diego airport with the words, “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” A cell phone video of the incident went viral, it reported.

It helped ignite a campaign urging people to refuse such searches on Nov. 24, which immediately precedes Thanksgiving and is one of the year’s busiest travel days, it reported.

President Barack Obama says he has pushed the TSA to make sure it always reviews screening processes with actual people in mind. “You have to constantly refine and measure whether what we’re doing is the only way to assure the American people’s safety,” Obama was quoted as saying by Associated Press.