[Infowarrior] - Delayed by her bra, air passenger is indignant

[Richard Forno]

elayed by her bra, air passenger is indignant

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/25/BA2812HVK3.DTL&type=printable

(08-25) 16:51 PDT OAKLAND -- When Berkeley resident Nancy Kates  
arrived at Oakland International Airport to board JetBlue flight 472,  
she thought she was heading off on a routine journey to visit her  
mother in Boston. Instead she ended up in a standoff with  
Transportation Safety Administration officials over her bra.

In the post-Sept. 11 world of heightened airport scrutiny, Kates, like  
most travelers, is familiar with the drill: Take off shoes and belts,  
open the laptop, carry shampoo in 3-ounce bottles.

For Kates, on Sunday, though, the security check got too invasive. A  
big-busted woman wearing a large underwire bra, she set off the metal  
detector. She was pulled aside and checked by a female TSA agent with  
a metal-sensitive wand.

"The woman touched my breast. I said, 'You can't do that,' " Kates  
said. "She said, 'We have to pat you down.' I said, 'You can't treat  
me as a criminal for wearing a bra.' "

Kates asked to see a supervisor and then the supervisor's supervisor.  
He told her that underwire bras were the leading item that set off the  
metal detectors, Kates said.

If that's the case, Kates said, the equipment must be overly  
sensitive. And if the TSA is engaging in extra brassiere scrutiny,  
then other women are suffering similar humiliation, Kates thought.

The Constitution bars unreasonable searches and seizures, Kates  
reminded the TSA supervisor, and scrutinizing a woman's brassiere is  
surely unreasonable, she said.

The supervisor told her she had the choice of submitting to a pat-down  
in a private room or not flying. Kates offered a third alternative, to  
take off her bra and try again, which the TSA accepted.

"They tried to humiliate me and I was not going to be humiliated over  
this," Kates said. "If I was carrying nail clippers and forgot about  
them, I wouldn't have gotten so upset. But here I was just wearing my  
underwear."

So she went to the rest room, then through the security line a second  
time. Walking through the airport braless can be embarrassing for a  
large-chested woman, not to mention uncomfortable. The metal detector  
didn't beep on the second time through, but then officials decided to  
go through Kates' carry-on luggage, she said.

The whole undertaking took 40 minutes, Kates said, and caused her to  
miss her flight. JetBlue put her on another one, but she was four  
hours late getting to Boston.

"It's actually a little funny in a way, but a sad, sad commentary on  
the state of our country," Kates said. "This is bigger than just me.  
There are 150 million women in America, and this could happen to any  
of them."

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said Monday that he wasn't familiar with  
the incident. But he said in all circumstances, "we have to resolve an  
alarm."

That's the case for bras, artificial hips or anything with metal that  
sets off an alarm, he said. "Unfortunately, we can't take a  
passenger's word for it."

Melendez said he didn't have any statistics on how many times  
passengers are screened because of bras. But he said, "we do  
everything we can to ensure that a passenger doesn't feel humiliated."

Kates said she plans to talk to her family lawyer as well as the  
American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women  
and decide how to pursue the incident.

Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's  
technology and liberty program, said Monday of federal security  
officials: "They can't find bombs in checked luggage, and they're  
essentially doing a pat-down of private parts. This is a security  
apparatus that is out of control."

Kates said that although she flies about once a month, the only other  
time her bra has set off alarms in an airport was while she was being  
"wanded" in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. When she explained to the security  
agent that the wand was picking up the metal in her bra, she said,  
that was the end of the matter and she was allowed to go on her way.

Chronicle staff writer Henry K. Lee contributed to this report. E-mail  
Tyche Hendricks at thendricks at sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/26/BA2812HVK3.DTL