CHICAGO, USA - Travellers dismayed by airport body scans headed to airports on Wednesday with the makings of any good protest: handmade fliers, eye-catching placards, slogan-bearing T-shirts and Scottish kilts.The loosely organised effort dubbed National Opt-Out Day hopes to highlight what some call unnecessarily intrusive security screenings. Others fear it will merely snarl pre-Thanksgiving airline operations on the busiest travel day of the year.
The 43-year-old Robert Shofkom from Georgetown, Texas, said he planned for weeks to wear a traditional kilt — without underwear — to display his outrage over body scanners and aggressive pat-downs while catching his flight out of Austin on Wednesday.- "If you give them an inch, they won't just take an inch. Pretty soon you're getting scanned to get into a football game," the IT specialist said.
- Shofkom was momentarily disheartened when his wife informed him on Tuesday that the Austin airport doesn't yet have body scans. But he decided to wear the kilt anyway, a show of solidarity with fellow protesters who have taken to Facebook and other websites to tout plans for similarly revealing travel outfits.
One internet-based protest group called We Won't Fly said hundreds of activists planned to go to 27 US airports on Wednesday to pass out fliers with messages such as "You have the right to say, ‘No radiation strip search! No groping of genitals!' Say, ‘I opt out.'"- "If 99 per cent of people normally agree to go through scanners, we hope that falls to 95 per cent," said one organiser, George Donnelly, 39. "That would make it a success."
- If enough people opt for a pat-down rather than a body scan, security-line delays could quickly cascade.
More than 40 million people plan to travel over the Thanksgiving holiday, according to AAA, with just more than 1.6 million flying — a 3.5 per cent increase in fliers from last year. Body scans for passengers chosen at random take as little as 10 seconds.New pat-down procedures, which involve a security worker touching travellers' crotch and chest areas, can take four minutes or longer.
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