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TSA’s Forced Indignities Don’t Make Us Safer: Jeffrey Goldberg
Illustration by Victor Kerlow
On June 24, Noibi boarded a Los Angeles-bound Virgin America flight at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, FBI officials said, by using someone else’s boarding pass. Days later, he unsuccessfully attempted to board a Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Atlanta using a boarding pass for a flight that departed the day before, also in someone else’s name. When police searched Noibi’s bag, they discovered 10 other boarding passes, none of which bore his name.
Reppert was traveling with an authentic boarding pass, but she almost missed her flight from Florida to Michigan last month because Transportation Security Administration officials decided they couldn’t clear her through security. The reason? A suspicious anomaly in her adult diaper, which was discovered during a pat-down.
Reppert, who was traveling home to die in the company of her family, uses a wheelchair and could not pass through either an X-ray machine or the full-body scanner — one of the very expensive machines now installed in many airports that can peer through your clothing and take pictures of your genitals.
Because the TSA could not reassure itself about the nature of the alarming anomaly, Reppert’s daughter wheeled her mother (her dying mother, let me repeat) to a bathroom, where, in the interest of securing the American homeland, she removed the diaper. Reppert was patted down again, and then allowed to pass through security. She flew home without the protection of a diaper, or the benefit of underwear.
