The TSA should make its mind. First its agents get all wee-weed up when a passenger refuses to cooperate. Then when a passenger capitulates to their demands to search his person, they want to slap a fine on him.
Some clothes, too. At least that was the case with passenger John Brennan of Portland, Ore., who was stopped at a security checkpoint last year at Portland International Airport.
TSA personnel informed him they had found traces of nitrates on his clothing. So to prove he wasn’t carrying nitrate-based explosives, Brennan stripped down to his birthday suit.
Agents were not amused. Station KOMO offers up newly released video that shows screeners scrambling to build a wall of containers around the naked man. Brennan eventually beat local charges of indecent exposure, but the feds aren’t finished with him. He was fined $1,000 by the TSA for disrupting the screening process and faces a federal hearing on May 14.
For those unaware that the TSA is authorized to levy fines, KOMO notes that a subsection of Title 49 of the Code of Federal Regulations reads: “No person may interfere with, assault, threaten, or intimidate screening personnel in the performance of their screening duties.”
Brennan maintains that he did none of the above, telling reporters, “I was very cooperative. I was aware that I wasn’t breaking the law, and was waiting for TSA to finish their screening when I was arrested.”
Brennan has already made it clear that if the fine is upheld, he intends to appeal the decision in federal court:
That’ll open the door for review of the constitutionality of the level of search and inspection that the TSA is doing. That we’ll have more effective procedures that aren’t so invasive.
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