Underwear bomber is what brought about the spate of body scanners, since said underwear bomb would actually be visible in such. Apparently many countries in Europe are busy deploying them as we speak.
I think the UK is being most aggressive about such things. The Germans still seem to resort to randomly selected pat downs and swabbing for explosives. I seem to get randomly selectred quite often by the Germans. Anecdotally it appears that brown skin is a factor in profiling there. The guy who does the swabbing has a thick notebook in which he records the result of each swab test in handwriting at Berlin Tegel. It was fascinating to watch him work. It was like he was working on his lab report for someone, and I was one of the sample mouse. There were three others standing in line for the experiments to be run on them
Well, unfortunately the reports I'm seeing from Germany is that clerks are starting to repeatedly and conveniently forget that you can tell them to sod off with their scanners, and go through "Alternative screening" instead, particularly at FRA (which is my most frequent connection).I think the UK is being most aggressive about such things. The Germans still seem to resort to randomly selected pat downs and swabbing for explosives. I seem to get randomly selectred quite often by the Germans. Anecdotally it appears that brown skin is a factor in profiling there. The guy who does the swabbing has a thick notebook in which he records the result of each swab test in handwriting at Berlin Tegel. It was fascinating to watch him work. It was like he was working on his lab report for someone, and I was one of the sample mouse. There were three others standing in line for the experiments to be run on them
To be clear, are we talking about airports or train stations here?Well, unfortunately the reports I'm seeing from Germany is that clerks are starting to repeatedly and conveniently forget that you can tell them to sod off with their scanners, and go through "Alternative screening" instead, particularly at FRA (which is my most frequent connection).I think the UK is being most aggressive about such things. The Germans still seem to resort to randomly selected pat downs and swabbing for explosives. I seem to get randomly selectred quite often by the Germans. Anecdotally it appears that brown skin is a factor in profiling there. The guy who does the swabbing has a thick notebook in which he records the result of each swab test in handwriting at Berlin Tegel. It was fascinating to watch him work. It was like he was working on his lab report for someone, and I was one of the sample mouse. There were three others standing in line for the experiments to be run on them
Was in LHR in April and didn't seen any scanners in use, nor in ABZ last year. I purposely avoid AMS because of their notorious and gratuitous security setup... hopefully it'll be a while before ARN/OSL/BGO see these scanners, as that's where most of my travel is to.
Good point, we should stick to Amtrak and its security here.
