Yesterday we brought you the story of the ExpressJet pilot who refused to go through a full-body scanner or submit to a pat-down at Memphis International Airport. Now the TSA is saying that the pilot’s characterization of the pat-down isn’t accurate.

In an interview after the incident, the pilot had said that to call the hands-on procedure a pat-down is “misleading… They concentrate on the area between the upper thighs and torso, and they’re not just patting people’s arms and legs, they’re grabbing and groping and prodding pretty aggressively.”

But the head of privacy for the TSA tells TheGeekProfessor.com that’s just not the case:

There is no retaliatory pat-down for people who decline AIT. There used to be several types of pat-downs, but there are now only two (standard, and resolution). People who decline AIT or metal detector, for that matter, get the standard pat-down, but our standard pat-down changed about a month ago and now has a sliding motion across the groin. There was a flurry of media attention about a month ago on it, and some complaints following the news articles, but not a lot. My rough recollection is a dozen or fewer complaints specific to the new pat-down.

We assume he’s talking about stories like this one about the TSA’s “enhanced” pat-downs that they began to roll out during the summer.

TSA Pilot Refuses Naked Scanner – TSA Response [TheGeekProfessor.com]

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