82 year old women is a terrorist.... anyone ever think to do a threat assessment?

Public pat-down over 82-year-old woman’s prosthetic spurs new airport security criticism

By Marc Weisblott | Canada - Daily Brew – News of an 82-year-old cancer survivor forced to reveal her gelprosthetic breast during a public pat-down in Calgary on Jan. 4, after a pin in her leg was picked up by a metal detector, has raised new alarms over airport security procedures in Canada.

Security officials asked Elizabeth Strecker if she had any liquids or gel on her. When she said no, she was accused of lying while being requested to raise her arms over her head in order to be monitored by a full-body scanner, something she can no longer do.

"I don't think I had to tell the whole world I had a mastectomy," Strecker told CTV British Columbia.

The system didn't seem so invasive last November, around the time a protest was called in the U.S. to refuse full-body scans after the viral popularity of a YouTube video of a California man telling a security official not to touch his "junk" after opting for a pat-down.

While there were fears of unprecedented airport chaos leading up to the busy Thanksgiving weekend, no conflicts were widely reported.

At the time, Canadian Transport Minister Chuck Strahl said there were no plans to imitate the stricter procedures, even though 3-D scanners had been quietly installed in the country's largest airports last year.

The scanners were used in secondary procedures for those singled out for extra screening, explainedthe Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, and no person under 18 would be subject to a pat-down.

But there is much empathy for the humiliation felt by Strecker, who admitted the pat-down made her "cry like a baby," and has pledged to never fly again after returning home to B.C. from visiting family in Calgary over Christmas.

"I'm an 82-year-old woman, not a terrorist," she told the Calgary Sun.

Complaints to the authority made news at the end of 2010, after The Canadian Press obtained 1,520 recent traveller complaints about treatment by human airport screeners.

A screener at the Regina airport was singled out for her comment to a traveller with cerebral palsy that caused a congenital limp: "Looks like someone has a bad owww-ee."

The revelations were dismissed by authority spokesman Matthieu Larocque, who said the complaints represented a "minute fraction" of the numbers passing through airport security in Canada each year.

Concurrently, the agency claimed surveys showed that 80 per cent of passengers preferred the scanners to traditional search methods.

These numbers contrasted with the fears of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which likened the scanners to running through "the airport naked, with a paper bag over your head."