My pat down did take 20 minutes. It was done by another person while the original person kept their original job. There was a backlog of people who refused to go through the "naked machine". And, yes, the whole line did bottleneck.

That's never happened to me. Sorry it happened to you. I invariably refuse the strip search.

My pat down and search of everything on me took a good 15 minutes. When standing in line they asked each one of us if we wanted the xrays or patdown (they installed it just days before) and I was horrified when the person in front of me said "Oh I don't care" and the person in front of them simply said "that line looks faster". I couldn't believe they were so willing to take whatever security measure was added. I can only imagine what they are going to do next.

On a moral level, I think it's excessive and abusive to use the backscatter machines and people should have the right to fly on airplanes without going through that process. On a personal level, I don't really care who sees me naked, much less faux-naked. And on a different personal level, getting into a confrontation with apathetic bureaucrats about my civil rights is never going to have any actual impact on my or anyone else's civil rights.

Normally, I'd agree with this. Here, I strongly disagree. Strip search opt-outs cost time and money. The fact that most people aren't opting out is what allows the TSA the fig leaf of "it's optional", a fig leaf that will eventually drop once people acclimatize themselves to the idea of minimum-wage-earning TSA agents handling nude pictures of them.

The time to force the issue over this (by making "optional" strip searches prohibitively expensive) is now.

Hey, if you want to DDoS the TSA sometime, I'm in. Get a bunch of people together on the same day and clog up a major airport (or, more ambitiously, all the major airports) by going through the opt-out line sounds effective. When it's just me and I don't personally care, it's a lot less convincing.

Hm. I'm flying to Philly at the end of the week; I'll give myself an extra 20 minutes or so. Thanks.