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SEN. RAND PAUL (R), KENTUCKY: You know, I have been flying pretty frequently for the past year since I was elected, and really have not had any trouble with the TSA.
Most of the local people have been friendly, if not outright supportive. But, today, I went through the scanner, and it went off, and I just requested that I either show them my leg, which I did, or that I get to go back through the scanner again. But they wouldn't let me go through the scanner. They insisted on a pat-down search.
And I just didn't think that that was appropriate. I thought that, really, when I interviewed Director Pistole of the TSA a couple of months ago, he talked about that we were going to let people go back through the screener so they didn't have to get pat-downs.
But the other thing I learned today is, the screener is not going off because it detects something. The screener is part of a random pat-down process, where people are getting randomly pat-down, but they think the screener is going off because it detected something. And I didn't realize that until today, because the screener goes off one time, and they finally let me go through it an hour later, and then the screener doesn't go off. That's because I must have been part of a random pat-down, but wasn't told that initially.
BLITZER: Because we checked, because you had mentioned that earlier.
We went to the TSA and we asked them, are there now random alerts that simply go off without any evidence that there's a problem? And they issued a statement saying no, because we said, can the TSA trigger the machine to indicate there's an alarm? No. And then the other question was, do the machines have alarms that randomly go off to indicate that there is an object on a person when there is no object on a person? The TSA insists the answer is no.
Who says that there's this random alert?
PAUL: Here's the interesting thing. Two people from the TSA, two separate people -- and I don't want to name their names right at this point. But two separate people told me that there are random bells and whistles going off in the screening process that the local screeners are not aware of, but are part of random pat-downs.
They admit that there are random pat-downs, but I believe the random pat-downs are coming from the machine. Otherwise, we have got machines that just aren't very good, because why are they setting off a signal one time and then not setting off the signal the next time?
So it tells me that either the machines are inadequate or they're not telling us the whole story. But my understanding from two different TSA agents is that, yes, there are random bells going off in the screening machines that don't indicate something on your body, but indicate you have been selected for a random pat-down.
The TSA offically denies it [the charge], but insiders from the TSA say otherwise.