The Transportation Security Administration will instruct its security officers in airports to avoid invasive airport security patdowns of children.
John Pistole, TSA administrator, told a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee meeting on Wednesday that tsa officers are to be given new advice and training on how to conduct security screening of young children.
"As part of our ongoing effort to get smarter about security, Administrator Pistole has made a policy decision to give security officers more options for resolving screening anomalies with young children," said a TSA spokesman.
"We obviously want to spend the most time on those who would be selectees [as opposed to the] very young or perhaps very old, where we could expedite their screening at airport checkpoints," Pistole told the Senate committee.
The decision follows weeks of media attention on the issue of TSA patdowns, after the emergence in April of a video shot at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport showing a tsa officer conducting pat downs on young children over the last thanksgiving holiday.
The directive from Pistole will see security screeners receive refreshed training on methods of screening young children, the agency says, and will result in fewer patdowns of children. "We need to use more common sense," he told the committee.
However, noting that terrorists in other parts of the world have used children, Pistole added that pat downs on children do sometimes need to be carried out. He added that no pat down on a child is ever carried out at random, and that they are based on evidence such as passenger background.
The issue is part of a wider debate about methods of ensuring airport security. Billie Vincent, a security consultant and former Federal Aviation Administration security director, told the Associated Press that intrusive pat downs wouldn't be required if the tsa was allowed to profile every passenger before a flight. Vincent said this would raise any potential dangers, and reduce the amount of pat downs needed at the airport.
Indeed, Pistole told the committee that the tsa has plans to introduce new ‘enhanced pat down' security technologies including behaviour detection, and new systems that will allow passengers to share information about themselves.
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