PJ Vogt

Could be.

Sweat.

There were other good reasons to suspect it.

There'd been the Redditors who'd complained about getting stopped over their armpits.

Maybe it wasn't the antiperspirant tripping the machine, but instead the moisture the antiperspirant was supposed to address.

And this summer, the same summer that I'd gotten those emails from our listeners, what I'd missed was a slew of articles, one in the New York Post, another in Vice, about a woman who was afflicted with what both outlets referred to as swamp crotch.

A sweaty crotch which was causing her, she thought, to get flagged by the TSA's body scanner.

So now we had what felt like a narrow, answerable question.

Does millimeter wave technology, the body scanner used at almost all American airports, just not work on people with very sweaty private parts?

I thought that was a narrow, answerable question, except it wasn't.

There just isn't good public data about TSA stops.

You can read anecdotes and Reddit posts, but there's nowhere where the government publicly discloses information about false alarms.

This is considered sensitive information by the TSA.

To some degree, all this secrecy makes sense, but this specific not knowing really frustrated me.

These sophisticated machines could handle sweat, or they couldn't.

Wasn't this something ultimately you could just test?

And I guess if the theory is that this might be sweat, is there, I guess I could just like, the next time I know someone who's flying, I could ask them to like do laps around the airport right before they go through the millimeter wave machine.

Yeah.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah.