The TSA's latest attempt to intimidate the public, interrogate every passenger before they board a plane.

BOSTON – As Ingrid Esser hands a Transportation Security Administration officer her identification and boarding pass for a flight from Logan International Airport to Washington, D.C., she faces a flurry of questions.

Where is she going? Why? How long is she staying?
"It was a new experience," says Esser, 31, who works in public relations. "It doesn't bother me at all. I understand their job, and it's keeping America safe."
In that exchange, Esser became part of an experiment that, if successful, could change how every passenger who seeks to board a commercial flight in the USA is screened: Besides going through a metal detector, and possibly a full-body scanning machine and pat-down, they'd first undergo a "chat-down," or face-to-face questioning by a TSA officer. The tactic is similar to what air travelers in Israel face under a program aimed at averting terrorism in the skies.

Chat-downs, a play on the word "pat-down," describing the physical screening that has angered some passengers as too intrusive, are part of the U.S. government's effort to adopt a broader strategy of sifting out people who might pose a greater security risk among the roughly 1.2 million people who fly each day.
Chat-downs already are controversial in their trial stage. Civil-liberties advocates and some critics of the TSA see them as another government invasion of fliers' privacy, a hassle for mostly law-abiding passengers or ineffectual.
"They're asking questions that people have a right not to answer," says Mike German, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. "It's nobody's business — and certainly not the government's business — where you're traveling and why."
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