“Maybe tagging guns as #instacool and #instagood isn’t the best idea.” – commenter on TSA’s Instagram account in TSA’s gun policy: Confiscate it, Instagram it [at cnn.com]
“Maybe tagging guns as #instacool and #instagood isn’t the best idea.” – commenter on TSA’s Instagram account in TSA’s gun policy: Confiscate it, Instagram it [at cnn.com]
Nice hi point.
So, who is up for setting up a similar Instagram that showcases the over 100 TSA Agents arrested for stealing or fired for grievous policy violations? There are mug shots ripe for picking!
I could do without an IRS audit.
And yet statists will swear up and down that the TSA exists for “the greater good” and “to protect us”
“We steal what has already been stolen.” – TSA
They may be proud of these findings, but how many knives and guns (and fake bombs used in investigating the TSA’s competency) gets through onto the airplane and never caused a problem?
And how many confiscated weapons walk?
TSA confiscated my very nice Klein network crimper tool because it “had a blade on it.” The blade was a wire stripper, inside the tool, which cannot do anything except for strip cable insulation up to 1/4″ in diameter. Unless I could find a way to get someone’s tip of their pinky finger inside the tool, there was zilch that could be done with it.
I hate TSA and will do whatever I can to fuck with them as part of my business travel. There’s not much you can do, but it’s at least a little satisfying when the sassy black lady at the X-ray belt tells you to step behind the line and wait for your bags to come out of the machine, say “no thanks”, grab your shit and go.
Wow, real mature.
Hey guys I am TSA. The vast majority of Screener/Officers are decent people. In ten years almost eleven TSA has “confiscated” only one item, toner cartridges for printers. It was only for a period of about six months, because Al Qaeda had found a way to put IED’s in them and clean them up so the equipment couldnt detect it. They hid them in copy machines being shipped FedEx from Yemen. TSA has not confiscated a firearm or a knife or a tool, or anything else. When we find “prohibited items” every passenger has the same options. They can leave the checkpoint, back to the non-secure side and do whatever they want with it, to include checking it in as luggage, mailing it, leaving it in their vehicle, having someone they know come and pick it up, we dont care. Or, they can “surrender” it. The items that are surrendered are picked up and “disposed of” by some contractor the TSA has to pay a fee to. Thats why for the first several years you could buy scissors on ebay by the pound. Scissors that are shorter than four inches long from the pivot point are no longer prohibited by the way. We go to work every day and deal with the public, (the same people you complain about for being uninformed or unprepared) the folks who dont read signs, dont know the rules, and dont understand the equipment or the procedures. We have 40,000 Screener/Officers. It is inevitable that some of them will not be stellar human beings. At one point, a year of “security experience” was all you needed. No diploma, not even a GED. I would guess that most of those people are gone now. We are rquired to undergo continuous annual recertification and we lose people every year, because they fail the tests. We all collectively cringe whenever we see that a Screener/Officer has been caught doing something stupid. Just because one idiot where you work is a, or does something criminal, doesnt make you a criminal. I do not steal from or grope passengers, and I am tired of being called a theif, or pedophile, or any number of the other insulting accusations, because uninformed people want to pick a fight. We have a person at all the lanes whoes job it is to tell the passengers what to do to get ready for the procees. NOTHING in your pockets, ALL liquids gels or aerosols removed from your bags, large electronic devices seperated from the rest of you property. 90 percent of the secondary screening we do is because someone didnt follow one of those three directions. I have had people claim that their cell phone was made of plastic, and demand to know how could set off the metal detector. Or get into the imaging machine, that doesnt look for metal and then say “its only my wallet theres no metal in it”, after being told to take EVERYTHING out of their pockets. The process isnt difficult. Im done now let the flaming begin.
Stop making excuses and get a real job, J.G.
If you can’t deal with people rightly hurling abuse at you for choosing one of the slimier government jobs, then do everyone a favor and quit.
The rules you enforce are ridiculous, many of your coworkers are scum, and you seem to want to be praised for inconveniencing people who just want to go about their business.
You are part of the problem.
If I walked into your place of buisness and treated you the way you expect to treat me, what kind of service would I get? I imagine that I would be asked to leave, and probably not politely. Where as the moment I refuse to put up with your crap, I become “part of the poblem”. Grow up and start acting in the manner you expect others to behave.
The difference is that we can’t chose any other security service. You are mandated on us.
All of these prohibitive objects prove that some people would rather stop paying your salary and handle security themselves.
Give us competition and your job as a TSA screener may disapear. Or it may not. But where is the harm in competeing for business?
You can always choose some other form of transportation. I have no problem personally with trained armed people on the plane. I dont think there are enough of them, but I dont think we will get any sort of program that allows it for civilians anytime soon.
Newsflash!!! The TSA’s traveling circus antics at bus stops and train stations are even known in Australia. Inspecting people as they get OFF the train is a bit pointless, unless the TSA also has the role of ticket inspectors (although the recently disbanded transit police could teach the TSA more than a few dirty tricks).
Interesting viewpoint, since evert Friday I get an email from DHS bragging about the “prohibited contraband” “confiscated” by TSA that week. You should subscribe.
Post a link.
As long as you keep enforcing policies that are inane and stupid for the sake of political correctness (we musn’t offend the Muslims!) then expect to be ridiculed, derided, and hated.
I’ll start with the easiest example….. hand raping elderly infirmed women and men in wheelchairs. The F’ing time you spend on massaging old Betsy’s chest is taking time away from properly focusing on Ackmed and Jabar from Saudia Arabia.
You see all these old men and women who probably served in WW2 or the factories getting molested by you idiots and I root for them to haul off and smack you a good one. Most of these old women have probably only been touched by their husband and personal doctor and then you idiots come along and feel them up in public.
Do you people think that we get up every day and look forward to giving people pat downs? Do you think that we as cogs in the machine get to make the rules or pick which ones we enforce? Do you think that racially profiling is good idea? Would you screen Timothy McVeigh before you let him on a plane? Do you remember what he did? The man earned a Bronze Star for his service in Iraq. Then he came home a blew up a building knowing full well that there were children inside. Did he fit your Achmed, and Jabar stereotype? So you tell me what does the bad guy look like? We have mitigated screening procedures for age groups young and old. As soon as we stop screening grandma and grandpa, a real bad guy is going to take advantage of that, and one of them is come in with an IED strapped under grandmas butt, and then what? Whose fault will it be? These people hide behind children launch rockets and mortars from schools. Do you think they will hesitate to use our sensibilities for grandma against us? I expected more from the “armed intelligentsia”.
Do you think that we as cogs in the machine get to make the rules or pick which ones we enforce?
Get another job. “Just following orders” ain’t an excuse.
It wasnt offered as an excuse. I notice you didnt attack any of the other points I made. Why not? I didnt think you were the type to go after low hanging fruit. I enforce all the rules because I dont get to pick which ones I do enforce. I stay at my job because not all the rules are bad ones, and the good ones keep the planes from blowing up, or crashing into buildings. Untill there is a foolproof way to pick the bad guys out we screen everyone. How many IGOOTD trophy winners do you want to have a weapon in an enclosed space at 40,000 feet? Can you pick them out of a crowd? I am not talking about a movie theater, or a mall, or someplace you can escape from. A pressurized aluminum tube going 500 mph, that is 40,000 feet above sea level and full of other people. How exactly do you think it should be done? Untill you have a better idea, one that actually works, or at least doesnt violate the other civil liberties by racially profiling, stop taking shots at those of us who are trying to make the best of a crappy situation.
I would check the TSA’s success rate which so far has been ZERO. Citizens have stopped more terrorist efforts than the TSA.
But Stalin did comment it was better to have thousands of innocents suffer than risk ONE guilty person escape.
J.G. – I respectfully request that you research what the Israelis do to defend their commercial flights. El Al doesn’t do what we do, yet I would rather fly on one of their planes before I would an American one. Then notice that their system costs only a fraction of what America spends and is more effective at the same time. Results are what we are looking for. If the question is, “What is the best and most cost effective way to prevent hijackings and injury to people on our flights?”, then DHS and TSA are not the answer.
First, thankyou for being polite. I am not working in the dark here. The Isrealies have ten airports to defend and they were designed or redesigned aound that very indepth process. We have over 400 airports. We have adopted some of the ideas they practice. We have Behavioral Detection Officers whos only job is to watch people go through the process and pick out people showing the same indicators that the Isrealies look for. It is a layer of our security process. They rely on racial profiling as well, that is illegal here. I appreciate your willingness to have a conversation and not an argument.
Here is an article that explains it. http://forward.com/articles/122781/israel-s-airport-security-object-of-envy-is-hard/
And don’t forget that every flight has an armed air marshal. Not the low percentage that we have. I understand that you are trying to do your job but I believe that your job shouldn’t exist at all. Not because security isn’t necessary but because the govt. shouldn’t be in the airline business and the only person responsible for your security is you. Check for bombs on the ground and an armed air marshal or two on every flight. Even better, let all who choose to, carry a gun. Terrorist want to hijack and these measures would prevent that at a much lower cost. Guns could be carried with frangible rounds, an empty chamber, and a security strap requiring a little effort to remove (teeth should work or a little knife) that safes the gun. And it would be checked when you debarked to make sure you weren’t fiddling with it while in flight. And now that I think about it, customers who carry on board should be given a discount on their airfare to encourage carrying. Simple and cost effective and freedom encouraging.
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