O as if. No, I’m afraid the TSA is All About strip searching granny in front of people and making sure granny barely makes her connection, because so many goddamn grannies are terrorists. You can’t believe what they can do with the underwires from their bras, let alone the titanium in their hips.
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It’s why they had to take away the knitting needles after 9/11. All those grannies knitting afghans.
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The TSA is fucking useless. Have they demonstrably stopped one attack? I don’t think so.
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It’s a big agency with lots of roles. Much of the visible front-line eye-rolling bag checks and anal probes to get on the fucking plane is a joke.
Where I do see more value from them is in things like their outposts overseas, where they maintain offices and presence in different countries and international airports, also aligned with embassies and consulates and the pre-screening stuff for things like visas, and scrubbing outbound manifests and reservations (travelers, even visa-waiver ones, have to pre-register before travelling to the US) for threats to ensure that some people never get on a plane to come here.
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Yeah I can see what you’re saying. If they would just back off at the airport - quit making us undress, quit treating us like shit and answer a question once in awhile - that’s not against the law.
I’m probably bitching for no reason - don’t know that I’ll travel again that way. At most I can see taking Taos Air back and forth instead of driving, but Taos Air is a charter the ski valley runs, and there ain’t no TSA.
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And give us our bottled water back and recognize that nobody’s taking over a plane with a fucking pocketknife post-9/11. Lotta little things they could actually do that would make life easier for folks and actually increase security as instead of playing spot-the-water-bottle, they could actually look for threats.
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Yeah and in fact they could lower the temperature around flying just about as well as closing the bars in the airport would. Security ratchets up the tension before you even get to the airport - you’re worried about it when you pack. Or at least I always have been. Can’t have a nail file in my purse or carryon and all the rest of those picky fucking rules. For awhile they were confiscating lip gloss. I had a friend fly into New Mexico who had to go buy new lip gloss right away because they had taken hers in LA.
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Yup. Lost a perfectly good screwdriver once. Had been buried in a side pocket where I didn’t catch it when checking everything before heading to the airport. Didn’t even know it was there and they’re like tearing the whole bag apart.
For a fucking screwdriver.
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lt’s totally indiscriminate.
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Nnedi Okafor’s graphic novel Laguardia was inspired by her experience of TSA being so intent on patting down her dreadlocks that they missed the canister of pepper spray she had forgotten in her purse.
Naturally, this lead to a Hugo award-winning graphic novel about sentient plant-aliens in an Afro-futurist world. Enjoy!
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Is this the theater that always puts too much salt on their popcorn?
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It’s the same theater that is staging “The Courier’s Tragedy” on an infinite loop 
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What privacy concerns?
Cawthorn is a public figure, and the incidents where Cawthorn tried to carry guns on air flights were widely reported.
Cawthorn’s a public figure who publicly broke the law repeatedly. Where’s the privacy concern? And where’s the concern for public safety, TSA?
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I’m guessing if you looked like a middle easterner, you would not get off quite so lightly.
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I do not think Maddie is brave enough to shoot anybody. He is the typical loudmouth jackass who talks a big game, but is the first to run away when challenged. I will never say never, but with his particular disability, It would be somewhat difficult for him to pull off a shooting and expect to get away with it. He is way too much in love with himself to make that kind of sacrifice.
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TSA seized nearly 6,000 firearms at checkpoints last year.
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Yes I am going to assume that the weapons set off the metal detectors and that’s how the TSA came to confiscate them. I think we should keep the metal detectors forever.
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We’ve had metal detectors in airports since the 1970s, IIRC. And I assume most of the guns were in carry-on bags and therefore got spotted on the x-ray scanners, which I’m also fine with. My beefs with TSA are that the checkpoints are perpetually understaffed, the liquid bans are stupid, and field agents’ determination of what is or isn’t prohibited is arbitrary.
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The liquid bans are stupid and so are the clothing bans - shoes, scarves, sweaters. I find the whole thing distinctly arbitrary.
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Once is cool, twice is queer.