TSA protects nation against dangerous sippy cup

I didn’t read all of the postings, but if you ever had something “disappear” from the screening line, don’t even think about getting compensation. After putting my computer, change, keys, cell phone, 3 oz. liquids in a bag, etc etc in the tray, while picking all that stuff up, putting my jacket and shoes back on, didn’t notice that my cell phone had disappeared until I got to the gate. Went back to the checkpoint where I got the evil eye for asking to speak to the supervisor, who said I had to go to the airline for “lost items”. Airline said to call their lost item department. Back to security and all I got was blank looks – rather than miss my flight I gave up. By the time I was able to cancel the phone, $180 worth of calls made to Dominican Republic. Filed a report with TSA alledging theft. Ignored for 3 weeks until I called to follow up. TSA sends a letter back saying “incomplete information”. Resent ORIGINAL package of documentation of flight and airports and told they would look into it. After 3 months got a call from TSA who wanted to why I thought it was stolen by them. Final result 4 weeks later – claim denied. The joys of flying……

Reading the majority of these posts saddens — and infuriates — me. How some of you can come on here and spout off such hate and selfish ignorance is beyond me. Regardless of how you feel about the policies in place, why would *anyone* argue with or otherwise taunt the TSA agents??? They are in NO way responsible for devising the rules — their job is only to enforce them! And I feel for them — as I hear it, there are *hefty* discipline measures in place should it be found that a particular agent allowed illegal contraband past his security checkpoint. If it were YOUR job continuously on the line, how would you act as angry, pompous-assed passengers continually took out their misguided frustrations on you through verbal accosting and then did stupid things like hiding knives and 6 oz bottles of water in their carry-ons to see how many checkpoints they can make it through?

You complain about the agents’ “lack of education” and “inability to speak good English”, as though this means anything. Are any of you qualified to brand people as lesser beings incapable of doing a job which really requires few qualifications. I’m appalled and disgusted.

I’ve flown many MANY times here in the U.S., both pre- and post-9/11… and I have a VERY Arab name to boot. If my family and I can deal with the looks and constant perusal of our luggage and carry-ons, then you ridiculous bastards can too! LOL! But honestly, I’ve never had a problem with any TSA agent. Sure, the inconsistencies between airports can be a little crazy — but I take those ones’ leniency as a welcome perk, *not* a new expectation for service I should receive everywhere.

Folks, just remember, a smile goes a long long way. Explaining calmly when you don’t understand and emphasizing that you really need their help can make the difference between a horrible confrontation and something both parties can laugh about later. Making them feel as though they can help you, that they are actually important… all these things make for better coexistence with folks who are already being treated like they are the dreg of the earth.

I mean, I am beginning to equate the bulk of your comments with the fool who goes into the fast food restaurant and belittles the cashier because they’re taking too long, telling them how stupid they are and how their so uneducated they “can’t even find the little fry button”… but then, you’re so surprised and enraged to find your burger was run along the floor before being placed in the bun! I just don’t understand the logic… nor this obvious belief some of you have that you are somehow entitled to leniency from what is LAW.

At any rate, I viewed the footage and was enraged by this stupid little woman. If anything, she showed her ignorance by arguing against the laws in place… then going so far as to pour the water on the floor! I still cannot believe she was that ridiculous… and then had the audacity to turn around and claim that the TSA agent tugged her arm, causing her to accidentally spill it! Did she not know that a camera would be somewhere recording it all????? I really must say that had I been the agent, I would have done pretty much the same thing — prevented her from going any further as well until she cleaned up the mess and disposed of the “contraband”, however ridiculous it was!

And Screwtheliberals, et al. — GOOD POSTS! Thanks for a little light in an otherwise dim series of comments…..

I’ve been flying for almost forty years. I’m also pretty savvy around cops and the like — sometimes I don’t like ‘em, but you’ll never hear me not say, “Sir” around them or be polite.

I’ve had extremely good results with must bureaucrats — for example, I had to phone the IRS a lot last year (it worked out fairly well) and I never talked to anyone where who wasn’t not only competent but polite and sympathetic.

That said, the TSA people range from decent public servant to crazy psychos. I’ve definitely had people who threatened me with “investigation” because my (perfectly valid but old) Green Card was rather beat up. (“Do you want me to take you into the back room? There’s no question that you’ll miss your connecting flight. It’ll take hours!” — but there wasn’t anything I could do, I’d pointed out — this was the Green Card I had, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The point is that these people work for us. We pay their salaries. They need to remember this — the cops need to remember this — and the politicians particularly need to remember this. The fact that a lot of these people behave like they are nobility and we are peasants is frightening. A policeman should always be polite to you — even if he’s arresting you. This is called “professionalism”. Threatening people isn’t going to have much affect on terrorists but it’s going to have a lot of effect on your average guy — I was shaking with fear when I left talking to this crazy TSA dude.

What’s more troubling is that the system is clearly crazy. A lot of you write, “Well, we need security,” which is of course and unfortunately true — but most of the activities that the TSA engages in are actually harming the cause of security. Consider the TSA’s obsession with shoes. The standard test they do to your shoes when you take them off would actually NOT find even the shoes that the so-called “shoe bomber” was carrying, but more to the point, any terrorist smart enough to get to that point would of course NOT be using their shoes to carry their weapons of death.

The obsession with liquids is the same — if you knew anything about the history of terrorism, you know that people tried to use binary liquid explosives to blow up airplanes well over a decade ago! So why did the TSA do nothing about this until a bunch of losers started talking about doing something like that? (Note that most of them didn’t even have passports yet — some terrorists!)

I just deleted various pieces of text but the gist is that there are tons of not-particularly sophisticated ways to get around the very specific security mechanisms in place now — and by focusing on protecting against specific mechanisms that failed in the past you are basically guaranteeing that any good new idea by the terrorists will get past them.

There’s also the deeply troubling idea that our civil rights are worthless — that any level of threat, no matter how small, trumps any civil liberties we have, no matter how crucial or hard-fought-for.

I live in New York City. I knew at least one person who died in the World Trade Center. 9/11 was a terrible disaster — but there were more traffic deaths in the US than that in the next month, more people, mostly random innocents, killed in Afghanistan by the end of the year 2001, more Iraqis killed in a given month since the US invaded. The impact of the US invasion of Iraq alone is a hundred times greater than the WTC disaster — in a country that’s a tenth the size. The Blitz in London was like 9/11 every week — for nine months.

9/11 was awful, awful! but NO excuse for turning America into a police state!

I’d rather have my rights intact, even if I have to assume some small risks as a result.

Now, I actually claim that if we went to a rational system, our risks would *decrease* as the people and the government would work together to preserve our safety on airplanes and in general in the most efficient and rational manner. For example, for the cost of two months in Iraq, we could have outfitted every airport in the US and most of the world’s major non-US airports with chemical sniffers that would detect almost any explosive substance, no matter how it was hidden (shoes, bottles, belts, bags, toupees, breast implants, dolls, etc) — for another month or two of Iraq we could do the same and add radiation testing to all the hundreds of thousands of massive containers that enter, mostly unscreened, into the United States.

So I actually think I’d be *safer* if we were willing to do rational risk planning, rather than being pushed around by a bunch of incompetent authoritarians. But I’d be willing to accept somewhat more risk in exchange for a free and just society.

As a self-described pragmatist, I try to align my experiences with the TSA’s performance to a reasonable set of expectations for who and what they are. Let’s face it, after 9/11, the organization was hastily designed, haphazardly thrown together, and they hired anyone with a pulse to fill out the ranks at every airport in the country. Virtually none of the line staff we as passengers interact with had any training in security whatsoever when they reported for work. Are these people going to perform up to EL AL standards–highly trained security professionals, many with years of compulsory military experience? Not likely. We all know the adage: “You get what you pay for.” For my (and your) money, I am convinced that a well trained, efficient and well-paid TSA could do an equal job at less inconvenience and delay to the traveling public with half the employees. But I digress…what is their job? Security, you say? Wrong.

The purpose of the TSA is purely economic. Its sole job is to provide the illusion of security to maintain the flying public’s confidence in air travel and keep us buying tickets. Surely we all remember how nearly every major airline was to going out of business in late 2001. No one would buy a ticket. The only viable solutions to this crisis were a) prop up the companies at exorbitant cost to the taxpayers or b) come up with a way to convince fliers that 100% security could be provided on your next flight. The gov’t choose the clumsier (though ultimately maybe less expensive) option B–your precious TSA. Don’t be fooled–100% security is a joke at almost any sample size. Considering the millions of air travelers screened every year, the mere suggestion of 100% security is embarrassingly silly. It is reasonable to suggest that the level of secondary screening conducted now is statistically sufficient as a deterrent, even if primary screening were eliminated tomorrow. Literally no system, regardless of cost or sophistication, should even dream that EVERY threat will be caught. You just have to check people often enough make the bad guys think twice about being bad at the airport.

If that isn’t enough, never forget that the mouse is always working to outsmart the latest mouse trap. Our security screening process, as is painstakingly pointed out in the media, is always reactive to a threat we know about–because it was foiled. As a previous poster pointed out, not even the dumbest terrorist out there is plotting a bombing today involving his shoes given the amount of scrutiny that is placed on them these days. Make no mistake: while they may hate us and what we stand for, these people are not idiots. By the time we are banning this or restricting that on a plane, they’re figuring out how to make a bomb out of something else.

TSA defenders above offered up “If you don’t like the rules, don’t fly” Humbly, I would offer “If you require zero risk travel, stay home”.

In the fall of 2002 my wife and I were returning home through Denver following the annual International Assoc of Fire Fighters Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Colorado Springs. This was the first memorial after 9/11, the date that 343 FDNY brothers gave their lives in the incident that led to the creation of TSA. At the memorial service family members of the dead are given folded flags sealed in protective cases. The TSA morons at the gate wanted the family members who were on my flight to open the cases so the contents could be inspected, despite having gone through the previous checkpoints. What amounted to a near-riot ensued and pretty much every person in line was all over the TSA’s butt over this insult to our dead and their families.

I notice that many people have commented on the passenger in the above article not following the rules. However if you look at the TSA web site it does indicate that you are allowed to bring a drink on for your small child. You need to notify security and it is scanned separately from your other 3-1-1 liquids. According the the TSA website it should not have been a problem to bring a sippy cup of water for a toddler.

TSA screeners are idiots, hardly better than trained monkeys. Even worse, their trained monkeys with power trips. Why? Because their management are even bigger idiots who refuse to empower the line employees and exercise a little common-sense judgment.

Again, Kip Hawley is an idiot and the TSA sucks!