TSA is gross
Former insider says they’re on the lookout for hot women and hassling people.
That’s pretty much the evidence presented in this article by a former TSA employee, Dear America, I Saw You Naked: And yes, we were laughing.
It starts with the absurd:
I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.
Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security….
I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.
…. and goes on to the disgusting:
I.O. [Image Operator} room duty quickly devolved into an unofficial break. It was the one place in the airport free of surveillance cameras, since the TSA had assured the public that no nude images of passengers would be stored on any recording device, closed circuit cameras included.
Most of my co-workers found humor in the I.O. room on a cruder level. Just as the long-suffering American public waiting on those security lines suspected, jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues: Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area. Passengers were often caught off-guard by the X-Ray scan and so materialized on-screen in ridiculous, blurred poses—mouths agape, à la Edvard Munch. One of us in the I.O. room would occasionally identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels.
Good thing government bureaucrats will not be treating our medical records this way.
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Comments
Every time I have to go through one of these contraptions, as my hands go up over my head, a slow double bird flies above me. Don’t know if they see it in the monitoring room or not, but it gives me a little satisfaction if they do.
I’ll never fly commercial again. Ever.
The TSA is LESS than useful.
Like MOST regulatory bodies, it gives the illusion of “protecting” people…and ONLY that. It is profoundly expensive in both freedom and money, and the cost/benefit ratio is strongly negative.
We are being pushed by Obamic agendas onto MORE public transportation, which will all be subjected to TSA invasions and “gun-free” policies.
These guys aren’t even allowed to be armed, and when they get attacked by someone who IS armed, they die, just like other unarmed people.
That already happened, once. It would be foolish to think that the real bad guys will never come back again, after that result.
I last flew in November and was eligible for expedited screening. It was almost like flying pre-9/11.
I remember when people went to the restaurant at Love Field and watched the airplanes take off and land or just hung out at the gates to people watch….. even before carry ons were x-rayed.
I have ZERO sympathy for the TSA-tards who show up each day to perform “just a little bit of humiliation and evil” on the public.
If the TSA-tards had any professionalism OR accountability they wouldn’t be in the back room mocking the naked x-ray pictures of passengers.
That the one particular TSA-tard actually took the champagne away from the returning military just confirms his missing humanity. When the tard returned the next day for work he put on the evil banality of the TSA. A self-respecting American would have either refused, or followed the rules and then quit.
You said it Howard!
Now I suppose that TSArd will want to sell books……
It’s even money if any TSA-tard can read the new book about the TSA.
Word on the street is the working title of the book was initially “My Struggle” until a German relative translated that for the author. /sarc
=O eeek!!!!!
That comment’s also a little kamfy (campy).
lol
I stopped flying several years ago which means I routinely drive 10 – 20 hours. Driving let’s me retain my autonomy and I can carry just about anything with me that I think I’m big enough to load. In the last 60 days, I’ve driven 18,000 miles and have another 8,000 on deck for the next 30 days. I’m not alone:
“Passenger traffic at El Paso International Airport declined 6.1 percent last year — the sixth consecutive year of declines, data released this week show.
Freight traffic declined 6.5 percent last year after three years of fairly strong numbers.” ~ El Paso Times, January 28, 2014
I’ve heard of TSA roadblocks back east.
Glorified Walmart employees with uniforms. I wouldn’t trust these people to protect a bowl of ice cream.
Wal-mart has far higher standards for employees.
TSA employees went to the same schools as O-Baloney and Joe Bumble.
Crude comments are the least of my worries on the medical records front.
On the medical side, I’m more worried about IRS style targeting… suddenly GOP donors start getting rejected for cancer treatment. In this history of the world, how many times has genocidal revolutions been waged through the civil servant infrastructure???
Methinks….
ALWAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Due to personal health issues, I have not been on an airplane in 4 years. Now that the health issues have mostly subsided. I still have no interest in ever boarding a plane again. Driving is far more enjoyable and stress-free. Even a 14 hour drive to New York (from Chicago) is considerably less stress-induced than a 2 hour flight. Especially when you consider the rushing to the airport, parking (short or long term) waiting in line at the ticket counter (f necessary), then waiting in line by the TSA, where you can be groped and oogled, then the wait for your section to be called to board (with the stress of not knowing if you will be sat with someone who hasn’t bathed with soap, or perhaps a crying baby or someone obese).
The next 2 hours are spent cramped into a seat that was designed for a 10-year-old child. ou can lay the seat back, but then you are crushing the person behind you. And unless you are in an aisle seat, G0d forbid you have to use the lavatory!
Now, assuming the plane took off on time and arrived on time (which happens maybe half the time), you then have to stand in line while everyone rushes to be the first to take their overhead luggage down. That line, which I believe is delayed on purpose by the ground crew to mess with you, can take 10-15 minutes, while you stand hunched over by your seat. Of course, you can stay in your seat and wait till everyone else has exited the plane. But then you risk having everyone on the plane stare at you.
You finally get out of the plane and then you have to walk to baggage claim, keeping in mind that you have not really stretched your body for almost 3 hours. So walking is a bit shaky at first (and that assumes you aren’t recovering from air sickness). Then you wait among the 500 other flyers (from all the planes that arrived at the same time), along with their friends and family who all came out to greet them at the airport. You get lucky and no one else took your similar looking bag, or the airline didn’t send it to Mozambique. Now it’s off to the car/taxi or however you go and then deal with the traffic getting home. By the time you make it home, you are far more drained and exhausted than had to leisurely driven at your own pace, stopped where you wanted to, ate whatever you wanted.
To make a very long (and not really worth the effort) story short, flying sucks and it’s infinitely worse because of the TSA. But expecting TSA employees, who are not paid that much (meaning you aren’t hiring the cream of the crop) to be anything but vulgar and gross is a true pipe dream.
Greyhound buses with wings.
Last time I flew (SF to NJ after Thanksgiving) I sat behind a poor little child who had a nasty cold. Guess what I got that lasted 6 weeks.
I’m another one who’s opted out as much as possible.
Aunt Sarah won’t fly. Doesn’t want strangers groping her, gawking at her through her clothes, going through her luggage, telling her she can’t have a nail file, 12 oz shampoo, etc.
So, we won’t be going anywhere we can’t drive until this
(cont’d) until this insanity ceases and the terrorist/Islamists are put in their place.
Here’s one for you… because of my husband’s occupation, he has security clearances, yet he is stopped by the TSA every time he flies. Ironic that the DoD and DoE think he is trustworthy enough to give him clearances, but TSA flags him as untrustworthy every time.
Institutionalized stupidity – as in many private and public colleges.
I actually stopped using my Military ID as photo identification, because I found I was selected for extra screening more often with the Mil ID than I was with my State Drivers License. Figure that one out.
Oh no – Georgia troopers stop/search inside drivers underwear:
“Driver after driver told investigative reporter Jodie Fleischer officers searched inside their pants while they were stopped for minor traffic violations. In several cases, the invasive searches targeted passengers who were riding in the car.
“He was like, ‘Just unbuckle all your clothes,’ and put his hands down inside my pants,” said Terry Phillips.”
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/roadside-violation-drivers-passengers-say-police-s/nc7kd/
All this has stopped exactly what?
I’ll tell you what it’s stopped: many WWII veterans who would love to see their memorial, but refuse to subject themselves to the kind of oppression from which they fought to free the world.
That’s despicable.
You can thank OBaloney in his DC fiefdom for that.
Then TSA employees HATE their jobs and who can blame them? These people perform routinized procedures for their entire shifts and never catch ANYBODY! So they take out their frustrations on the passengers.
Cut the staff in half, tell no one that is being done, put in an occasional “fake positive” and things will improve, even though that is not enough.
The level of anxiety I routinely experience at the airport, even with TSA pre-check, rivals that experienced when I had to explain that I had lost my exit visa at Sheremetyevo. Russians hate crying American women; TSA simply thinks that someone freaking out because she’s been separated from her child is a reason for further screening.
I actually found the exit visa years later in a pile of papers. Why it reappeared, I have no idea. Why we have to tolerate this gubmint playacting, I have no idea.