TSA Tag

I hate the TSA. Hate, hate, hate. Not just because they reached into my purse while I was waiting to board a plane. And not because they've lectured me about tooth paste on five, yes -- five separate occasions. My hatred of TSA is not even a result of their oft pervy-handed ways. I hate the TSA because they're painfully incompetent. Last week, the acting head of the TSA stepped down after a, "news reports that undercover security agents had penetrated airport security on 67 occasions," according to the Washington Post. That amounts to a 96% failure rate. As if a 4% screening success rate wasn't bad enough, a new audit found the TSA accidentally hired 73 workers who were listed on their own terror watch list. "This is totally unacceptable... we need to revamp the TSA process," said Texas Representative Michael McCaul in an interview with Fox News. "Most importantly, it puts Americans at risk."

Last week, an Inspector General report revealed that the TSA failed to flag over 70 airport workers with ties to terrorism. Auditors found that, although the TSA employs procedures to check employees for potential red flags, the agency was not using the complete terror watch list in its screenings. Another study revealed last week showed that screeners missed a staggering 95% of fake bombs and other banned items that undercover federal agents attempted to smuggle through security. Today, a Senate committee played host to TSA whistleblowers who offered testimony that should make any traveler's skin crawl:

Earlier, Rebecca Roering, an assistant TSA federal security director at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the agency suffers from low morale. She said this is in part the result of agency leadership, composed of too many former commercial airline executives “placing more emphasis on customer service and passenger wait times than on security and detection rates.”

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:

On July 25, 2011, the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the TSA must act "promptly" to hold a public comment period and adopt rules and regulations regarding its use of body scanners in U.S. airports. Nearly a year later, the TSA has yet to comply...