"TSA Agent Confession - POLITICO Magazine"

"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...

Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone...

I.O. 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...

Many of my co-workers felt uncomfortable even standing next to the radiation-emitting machines we were forcing members of the public to stand inside. Several told me they submitted formal requests for dosimeters, to measure their exposure to radiation. The agency’s stance was that dosimeters were not necessary—the radiation doses from the machines were perfectly acceptable, they told us. We would just have to take their word for it. When concerned passengers—usually pregnant women—asked how much radiation the machines emitted and whether they were safe, we were instructed by our superiors to assure them everything was fine."

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/tsa-screener-confession-102912.html#ixzz3k2jzUltc

Urrrgghh. Airports are where all our failures to live up to the myth of America come into sharp relief. It's really scary that I feel a little trepidation writing this, like "someone" might see it and translate my irritation with TSA practices into violent intentions about the country at large, somehow.

I mean, the whole point of coming to America is not having to have those fears.

But my time in federal science policy did teach me that TSA is actually, now, working really hard to be innovative and they have this really cool idea collection program that's worth checking out right before going through security in order to feel a little less irritation. <link>