by
Michael Tennant
The
New American

Recently
by Michael Tennant: Boehner:
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“Anyone boarding
an aircraft should feel maybe only a teeny tiny bit safer than
if there were no TSA at all.”

The author
of those words should know: He (or she) used to be a Transportation
Security Administration (TSA) screener at Newark Liberty International
Airport in Newark, New Jersey. An article by this anonymous former
screener in the New
York Post paints a devastating portrait of an agency
that employs incompetents, enforces arbitrary regulations, and
engages in what security expert Bruce Schneier calls “security
theater”: public actions taken in the name of security that actually
do nothing to make people safer.

Government
officials often call TSA screeners “a first-class line of defense
in the war on terror,” observes the author. In fact, the author
points out, one needn’t even have a high school diploma or GED
to get a job as a screener. “These are the employees who could
never keep a job in the private sector. I wouldn’t trust them
to walk my dog.”

Most screeners
aren’t really concerned with airport security, the author says.
They are there for the paycheck – $15 an hour to start, plus
“tons of overtime” filling in for no-shows – and the benefits,
including generous amounts of vacation and sick time and a near
impossibility of being fired unless they get caught stealing from
passengers. Supervisors, it seems, care little about what screeners
do – as long as they don’t chew gum on duty.

Another
benefit (for male screeners): “a lot of ogling of female passengers.”
The author advises women to “cover up when you get to the airport.
These guys are checking you out constantly.” Of course, covering
up won’t do you much good when you go through the scanners that
show your naked body to the screeners anyway.

The former
screener states that there are a few “delusional zealots who believe
they’re keeping America safe by taking your snow globe, your 2-inch
pocket knife, your 4-ounce bottle of shampoo and performing invasive
pat-downs on your kids.” The rest “know their job is a complete
joke.”

The rules
are arbitrary, he argues, and the pat-downs are “ridiculous.”
“As invasive as it is, you still can’t find anything using the
back of your hand on certain areas.” Some screeners, embarrassed
to be patting down children or wheelchair-bound seniors, just
give them a quick once-over to make it look like they’re doing
something; otherwise, the entire terminal would have to be shut
down until the individual who wasn’t groped was located.

Then there
are the stories of TSA screeners’ strip
searching grandmas, examining (and sometimes breaking)
passengers’ urostomy and colostomy bags, and exposing
the breasts of teenage girls, just to name a few outrages.
Whenever one of these incidents occurs, the TSA’s first defense
is usually to claim that proper procedures were followed; later,
when the affront to human decency becomes so obvious it cannot
be denied, the agency blames the screeners for not following procedures.
This is nonsense, writes the ex-screener: “Every time you read
about a TSA horror story, it’s usually about a screener doing
what he or she is instructed to do.”