TSA Agent Confession

Politico ^ | 1/31/2014 | Jason Edward Harrington

[12th_Monkey]

My pained relationship with government security had started three years earlier. I had just returned to Chicago to finish my bachelor’s degree after a two-year stint in Florida. I needed a job to help pay my way through school, and the TSA’s call-back was the first one I received. It was just a temporary thing, I told myself—side income for a year or two as I worked toward a degree in creative writing. It wasn’t like a recession would come along and lock me into the job or anything.

It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism of U.S foreign policy; by day, I spent eight hours at O’Hare in a federal uniform, solemnly carrying out orders passed down from headquarters.

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.

(please see article at the link)

[Jotmo]

“Every now and then, a passenger would throw up two middle fingers during his or her scan,”

I had to go through O’Hare every two weeks for five years. I let them know my opinion of them in this maner every time they made me go through one of those things.

I’m glad I was not the only one.

[12th_Monkey]

Love Weaselzippers, I need to get by their more often.

[12th_Monkey]

thats a heck of a lot of body scans.