The agents were passive-aggressive, rude, and tried to pressure me and another pregnant woman into just walking through the scanner because it’s “safe.”... Perhaps things would have gone more smoothly if I’d handed over my biometric data to a random private company (CLEAR). Then I could enjoy the special privilege of waiting in a shorter line to be treated like a terrorist in my own country. Is this freedom? Travel, brought to you by George Orwell....
Over at X, people keep razzing her about her father — Does she not know who her father is? — and she keeps telling them TSA is not part of the Transportation department but the DHS.
You may have noticed the blog has a theme today — creepiness — and this fits right in. It's not only that it's creepy to feel up pregnant women. (But what else are you going to do? Would everyone who identifies as pregnant get to bypass the screening, whatever they might be concealing inside that fake belly?) It's also the creepiness of the advertising image embedded in the NYT article:
What's going on there? It feels like it belongs in the Epstein files. Why is that bent-over, stringy-haired woman hiking up her own dress? It's a fashion ad. I know the (dead) designer's name, McQueen. But what feeling are we supposed to get? Something she's seeing through the keyhole is motivating her to expose her ass? It does heighten the anxiety around TSA searches.
I'm feeling like I never want to set foot in an airport again. I don't think I should ever experience the abuse that air travel requires you to agree to endure. It is by treating everyone the same that they can find the terrorist, so, yes, you too must be treated like a terrorist. What's the alternative? More risk? Ethnic profiling?
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Ah, the same agency that routinely fails to detect dummy bombs during training. So much of modern security measures are indistinguishable from bad security theatre.
Its expensive kabuki
Much of the govt is not only in this country
Man resembling Bondi gunman Naveed Akram caught on Philippines CCTV in mid-November - ABC News https://share.google/GLnPcorlHbs24UQ2X
We import terrorists. We create them through our foreign policy, wars, and airstrikes. And giving weapons to other countries to do wars and airstrikes.
But yeah no, that's a small price to pay for "Spreading Democracy".
What about the scummy people and their "therapy" dogs. Do the dogs have to go through screening?
I've seen multiple reports of TSA failing miserably at catching weapons and explosives when tested usually somewhere in the mid to high 90% failure rate, so why do we still have it? I know why, lack of courage. I doubt I would have the guts to end it if I had the power. I imagine people would go nuts, despite the fact that we never needed it for 70 years of commercial air travel.
It is and always was what most of government is at its core.
A jobs program for the politically favored and their union organizers. Processing your way through airports is just another way to take one for the team.
We're supposed to forget what it was like before all this happened.
She's saying: "Hey can you spare a square?"
Yes argenbright failed for a host of reasons
TSA makes air travel for me feel like the most vulnerable situation I ever accept. I feel unprotected, violated, untrusted, and unfree. It's great! In other words, the terrorists won.
She's hiking up her dress to get attention to the ad.
From the post:
"I'm feeling like I never want to set foot in an airport again. I don't think I should ever experience the abuse that air travel requires you to agree to endure. It is by treating everyone the same that they can find the terrorist, so, yes, you too must be treated like a terrorist. What's the alternative? More risk? Ethnic profiling?"
Two years ago, we flew from Dulles to Seattle to catch a cruise ship to Alaska. Minimal bags as we knew we'd have to buy an extra bag for the return trip in a rental car, to hold the booty from the shops along the way. Caught the first hotel shuttle to IAD, breezed through the checkpoint and had plenty of spare time.
I think it depends a lot on the personalities at the TSA gateway.
On the plane, we had a middle and an aisle seat. Guy at the window seat closed the shade and slept fir the whole flight, but we didn't miss much as Canadian smoke obscured the ground until we were in the approach pattern at Sea-Tac.
It was a memorable trip.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to have air marshals on every plane? Maybe have explosive sniffers you walk through at multiple key points throughout the airport like smoke alarms. I think this would be better than dancing robots.
I fly about 4-5 times a year in retirement.
TSA is really good at finding wine corkscrews that have no use as a weapon, but they have never found the scissors I put in my toiletry bag.
The US is not unique in this respect. I experienced similar pre-boarding procedures in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Czechia, Portugal, and Canada.
Even without TSA, you would be in more danger on your drive to the airport. Then again, Biden did let in tens of thousands of unvetted military age men with terrorist ties, so maybe the calculation has changed. I sure miss that guy, and that wonderful Mayorkas character too. Lovable Americans that served us all. "It's a cook book!"
Perhaps she is the alternative to Achilles's Pinochet.
"EVITA 2036! CRY FOR YOURSELVES, LEFTIES!"
(she was born in '99. Have to wait a bit.) CC, JSM
Went to a concert in Dublin's Croke Park many years ago and my sister in law concealed a 4 liter bag of wine in her overalls. She looked so convincingly pregnant that security ushered us all past the main entrance where people were having their bags searched. They did express disapproval of her coming to the concert so heavily pregnant.
I am TSA Approved Pre-check... JUST SO I DON'T GET PATTED DOWN... Why isn't she get Pre-check???
Got a counter-narrative to share on TSA, who I used to hate. I was flying out of Spokane this fall without the new RealID they require because I’d not gotten one due to sloth. So I brought along my birth certificate, my expired (one month) passport, and other papers. The woman I met said, No problem, the passport still works, etc. She was super nice and helpful. Same thing on the other end flying out of South Bend. I think the TSA has gotten much nicer since Trump. Maybe there’s no connection but that was my first thought and I’m sticking with it.
Diversity, Equivocation, and Indifference (DEI) is a fetus... feature of the Critical Bloc Theory of human life... and minority report. Throw another baby on the barbie, it's over.
A voyeur with a creeping dress. #NoJudgment #NoLabels #LustWins
"What's the alternative? More risk? Ethnic profiling?"
El Al was once the world's most often hijacked carrier. Now, it is the most secure. Israeli airport security makes TSA look like exactly what it is, a make-work project for congenital idiots, and they profile rather than humiliate. Furthermore, El Al planes are more secure, because the attendants are trained and equipped to cope with threats, and there are other confidential security measures in place as well. Let's just say that no one can hijack an El Al flight with box-cutters.
Last year, I missed a connecting flight because of a disturbance caused by loud and obviously hammered woman. She was somewhere toward the back, but I couldn't see her, but I could hear very thing she shouted clearly. It took the airport police to remove her. If I made the rules, airport bars that carelessly fuel such behavior would share the liability for these incidents. You say ya wanna fourth martoonie, lady? Get out!
I flew for 20 years with a little Leatherman Micra attached to my house key. Its a small pocket knife. I put it in my carry on bag, and no one ever said a word.
That is, until I went through the checkpoint in Kalamazoo,MI. I thought I was going to spend the night in jail. This was 2019, and I explained that I had flown dozens of times with that tool in my bag. No dice.
This makes no sense at all.
And thanks for the TSA, George W!! Jackass…
TSA is not the problem. Diversity, Equivocation, and Indemnity (DEI) is.
I carry a small Swiss Army knife (the blade is about 1 1/4" long), it has a toothpick in it which comes in handy regularly. One time, I forgot to leave the pocket knife in the car and it was confiscated by TSA. They were okay with letting my mechanical pencil through, though. It's about 6" long and has a steel tip pointy enough to stab someone in the heart.
The airlines love it. It establishes an environment of submission to orders. Because it's administered by the government, the airlines have no liabilities for negligence, invasion of privacy, or racial sexual, or religious discrimination. It prevents people from bringing alcohol on board. The airlines have no exposure to the myriad of employment law problems in managing a workforce of that magnitude. TSA is here to stay.
El Al security involves behavioral intelligence, which allows them to avoid the Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class bigotry) trap laid for women conceived as the female sex and feminine gender pregnant with a fetus... baby of equitable and loving inclusion.
So, knee replacement in late September, and I flew to and from California in early November. Breezed through security in Houston on the outbound flight, but in Sacramento on the way back, it set off the machine and I had to be wanded.
On that outbound flight, I'd deliberately worn wide-leg jeans so I could pull up the leg and show the scar if needed, but on the way back, suffused with confidence, I wore different jeans that couldn't be pulled up over my calf. I was very glad the wand worked so I didn't have to drop trou in the security line.
People in systems do not do what the system says they are doing. It's quite general, part of the genes of systems.
A womb of mass destruction? She may be carrying the next Mao, Cecile, Mengele, or a "burden" of social inconvenience. Alas not the last.
If you are going to hijack a plane, you know exactly what they are looking for and what they are not. I'd prefer TSA be less numerous, undercover, armed and well trained with great intelligence streaming to them, rather than numerous, poorly trained, poorly equipped and incapable of doing anything too far from the food court. The money has been and is being spent poorly. The goal is spending, not safety.
Why has there not been any more terrorist attacks on airplanes? I don't know. Maybe the locked cockpits and knowledge of how people on flight 93 reacted makes success unlikely now, but I know that hand held weapons that could easily bring one down without getting on the plane are readily available to the thousands of terrorists already here, and they haven't done that either. My only explanation is that maybe the U.S. makes the cost of doing it too expensive for the people who would fund and plan it. Maybe.
Coming through Kennedy in NYC, i was basically painfully sexually assaulted by TSA when my artificial hip set off the metal detector. They must see hundreds of people like me a month. Is this their weird kink?
Hijackings were a thing in the 70’s. They stopped without any big change in airport security. 9/11 was a 1-off, it worked because people were told to cooperate. People don’t cooperate anymore. Flight 93 proved that. The shoe bomber proved that. The underwear bomber proved that.
What's the alternative? More risk?
The alternative is to recognize reality—that the TSA does virtually nothing to make us safer. The alternative is to return to pre-9/11 security measures and still be safe while flying.
My husband and I watched "Die Hard" a few evenings ago. The opening airplane/airport scenes have a regular passenger carrying a handgun in his belt on the plane, as if that were a common event, a lot of cigarette smoking, and no airport screening or security.
Weren't plane hijackings pioneered by Arafat?
Actually waddi haddad a kgb operariive
My wife takes her knitting needles with her all the time. Apparently there is some sort of exception (for women of a certain age?). I don't know how it works, but I would not want to be the TSA agent who tells her that she has to throw them away and can't knit on a 5 hour flight.
Makes zero sense to me. A terrorist with a knitting needle is just as dangerous as a terrorist with a pocketknife.
Its meant to be fiction
Gruber is based on those red army faction leaders at mogadishu and entebbe
"the abuse that air travel requires you to agree to endure" Recent travel suggests the abuse has diminished.
"It is by treating everyone the same" Under liberalism, that's always the problem. Can't focus on young Muslims, or in the case of crime: blacks.
"Ethnic profiling?" Of course. But better to let everyone suffer to protect tender prog feelings and "civil rights."
If incredibly sexy white men who never seem to age were the ethnic group doing the hijacking, I would have no problem letting the rest of you skip TSA so they could frisk me.
Middle Eastern men should have same selfless attitude.
Like the model assassins in zoolander
I notice there's no comparison to the Joy of TSA protocols in the past. Just that, if it's bad now, it's all Trump's fault. Politics *spits over left shoulder*. Our experience traveling internationally a few days ago was that it's much faster than it was a few years ago, and the agents seemed a lot more amiable. I put the former down to advances in scanning capabilities.
Then treat terrorists not from this country like terrorists.
Remember: all this draconian NSA crap started because all the leftists like Hillary, disgraced pedophile Elliot Spitzer, Schumer, Ramsey Clarke, Barbara Boxer, traitor Jack Murtha, terrorists orgs ACLU and NLG bitched and moaned that profiling people coming from countries post 9-11 from countries sponsoring Islamic terorrism was bad because ::checks notes:: it was unfair to the Islamic terrorists.
That's why NSA had to treat usnall that way.
We can't have nice things because leftists can't be nice.
https://pjmedia.com/richard-fernandez/2025/12/19/belmont-club-bondi-is-not-past-but-prologue-n4947234
A dog sniff after the bags have been loaded and the passengers seated would be just as effective. Replace TSA screeners with K9 platoons. Lack of checkpoint backups and people milling around hours before their flight would reduce the target value in the terminal. Yes, there's a chance someone would blow a device while the plane is on the ground, but it won't make the plane fall - you'd have fewer casualties. Ditto if someone hijacks the plane on the ground - you can block the taxiway so it never becomes a missile. CC, JSM
When the americans caught a bunch of these aussie teerorists they whined and sued and we sent them back
Try being a diabetic using an insulin pump and a Dexcom (continuous glucose monitoring device) . My pump can’t go through any of the screening devices, so i need to remove it (lifting my shirt to access it on my abdomen) and have it and all my Dexcom supplies hand screened. No insulin delivery while it is disconnected from my body. In the past, the Dexcom connected to my body (non-removable) also could not go through any of the screening devices, although that has changed with my newer version. However, previously, when i told a TSA agent that i needed to be hand screened, he said “No you don’t; you can go through the x-ray machine.” We had an extended back-and-forth: yes you can, no I can’t, until I said “Maybe you’re willing to bet my life on it, but I’m not.” Then i got the pat-down. I have many funny and/or enraging stories about TSA encounters as a traveling diabetic. That said, i do think TSA agents have become more amiable and polite.
David Hicks: Australia violated his rights by jailing him after Guantanamo transfer - UN experts | OHCHR https://share.google/w3nfKFL04qIhPGD56
Someone should do a study on who is harassed the most by TSA to see if it really is fair and unbiased, which only dumb people insist on. I would be willing to bet that the demographics most responsible for hijacking are the least harassed, and we all know why. The most harassed are likely the people who are the easiest to mess with, the ones less likely to be confrontational, the ones without a race card.
Don't they have women feeling up women?
Maybe the McQueen model is looking back at the guy looking through the keyhole of her mind.
I paid the requested $50 for TSA pre-screening. It allows me to use a shorter line, and avoid removing my shoes and removing my laptop from the case.
I also have four sets of metal in my body.
At one checkpoint, I was directed to go to the "normal" line for screening, as the pre-check line did not have the proper equipment for screening me. They forced me to remove my shoes, open my laptop, etc.
I respectfully asked for my $50 back. This was not received well.
Well, her father has been pushing everyone to wear their Sunday best for their official government sexual molestation and crappy air travel experience.
A sign a young woman may have experienced SA is that they stop dressing well and wear baggy clothes. Not unlike how people have come to dress for air travel since the inception of the TSA.
air travel has become like the proverbial wagon train with elements of pirate ship,
What's the alternative? More risk?
It worked very well in the days before we allowed radical leftists to run wild in the 70’s, and inexplicably imported massive numbers of inassimilable, hostile Muslim foreigners in the 90’s that continued and even accelerated after 9/11/01.
Ethnic profiling?
That works beautifully for El Al. The Israelis don’t give a shit for political correctness and performative multiculturalism.
This is my preferred option.
Evita has never done jury duty. Entering the courtroom, your possessions are fondled far more than any TSA agent, and you'll be treated like a violent criminal if a single pointy object (like a nail file) is found on your person. I'm all of 5' tall, WTF am I going to do with a nail file?
Then, after being treated as if you are there to murder someone, you'll be shown a film in the jury room with a completely different message: "You are the only thing standing between society and chaos!!!!"
Wait, 30 minutes ago you wouldn't trust me with a nail file, but you trust me on a jury. FFS!!!!
certainly the cracked panopticon, that arose out of 9'11 didn't help, first it was the shoes because of richard reid, then liquids because of the transatlantic plot, then the full body because of the underwear bomber
Hassayamper: "Ethnic profiling?/That works beautifully for El Al. "
My understanding is the Israelis do behavioral profiling and interrogation by trained, experienced interviewers. They can't really do ethnic profiling: on the enemy side, some of the biggest terrorist attacks were done by non-Arabs, such as the Japanese Red Army. Plus Arabs can look like anyone: it's more of a complex cultural identity, like being Latino. And of course the biggest Jewish body count was piled up by blue eyed blonds. On the friendly side, Jews can look like anyone. The current military-age Israeli generation is very dark Sephardic and North African, and grew up with Arabic speaking parents - look up some IDF footage. The elite Israeli intelligence units penetrate Arab neighborhoods all the time.
So the Israelis rely on much more than the passenger's looks or what their passport says.
And I am pretty sure they do conventional magnetometer/X-ray screening, too. CC, JSM
I've had two all metal hips for 25-years. Got pat downs and wanded all the time. If you act like a compliant happy stoic, the TSA folks treat you very very well. I have never had a bad experience. Just don't be an entitled brat.
Quaestor said:
"El Al was once the world's most often hijacked carrier."
***************************
El Al was actually the least successfully hijacked major airline during the '60s and '70, despite being one of the most targeted.
Only ONE successful hijacking in its entire history - El Al Flight 426 on July 23, 1968
I remember the pre-TSA days when I’d always flying with a vial of coke in my backpack. Hey, don’t judge - it helped with anxiety… lol
Easiest version of the trolly problem ever.
Just flew back from France and the flight was delayed because someone got held up at passport control, he finally got on. Well I am pretty sure he got profiled, and it wasn’t even Trump's goons at the TSA
I flew last year for the first time since TSA was established- and the last time until it disappears. Got body searched because I had (GASP!) xylitol in my carryon. And it triggered the chemical detector!
So I stood there being patted down while a female TSA agent far more more likely to spontaneously explode in her full hijab observed, looking for likely terrorists, no doubt. Whether to assist them getting through or stop them is up for debate...
TSA is useless. As anyone in quality control can tell you, checking every product (inspecting every person) yields poorer quality control then random testing or testing based on observing easily visible anomalies.
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