Never mind the man behind the curtain

When I worked for TSA, the red team tried three times to get stuff past me, and I caught them all three times. How did I beat the odds so spectacularly? If the overall success rate is only 5 percent, how did I achieve 100 percent? Yes, the red teams were sometimes able to get prohibited items through 100 percent of the time, because the detection methods we used were not designed to detect the threat chosen by the red team. I would like to know what they're doing now to fool the screeners 95 percent of the time. They could do it by presenting threats the equipment and procedures are not capable of detecting. They used to do that all the time, and they would sometimes get the same threat past the screeners time after time after time.

I realize people like to make fun of TSA officers, with comments about minimum wage dropouts and such, but the real problems lie elsewhere. The training is poor. The tests do not always relate to the real threats. The detection equipment is not capable of picking up certain things. Morale is low, and turnover is high. There are too many managers and supervisors who should not be managing or supervising anything. The high failure rate is exactly what one would expect from a poorly trained workforce, using ineffective equipment.

circulating amongst various TSA groups,that all this garbage about failure rates is to set the agency up for Privatization and taken over by Securitas of Switzerland. Stories about lousy or zero training and up training are very true. Turn over is going through the roof and good old Delta is loving it.

There were originally some pretty sharp people attracted to TSA. Most of them are in the first three "waves" of people hired when the agency was established. And most of them are gone, discouraged by promises not kept. You are probably right about privatization. Once things go private, the company or companies will simply jimmy the results to look favorable.

close friend of a Union Organizer. Sounds like the moral has gone in the crapper at most airports.

It has nothing to do with "security."

My brother, who is even more likely to say out loud what he's thinking than I am, has been "punished" with secondary inspections several time now. (He's the most gentle soul I know, an artist creating new interpretations of old motorcycles and other mechanical things.)

I hate flying to begin with.

I don't like being crammed into a pressurized aluminum tube with my knees pressed up against the seat in front of me, hurtling through the air at 450 miles per hour. I don't like being scrutinized as a weird evasive person either. Yes, this is my laptop held together with hot glue and yellow duct tape booting Linux to the command line, and it does look suspicious to someone expecting a Windows Desktop.

startx

The last time I flew they swabbed my computer down with magic explosive detecting stuff, which might have turned out badly given some of my scientific and horticultural interests, which sometimes involve a few very tightly wound nitrogen compounds.

That is about it LOL

I personally think it's because I'm fat.

TSA is there to give a false sense of security to the traveling public.

Airport security has done this since the 70s.

Disclaimer, I worked airport security for a time in the 90s.

Come on, what exactly is the probability of a 95-year old grandma being a terrorist? And look at the TSA woman, she is just loving every minute of it. Some people just absolutely revel in making life miserable for others and throwing their weight around. And lots of these people end up working for the TSA.

my dad was at our house on a Sunday evening. He shouted for me to come watch 60 Minutes because "I saw your mother on TV". He saw her on the promo and sure enough, when they aired the piece on the TSA, there was my mother in her wheel chair as she was being searched.

The guy literally sat there and rifled through my standard deck of cards for a good 15min. Its not like I felt violated or anything, but how on earth do they choose to dick around with a deck of cards for so long and fail 95% of the time someone has a fake bomb?