TSA agents are drinking your alcohol


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Even airport TSA agents don't really believe they're making much of a difference. Or so suggests Jason Harrington, a former Transportation Security Administration employee who's written a revealing piece for Politico on what it's like to work for the agency on the ground floor. Harrington writes that many of his coworkers found their orders questionable, from selecting people for enhanced screenings based on their nationality to the broad use of full-body scanners. Harrington also writes that he also hated that the job made him pat down children and the elderly and confiscate everything from nail clippers to homemade jellies under the guise of national security.

 

TSA agents reportedly didn't take the job all that seriously in many cases too. Harrington writes that those tasked with analyzing imagines from full-body scanners often didn't pay attention or would crack jokes about passengers' bodies. In part, that may have been because the agents Harrington worked with didn't really care for the machines in the first place: they didn't like the idea of being around radiation all day, and they were among the first to realize that Rapiscan Systems' full-body scanners weren't very effective at identifying smuggled weapons.

 

If Harrington's stories sound familiar, that's because you may have read pieces of them before: he's run the blog Taking Sense Away for a couple years now, anonymously sharing his and others' experiences working with the TSA. His publication in Politico this week is this first time Harrington has identified himself, and he's already using the exposure to share some added insights:

 

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5364860/tsa-agent-culture-crude-jokes-questioned-orders

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with the **** they have to put up with on a daily basis, people should thankful they're only drinking alcohol and not all out destroying property.

 

Topic title has only one small blurb at the bottom about "drinking your alcohol". Sensationalist title to get readers. :/

 

yup, it's just a tweet anyway. not even part of the article itself

 

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I don't know why anyone is even remotely surprised. A while back it was shown that a high ranking executive of RapiScan systems now works for the TSA...and guess who RapiScan's biggest customer is?

I've seen people sitting at the gate, all of whom got through security at Orlando International, with screwdrivers and once even a ######ing switchblade.

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