Fellow weblogger John Hoke had an interesting experience with the TSA yesterday while flying from LaGuardia to Dulles…
One screener asked to manually inspect one of my bags, knowing that I had nothing in it that was prohibited based on the TSA’s own site I allowed the search. This inspector found a lighter that I was given by my step daughter for our first Father’s Day together. It was a cigar lighter that did not run on Liquid Fuel, but gas. (Unabsorbed Liquid fueled lighters are prohibited based on the above PDF). He looked at it and exclaimed, “Wow I have always wanted one like this”. Then proceeded to tell me that he had to confiscate my lighter.
I calmly explained that it was not on the list of items that are prohibited on his own Department’s website. He replied he was allowed to use his judgement (what little of that there apparently is) and he was confiscating it. I requested to speak with his supervisor as he was not wearing any TSA identification, no name badge, not badge at all.
The supervisor came over and the screener was confiscating it, end of story. Tried to be helpful in that unhelpful supervisory way.
…I will be writing (and posting here) a letter to the TSA, even though I was told by the supervisor “Go ahead and complain, there is nothing you can do to us.”
Seems to me that this is pretty simple — petty thievery, compounded with harassment and the overbearing attitude that any amount of power will instill upon the small-minded. More and more, the TSA seems to be less concerned with actually providing any amount of security, merely using the power they’ve been granted to harass, humiliate, and steal from anyone coming through the gates of the airports. Sad.
And on a semi-related note, who comes up with these lists of what can and can’t be admitted on the airplanes? My mom came through Seattle on her way Florida from Anchorage a couple of months ago, and I was flabbergasted to see that she was allowed to bring her knitting needles on the airplane. Sure, “knitting needles” sounds innocuous enough — but these were two six-inch long metal spikes connected by an approximately eighteen inch metal wire. Two stabbing implements and a very effective garrote, in other words, should someone choose to use them as such. Yet these are allowed? Just bizarre.
Just watch what you take on the planes these days, folks — and hope you arrive at your destination with everything you left with.
iTunes: “Genauso Wie Ich (Future Pop)” by Beborn Beton from the album Tales From Another World (1994, 5:55).