TSA Says Screening Drinks Purchased Inside Airport Terminal Is Nothing New 427
First time accepted submitter lcam writes in with a story about a video that has started a new round of condemnation against the TSA over the testing of drinks. "The video, posted on YouTube on Monday and featured on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams Tuesday night, has already garnered almost 125,000 hits and nearly 900 comments from angry travelers. It shows two TSA officers swabbing bottles of water, a carton of coconut water and a cup of coffee, among other liquids. 'Now remember that this is inside the terminal, well beyond the security check and purchased inside the terminal ... just people waiting to get on the plane,' YouTube user danno02 says in the video's description. 'My wife and son came back from a coffee shop just around the corner, then we were approached. I asked them what they were doing. One of the TSA ladies said that they were checking for explosive chemicals (as we are drinking them).' The TSA insisted Tuesday that its policy of checking liquids beyond the security gate has been in place for five years now. TSA agents will randomly patrol the gates using a test strip and dropper containing a non-toxic solution, it said."
non-toxic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the strip and solution really non-toxic? Will TSA provide independent test lab results to prove it? (unlike the poorly tested backscatter x-ray machines)?
If they have a reliable test to determine if a liquid is hazardous or not, then how about letting me bring liquids through the checkpoints?
TSA security theater story of the day:
On a recent flight from IAD, just before the flight started boarding, the gate agent announced "Please have your ID available for inspection, TSA will be conduction random ID checks and baggage searches upon boarding". And sure enough, as we boarded, there was a TSA guy with his magic flashlight, randomly checking ID's for validity, and farther into the jetway was a pair of TSA agents randomly searching luggage.
What's the point of a random check if it's announced when passengers can choose not to participate? If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
Random swabbing (Score:5, Interesting)
The real reason for this is to make you, the idiot public, feel safe by having some random person in a uniform approach you and proceed to do something vaguely scientific-looking while assuring you that you're very safe here. See, you're safe because we're doing this thing of dubious value, but we're dressed in uniforms that command authority.
If you want to see this first hand, dress up in a suit, wear an official-looking nametag (it needs to have a BIG official-looking gold seal on it) covered in laminate, and then walk around a commercial building telling people what to do. Tell them men's room is closed and everyone has to use the women's (or vice versa). Stand in front of an elevator and tell people it's out of order (even as people exit from right behind you). Now, take it to Troll Level 99 by getting a couple of your friends involved in it: Come up with something completely outrageous (claim you're an USDA food inspector and need to look at anyone carrying a sandwich while in front of a cafe), and make sure your friends agree to do whatever you're doing. Then demand the same of other random people. Take a bite out of their sandwich and then tell them it's "acceptable" and let them go. You can have one of your friends object, at which point you eat the entire sandwich and treaten to write them a citation for interfering in official inspector business.
You'd be surprised just how far you can take it. I mean, you can basically rob someone of everything they own, and as long as other people are complicit to allow it, they'll just fold in like a deck of cards. No. I really mean it. But don't do it since it's unethical. But they do, they really do. :(
Human Intelligence? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read a comment on one of the other sites carrying this story that the test itself was of minor interest to the TSA - instead the goal is to talk to more passengers in order to gain "human intelligence." To these cynical ears, that sounds like exactly the kind of half-baked plan the TSA would come up with. Somebody thought it would be a clever way for their "behaviour profilers" to have an excuse to "profile" people without obviously creeping them out.
My personal experience is that I've flown once in the last 8 years, and the one time I did fly one of those TSA guys tried to talk me up while I was in line. It was uber-creepy - I spent the next hour trying to figure out if the guy was just naturally creepy or if he been trying "profile" me. Either way I did my best to say as little as possible to the guy and just get on past the checkpoint as quickly as possible. Talking up someone while you both wait a minute or two for the "test strip" to change color is probably going to be less obviously creepy. Still assinine and utterly ineffective, but less creepy.
Re:non-toxic? (Score:0, Interesting)
If I were a bad guy with a fake ID or something bad in my luggage, I'd go home and try again a different day with a different fake ID.
You know you don't need an ID to fly nationally, right?
Re:How do you know it's a TSA agent? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the other TSA agents presumably WOULD know.
Would they? How long would it take to discover the rogue TSA agent? If TSA tactics are always changing and no one knows what's real and what isn't, maybe the bad guy would have time to visit all the patrons of an airport restaraunt and infect their drinks before slipping away unnoticed.
Or maybe the bad guy is a real TSA agent and slips the virus into another agent's vial, and that agent goes around infecting people without even knowing it.
Or, to really spread terror, the bad guy can just dump a TSA uniform and some testing vial half full of Anthrax (or whatever can be transmitted though liquids) in an airport restroom where it will be discovered. Then TSA won't know how many people may have been infected.
Do it in more than one airport and they won't even know how many airports it happened in.
The bad guy doesn't actually have to do anything bad to shut down air travel nationwide - just dump some clothes and a vial in a restroom stall.
This is where TSA's security theater could come back to bite them - when they rely on so much showmanship, all it takes is a different kind of showman to make them look incompetent. No amount of TSA spin is going to help when news crews are in several different airports across the country showing discarded TSA uniforms and speculating about what could have been going on. And if TSA suddenly announces "We will no longer be testing liquids", people will wonder why they were testing them in the first place if they can suddenly stop testing them.
Re:Random swabbing (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>If you want to see this first hand, dress up in a suit, wear an official-looking nametag (it needs to have a BIG official-looking gold seal on it) covered in laminate
I saw this on a plane recently. As I was getting off I put on my workbadge, since I knew I was going directly to my job. When I said "excuse me" people looked at my badge and said, "Oh certainly sir" or "yes sir" and let me get past them in the aisle. My seat was close to the rear, but by using this technique I ended-up as one of the first persons off the plane.
That wasn't part of my original plan, but just happened to work out.
Re:The TSA needs to be stopped (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we sue the TSA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Random swabbing (Score:4, Interesting)
So behind the Times America (Score:4, Interesting)
Swabbing? LOL..
measures (Score:2, Interesting)
If you dislike the TSA, please expend the small amount of time and calories to:
1) reduce your airline flights as much as possible and notify an airline in writing ("I estimate that I've avoided spending $1800 this year alone on plane tickets, and have instead spent about $2100 and more time on other forms of travel, in order to avoid the TSA treatment.")
2) write to a congressperson to complain
3) always POLITELY request to be hand searched rather than scanned, and try to POLITELY take up as much as their time as you can
4) try to carry many completely innocent items which they must remove or scan -- things like a bottle of coke, etc.
This takes many, many of us doing it to have the desired effect.
Re:non-toxic? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was recently at a convention. A lot of the vendors gave out these bouncy balls full of some strange liquid and glitter. I threw them in my backpack and forgot about them. I was able to pass though security with 11 of them in my bag. Yes, 11 baseball sized balls of liquid.