The Seattle TSA are the most belligerent, rudest, and least professional of the TSA flunkies I've encountered since flying post-9/11. They're also slower and less efficient than those agents at airports in which you might expect to experience more of a bottleneck, such as JFK-NY, Miami, and San Juan, PR.
They come by it honestly, I suppose, given that Seattleites in general are fatally passive-aggressive and endowed with vastly inflated and elitist senses of self-worth. (Yes, I'm a Seattle native.)
Read the infuriating original story, too. Yeah, I'll be triple-checking my luggage when the 22nd rolls around.
Update: Hitchens has more.
3 comments:
I'm not infuriated, except at the reporter for writing so simplistic a story. So what if she's categorized as this or that? What are the consequences and how bad are they? How costly or prudent would it be to have a system of appeal, and how easy should it be to appeal? We don't want knives on airplanes. If somebody brings a knife on once, it makes sense to me to be sure to look at them closely subsequent times they travel. But I guess perhaps there should also be a system of "good terrorist" points which you get each time you travel with a weapon and don't use it.... Anyway, it was a simplistic and reactionary news story.
It wasn't the terrorist watch list thing that raised my dander; it was this:
She says screeners refused to give her paperwork or documentation of her violation, documentation of the pending fine, or a copy of the photograph of the knife.
"They said 'no' and they said it's a national security issue. And I said what about my constitutional rights? And they said 'not at this point ... you don't have any'."
Hence the quoted comment.
So they didn't give her a souvenir of her ordeal. What good would it have done? We don't know. We also don't know that the event has gone undocumented or that she'd be denied access to evidence were she to formally appeal her listing...to the extent appeal is possible. It does suggest the screening "industry" is "customer unfriendly" or mightily insensitive, and I can see that would infuriate some, but what I sensed needed challenging was infuriation on an inference of simple unfairness. I don't think the news story cared which way it infuriated people.
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