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Being a TSA officer is a dream job for sadistic sociopaths, but for people who are able to sympathize, it’s a nightmare. “I hated it from the beginning,” writes former TSA officer Jason Edward Harrington, in an essay published in Politico Magazine. He recounts the daily shame of having to confiscate nail clippers from pilots (to prevent the pilots from using them to “hijack the very planes they were flying”), jars of homemade apple butter (“on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security”) and a bottle of champagne from some Marines returning home from Afghanistan who wanted to share it with a young soldier who’d lost his legs to an I.E.D.
He also admits everyone at the TSA “knew the [$150,000] full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed.”
Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines.
“They’re s—,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket.
Confessions of a former TSA officer
(The useless full body scanners turned out to be lucrative for former U.S. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who “wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post advocating the full-body scanning systems without disclosing that Rapiscan Systems was a client of his [private consulting] firm.”)