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Live Q&A With Ex-TSA Agent Jason Harrington
Jason Harrington (@Jas0nHarringt0n) is a controversial blogger, frequent contributor to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and one of the TSA's least favorite ex-employees. His descriptions of life on the job as a TSA agent caused some big waves and restarted a national discussion on security theater. Jason will be answering your questions below for the next couple of hours, or until the security line starts moving again. Please keep it to one question per post so everyone gets a chance.
Update: 03/01 02:11 GMT by S : Jason has finished up for now — you can skip to his answers at his user page, or simply browse the comments to read everything. Thanks Jason for answering our questions!
How much influence does a random TSA agent have over your ability to fly or move about the airport? In other words, if somebody takes a dislike to you, can they arbitrarily make your life difficult, or are their checks to prevent this.
Generally, as far as official memos coming down from D.C., the only news stories that caused official reactions were those that the TSA officially acknowledged and responded to in the press. As far as the local level, it varied from supervisor to supervisor, manager to manager. Managers and supervisors at TSA are mostly terrible, most TSA employees will tell you, and tend to just pull issues out of their asses that they want to harangue their subordinates over. Sometimes they would decide that they wanted to make a big deal out of some news story concerning misbehaving TSA employees, so yes, then those stories would affect us. Sometimes they would decide that they wanted to make sure no TSA officers in the entire airport were chewing gum at any time while on duty.
Hi Jason, and thanks in advance for answering these questions.
I am physically unable to use the scanners, both the X-ray and the millimeter-wave radar. I have been advised that I am therefore medically exempt, and am entitled to be screened by only the metal detector without any direct-contact search. I have TSA's standard notification card that I give to the person at the WTMD, informing them of the nature of my issue, and I also tell them verbally that I am medically exempt. Half the time they wave me through the WTMD (and half of that time, conduct an explosives test on my hands). The other half of the time, the TSA person gives me a LOT of grief in an effort to force me into either the scanner or the enhanced pat-down. So far, eventually they step away for a few minutes, then someone else comes along and waves me through the WTMD.
What phrasing do you recommend I use, both on the card and by speaking, when I initially notify the screening person of my situation, to skip the part where the TSA person gives me grief?
There are many airports across the U.S. that actually went privatized-- the cities decided they didn't want TSA anymore. SFO, San Francisco, is one example. The government regulates and monitors the private firms at those airports to make sure they're up to federal requirements. I believe private firms do just about everything more cheaply. And I can't imagine they would be any less effective than TSA. I used to think that every TSA employee should have the right to make judgement calls on the job-- to use common sense. To look at a jar of peanut butter, look at the owner, size up the situation, and say "This can go on the plane. You and your peanut butter aren't a threat, despite what the official rules say." I wrote a letter to the New York Times saying as much; I framed it in terms of allowing TSA screeners the ability to use behavior detection on the job to help make judgement calls. But I eventually realized I was wrong; I eventually came to regret most of what I said in the letter to the Times, at least about behavior detection. Quite frankly, the majority of TSA employees aren't the brightest stars in the galaxy. Many of them are perfectly intelligent, perfectly nice people. But the majority are not, in my experience. To be frank, I think it would be a really bad idea to give the entire TSA workforce the power to make judgement calls and arbitrarily decide who gets pulled aside for extra screening, and who doesn't. I think the TSA should lift the liquids ban, allow everyone to keep shoes on, sell most of the body scanners. Maybe one scanner per checkpoint, only, to be used on a random basis. They should basically tell the public, "OK. We're lifting those restrictions, but just know that we can and will be randomly testing shoes, liquids, and randomly selecting passengers for full body scans (which they can opt out of for a pat-down, instead." Just the possibility of having your shoes tested would likely deter you from bothering to risk a half-assed shoe bomb attempt on an airline. You'd hit a mall or something instead, if you were a terrorist. Bruce Schneier talks about all of this on his blog, and has for years. There are so few terrorists out there in a position to actually inflict harm that it's just stupid to waste much time or money worrying about it. It's irrational. Confiscating people's bottled water is not going to make a terrorist say, "Welp. There goes my terrorist dreams. Guess I'll give up." He or she is going to just hit another target, or work around the TSA's rules. The money we waste with all this theatrical fretting over liquids (and losing perfectly good liquids) would be better spent trying to address any of the 5,000 things that cause more deaths than terrorism in the U.S. every year. The best I could come up with as far as behavior detection goes would be to scale the behavior detection program way back, and focus on having just one person certified in behavior detection on each checkpoint. Say, a supervisor. That person would be given the very serious responsibility of being allowed to bend TSA rules on a case-by-case basis-- to use common sense, based on his or her analysis of a passenger's behavior and situation. He or she would be paid more due to that responsibility (like supervisors are), but would also be in hot water if he or she abused that power/responsibility
The liquids, food items,flammable material and such-- stuff that you couldn't legally ship out for auction-- gets disposed of as hazardous material, at a hazardous material disposal site. This is one of the most common questions as far as senseless TSA rules go-- "If my stuff is supposedly dangerous, then why is it just sitting right there in a disposal bin on the checkpoint after I surrender it?" TSA would officially say that the items that are placed right there in bins on checkpoints after being surrendered are items that have been determined to not be the implements of a terrorist attempt, but rather, potentially dangerous stuff that is just being tucked away out of reach of the public, where it can't be brought through and potentially commandeered by people with malicious intent. But, a closer look at the way a checkpoint usually operated in practical terms, with a full passenger load coming through fast and furious, like at Chicago O'hare, LAX, or JFK, betrays holes in this logic. So you bring a liquid through that could potentially be hydrogen peroxide or liquid nitrogen, as far as the TSA is concerned. That liquid looks like a bottle of water. The TSA agent tells you that you can't bring it through, since large amounts of liquids could potentially be deadly explosives. The agent throws it in the bin right there on the checkpoint. This would maybe make sense, if the TSA agents tested the liquids each and every time before they threw it away to make sure that it wasn't an explosive. But in a busy airport, this almost never happens. The lines would be out the doors if the agents took the time to actually test every single bottle of water or Diet Coke that came through. So almost all of them end up just throwing it away, without testing it. That's what really betrays it as pure theater. Several security experts have noticed that this actually creates large security holes, in certain circumstances. There are hypothetical situations, which are completely plausible, in which a terrorist could simply bring bottles of liquid to an airport every time he or she flies, watch as the TSA mindlessly throws it away 3 out of 4 times, until they got through on the 4th time without having the liquid tested, due to an inattentive x-ray operator.
I would say the all around most interesting weird thing that occasionally shows up would be exotic pets. People trying to bring exotic baby snakes from the U.S. to Britain, for example. There were cases of that happening at O'Hare, I was on the checkpoint for a snake smuggling situation, someone had a bag of baby snakes taped to his leg, I believe it turned out to be. This happens at airports around the world fairly frequently. I sometimes write for Cracked.com, and in googling this, I wasn't surprised to find a Cracked article on it: http://www.cracked.com/article... Off the top of my head, and I should really think about this more thoroughly and more often before I forget, I would say that another of the funniest things that turned up sometimes were people wrapping their bottles of alcohol in tinfoil, thinking that would prevent the x-ray operator from being able to tell that it was a large bottle of liquids. One Russian lady did that at least twice that I knew of, on separate occasions. An old lady who, each time, acted as though she had no idea why her vodka was wrapped in tinfoil, or how it got there, claiming to speak no English. She was hilarious. We could just see that she was completely lying, and it pretty much felt as though she knew that we knew, and it was all just completely ridiculous.
TSA agents are told that they are not allowed to physically restrain a passenger in any way, or use force in any way. If a passenger just screams "Fuck this" and runs through security, TSA agents are, by agency policy, not allowed to do anything besides follow that person and call for help. The agent isn't supposed to even lay a hand on that passenger's shoulder to try to get him or her to stop.
I applied for TSA in 2005; at that point, there'd only been 3 years, max, of anti-TSA sentiment and stories in the media and such. I suppose it would be different for someone applying for TSA today, nearly 10 yeas after I applied
The first question that I was asked for this Q and A actually came on Twitter, and I promised on Twitter that I would answer it on here, and I actually saw the question somewhere in this sea of questions at one point, and of course forgot to get to it, somehow. But that question is: Have I experienced any retaliation from the TSA, have I flown since then, and if I have flown since then, have I been recognized by TSA agents . So far, there has been no official word from the TSA as far as problems concerning any nondisclosure agreement or what have you. As many people have noted in various places, the TSA has to really, really be prepared to hit me with official action, and it has to be really, really sure that it's a good idea, because I've obviously made a few contacts in the media over the past couple years, and I'm obviously not exactly shy about sharing whatever's going on in my life with the world at any given time. Short of just straight-up disappearing me Stalin-style-- which I think would be a little overboard, really, for goddamned airport security matters-- any action taken against me will likely end up as news one way or another. We're not dealing with Snowden-caliber releases of information, here. I've seen a few mentions of my name in the same sentence with Snowden in places on the internet, which I think is absolutely absurd. Snowden is on a whole different level. I don't even consider myself a whistle-blower, really. Maybe one thing I did-- the very first post I made on my blog, informing the public that I, as a TSA employee, and many of us, strongly felt that the radiation Rapiscan scanners were mostly useless, and that the TSA tried to work around the machines' inherent flaws with clumsy directives involving additional pat-downs of passengers-- counted as a sort of whistle-blowing act. But other than that, all I'm doing is basically just telling my stories. That's what I am, a storyteller, a writer-- I'm a creative writing major in a fully funded grad school program. I've been writing short stories and screenplays since I was 8. I primarily want to inform and entertain the world with stories of things that I experienced at the TSA, delivered in high-quality fashion. [Please don't hold this post or any of these rapid-fire Q and A pieces of writing that I'm producing here too close to that standard, though, it's pretty fast and furious with big-ass Q and A sessions like this]. As for whether I've flown since working at the TSA: hell no. I've taken Amtrak everywhere, in terms of cross-country travel. I don't intend to fly for a while. I wouldn't be too surprised if I were recognized by someone, or if some sort of enhanced screening mysteriously popped up for me. Although, then again, knowing the TSA as I do, I may very well be one of the last people they want to give extra screening to at an airport, knowing that it would very likely become news to some degree. So actually, I probably should try flying one of these days soon, just to see what happens. I genuinely hate flying, though, because it's just an all around unpleasant experience these days, but I suppose I don't have to tell that to most of you. OK, this is officially it, I'm out of here, it's been great, you guys