Dear America, I Saw You Naked. And yes, we were laughing. Confessions of an ex-TSA agent.

politico ^ | january 30, 2014 | JASON EDWARD HARRINGTON

[lowbridge]

snip

I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.

Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.

There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22.

I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.

Charges of racial profiling by the TSA made headlines every few months, and working from behind the scenes we knew what was prompting those claims.

snip

[Polynikes]

I was tested as part of the original deployment ie: the first wave. I went through the original threat identification exercises. I found them not that difficult, but I guess I must have good visual acuity and quick threat assessment. It seemed rather straight forward to me. I did qualify as a lead screener, sort of like a NCO in the TSA world.