Down with the airport security overlords!November 11th, 2005 by Joe Jones |
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One of Marmot’s recent posts confirmed that the Transport Security Administration (TSA, also rumored to be an abbreviation for “Thugs Standing Around“) is the biggest waste of money and time since the lawyer was invented. I would make an argument about how none of our airport security procedures would be sufficient to stop a terrorist attack on an airplane, but it’s more fun to point out random gripes from across teh intarweb:
- There are too many of them where they aren’t needed.
- They have a ridiculous no-fly list that appears to be based on Arabic names.
- They piss off foreign government officials who return to their countries determined to undermine American foreign policy.
- They lead to wives taking the fall for their husbands and penises taking the fall for their owners.
- They are cruel to robots and people traveling on a different airline each way (I can confirm this personally).
- They can’t decide whether shoes are optional or not, but they make you take your shoes off anyway.
- Besides nail clippers, they also take away bowling pins and thongs.
- Even though they inexplicably force you to show your boarding pass twice, people can STILL get onto planes without tickets.
- For an agency designed to thwart terrorists, they have a funny way of involving themselves in the War on Drugs.
- And half of these procedures can be avoided completely if you have money.
Oh yes… there’s now a mobile phone game where you win by beating TSA security at every major airport in the US. Fun times.
Granted, they aren’t quite as dastardly as Japanese Customs...
November 12th, 2005 at 8:50 am
It’s interesting that members of groups like the EZLN in Mexico and the Sendero Luminoso in Peru have found their ways onto the no-fly list, considering that they have no history of suicide attacks, airline violence, or hostility towards the US. And my father’s on the no-fly list as well, because he shares the name of a 70’s IRA politician, who’s neither the same nationality nor age as my father.
So every time he flies, he spends 45 minutes getting that little nugget cleared up. What a pain.
By the way, airline security screeners did absolutely nothing wrong on September 11. Had they stopped those terrorists from boarding, they would have been fired. It wasn’t their fault, but America sacked ‘em anyway.