Originally Posted by
HSVTSO Dean
That... had nothing to do with the SPOT program, dude.
Well, the description of the event, the TDC asking pointless questions, implies the TDC was acting as if he was doing or pretending to do behavior detection or suspicious-activity detection of some sort--hence my comment "playing BDO/SPOT."
The key point isn't whether the incident was a formal part of the SPOT or any other behavior-detection program; the key point is that a TSA agent interrogated a three-year-old for no purpose, did so without permission from his parents, and made the kid cry.
Whether the TSO was actually trying to root out some "suspicious" activity (parents buying a ticket in a different name than their kid's formal, legal, Secure-Flight-approved-for-government-travel-permission, name
), or whether the TSO was just trying to acclimatize the kid to sheepishly answering pointless privacy-invading questions from officious government agents at papers-please checkpoints, to me the incident is shameful.