I guess you didn't look hard enough and this really explains the nature of all of your posts as a TSA/CBP cheerleader.
I'm a dual US/Australian citizen. In Australia I'm welcomed home by the immigration officer. In the US, I generally deal with an assclown holier than thou CBP idiot. From these experiences, I can only guess how much worse it is for non-citizens.
In Australia, I can board a domestic flight without removing my shoes, showing ID, or having to leave my dangerous liquids behind. Why? Because they are not credible threats. Australia gets it.
I'm not a TSA cheerleader. I just think it's stupid how people make one sided arguments. They ..... about the limits of the liquid ban, but they don't stop to realize that they would be .....ing more if there were no solid guidelines. You call them on this and then they bring up their overall issues with the liquids ban. This, of course, almost always has nothing to do with the argument at hand.
I don't recall exactly how I was greeted in Australia. That said, plenty of people I know find Canadian customs and immigration worse than that of the USA. I have gone through customs in Europe once this year and I don't recall them asking me politely if I wouldn't mind if I could bend over so they could kiss my backside. I don't recall them doing this in Japan when I was there. Going through customs and immigration is a serious matter. I go through customs in the US about 20 times a year. I've yet to have had a problem with crossing ever.
Australia gets it? I guess the US and the EU and various other countries don't. Then again, I couldn't use my phone when I landed in Australia and had to spend an hour going through an invasive species screening. The folks there wouldn't even give me, "that's not a knife, that's a knife", "throw another shrimp on the barbie" or a few rounds of Waltzing Matilda. Of course, I didn't want or expect that. I wanted them to do their job just as they do stateside or in other border crossings.
In their eyes of a traveler from outside the States, what’s the difference? The end result is the same if you have government employees with badges at airports with poor customer service skills. There’s plenty of vacation destinations in the world where one can go without being barked at, the Shoe Carnival, the War on Liquids, etc.
The difference is rather elementary. They go through the same screening process when flying ANYWHERE as they do here. The immigration is the difference. Think back to Sesame Street and, "One of these things is not like the other".
They can go ahead and fly somewhere else of course, but if they're in Europe, they deal with the same thing pre-boarding. Of course, it's not called TSA just something else.
Having to take off your shoes and put your toiletries in a bag is ruining travel for you?
Thegeneral,
You're right. I do spend more time talking or whining about the TSA than actually dealing with them.
But the interactions I do have are often disturbing.
Not to rehash all of our collective frustrations, but it's the barking, the waiting in line, the drawn-out ID inspection, getting a random search at the checkpoint and AGAIN ten minutes later at the gate. Unless there is a delay, the TSA is the most time-consuming part of the airport experience.
It is somewhat dependent on which airport and which checkpoint you use. I have had some "glide through" TSA experiences. But with the ramp-up in random secondaries and gate searches, this becomes less likely.
Disturbing? Such as what? Do they take you in a closed room and make you dissect kittens or something? What exactly is it that's distrubing? That' 10 seconds of taking off your shoes and removing your liquids? That's what bothers most people on here. Of course, they have to call it a shoe carnival and war on liquids in order to make it sound like something far worse than it is.
There was id inspection before 9/11. The random searches as the checkpoint are few and far in between. The searches at the gate even more rare. The odds of getting both have to be at most 1/1000. That's what, 500 trips?
In terms of the delays, you're flying out of SFO, they do have elite lines. If you don't fly enough to actually even get a basic elite status, why even bother posting on a website devoted to flying? Going through security now doesn't take much longer than it did before. Certainly, airline volumes and loads were very high for a while, but people always had to go through security. Somehow, people forget that.
By the way, the drawn out ID inspection is rarely a rate taking step. The drawn out part involves shining an ultra-violet light on my boarding pass. The id inspection at a strip club takes longer.
Things might be dependent on your airport, but in having a quick look at the regional forums, I don't see people .....ing about gates in their airport, but they come in here and feel that it's great to come in here.
Thus far this year I've gone through security in MXP, SEA, EWR, LAX, SAN, SFO, BUR, MSP, MCO, DEN and a slew of other airports. I don't recall either one taking more than five or ten minutes. The vast majority are in the <5 category.