They were a lot more anal at Lisbon and I even commented to the TSA guy at Newark that I had to remove every single thing from my bag and break it apart as far down as possible and the guy said "Yeah, we're a lot more laid back here, we're not here to harass people".
Looks like I'll be canceling my trip to the Azores then. Haha. What that TSO told you was just Bravo Sierra. You can't trust anything a TSO says. I think it's actually kind of random, but also depends on how much stuff you have and how weird it looks on the xray machine. I get my carry-ons inspected every single time I travel, but then I tend to travel with stuff like motherboards, CPUs, RAM, video cards, LCD monitors and hard drives. On an xray it must look like some kind of big messy bomb. Before my trip I was half expecting the TSO to ask me to assemble the thing and throw the power switch (which would have been on the power supply that was in my checked luggage). Of course I am always left to repack it myself, which is lucky because it is all packed like a delicate, static sensitive, jig-saw puzzle. Last time I think it took me 15-20 minutes to put it all back together again. My carryon full of computer equipment was only searched on my outbound flight fromt the US. On the flight back to the US security didn't pay much attention to it, which kind of amazed me. I have yet to see more stringent airport security than in the US, but then I have never been to Portugal.