Originally Posted by
PresRDC
Still the wiser move to carry it with you and not check it. And you should know the rules, so you can call them on any violations.
Ah, but now you've hit upon the great Catch-22 of TSA-passenger interactions: we can't know the rules.
Oh, sure, TSA will publish stuff on its website. But that's no guarantee that the TSOs will know the rules. If you challenge a TSO regarding the rules, you'll often get a response like "the website is out of date" or "there's another rule that applies that I can't tell you about because it's SSI" or simply "you're reading that wrong". Supervisors don't necessarily know the rules any better.
Because passengers are not given a definitive, authoritative source of The Rules, in any interaction with a TSO, passengers are at the whim of the TSOs interpretations of the rules. And if the TSOs are wrong, passengers have no effective recourse.