+1, and not just with ICTS. Recently pushed back a little with TK's contractor (Gozen) on a question about place of residence that didn't seem relevant to my right to fly RT IST-LHR on a US passport and Turkish residence card. I just asked the girl at the podium (really young, hard to believe she was even old enough to be a college grad) if there was any particular reason for her question and the next thing I knew she hissed, said "you son of a b*tch" and called over some of her colleagues to escort me to a table for a secondary security inspection. No idea what caused such a venomous reaction on her part - in hindsight it's possible that her English was so bad that she thought she heard me use less polite language than I actually did... I asked repeatedly what criteria they used and each time they either said "random" or that they didn't understand my English. To make it even more patronizing their search was so basic that it didn't enhance safety in any way over the main checkpoint - they didn't even use a puffer or a wand, which they commonly use at the gate on shorter-distance LH flights out of IST, nor did they rummage through my suitcase after making a big deal about me having to be the one to open it.

I'm not saying that the process would have been more pleasant with the Turkish National Police or the airport authority's security guards there, but it wouldn't have felt like the same airline that takes my money and gives me gold status is intentionally trying to piss me off. The TSA may be incompetent, but I find it much easier to accept the SSSS treatment when it's being done by a, well, quasi-LEO executing the (however pointless and misguided) mandates of DHS and its overseas equivalents than a private security firm that earns a profit regardless of how petty and retaliatory its employees are. In that sense, the incident described above actually made me a little teeny tiny bit appreciative of the TSA and quite wary of free-market conservatives who want to privatize it (and, in all likelihood, hand our airports over to the likes of multinationals such as ICTS, Group 4, Securitas, ect... - some of which have been accused of very questionable human rights practices in other lines of business).