Originally Posted by
Section 107
But as much as it pains me to appear to defend the Dept of Homeland Insecurity - lets keep things in perspective. There are ~50k TSOs handling more than 450,000,000 checkpoint transactions every year. With that kind of volume of human interactions there are bound to be ridiculous and egregious incidents. Even if there were 300 such absurd incidents over the last 10 years, that would be 300 out of 4,500,000,000 interactions; lamentable to some degree to be sure - but hardly a deplorable state of affairs.
Of course there will be bad decisions. The issue is that TSA doesn't seem to care about it. Everything is "screener discretion" when there should be an authoritative list of things which have been an issue but which are legal. (For example, nitroglycerin tablets.) Once an item has been established as being on that list the screeners should not be allowed to deny it, nor subject it to testing beyond what the list says is proper. (See the repeated issues with milk & formula.)