Originally Posted by
FliesWay2Much
I flew to my home town for the memorial service for my 106 year old mother in law who died of Covid last December in one of Cuomo's infamous nursing homes. I flew back to BWI this afternoon on Southwest. I arrived at the gate to find a table set up adorned by two TSA clerks who either weren't yet alive in 9/11/2001 or who were in elementary school.
They demanded that each passenger, whether in a wheelchair or not, produce an ID. If you dared to have a carry-on bag, they demanded you open the "biggest compartment" so they could conduct a visual no-contact inspection. I heard all sorts of SPOTNik-type interrogations around me asking questions such as: "What is your final destination?" "Are you going home or visiting a friend?" My disappointment was amplified by the passengers around me who actually answered their questions. Worse yet, the group in front of me were saying things like: "That's OK. They can check anything they want." For the record, neither clerk engaged me in the SPOTNik small talk. Maybe it was my dutifully masked Lawrence Taylor stare?? Curious if anyone else experienced a similar display of the TSA reminding us that they are God's gift for civil aviation security?
That sounds like the pre-TSA-era process for my first NYC-BWI flight less than 9 days after 9/11 — a flight I got stuffed onto because a segment to DCA was not possible after I got back to NYC via Germany from a short trip to South Asia.
I didn’t have it in me to tell the gate area screeners in NYC to pound sand then when questioning some BWI-bound passengers like that that time. 20 years later I am not hesitant to act on recognizing no obligation to verbally answer any TSA questions to travel in my own country by air. The suspect behavior is the TSA’s SPOTnik nonsense — it is not in a lack of willingness to share personal information with people groomed to imagine suspect behavior.