Originally Posted by b1513
Going through security in PHL for a TA flight there was the greatest TSO. A passenger ahead of me had a bottle of water. There were 3 male TSOs (making sure we're safe) and 1 female. The 3 men were at the scanner and when they saw the bottle of water they started yelling and trying to find out whose bottle of water it was while waving it in the air. The guy (who *owned* the dangerous bottle) said nothing because he was busy walking through the metal detector. The women TSO who was at the metal detector made a shooing motion with her hand and told them to stop making such a big deal of it and to just discard it. Then she said to me that they just get so hyped up over everything.
Um, if everything happened the way you describe it, it sounds like they just took it without the owner's permission. Police call that theft.
TSAers here like to tout that they do not confiscate anything, and that the pasengers "voluntarily surrender" the items. This is not what happened here.
Taking the item and "discarding it," again, the way you describe it, without the owner's consent, is theft of property.
Yes, a hyper-technicality, but so is the claim that the TSA doesn't take things from you.