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Nov 22, 2006 | 10:54 am

#1

docmonkey

Join Date: Jul 2005

Posts: 861

Salon article on TSA

A great article:

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/...210/index.html

"...On Friday I spoke with Anne Davis, a TSA public affairs manager. "We encourage passengers to use common sense," she says. "When in doubt about a specific item, they should err on the conservative side and pack it inside their checked luggage. People should also review the guidelines on the TSA Web site."

I asked Davis if that same common sense applies to the agency's screeners.

"Absolutely. Our workers are highly trained, and we encourage them to exercise discretion when it comes to screening certain materials."

Personally, in my travels during the past few months, I've witnessed anything but discretion. What I've seen is a draconian obsession with the exactness of container sizes and their contents, including overzealous guards actually yelling at hapless passengers. Did some of that discretion finally came into play with Mom's tomato sauce?

snip

And all of this is for what reasons, again? Because last summer, a stumblebum group of would-be British attackers, in possession of neither airline tickets nor passports, were maybe, possibly, hoping to brew liquid explosives, using methods that many experts contend would be extremely difficult or impossible to produce a bomb with."

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