petaluma1

From @AskTSA this morning:

"Just saw a male @TSA agent interrogate a scared 5-year-old girl at the MSP airport. I feel so much safer already..."

TSA mission creep is alive and well.

"TSA's response: We don’t like to hear this, Grigory! Pls provide addition details so we may look into this: http://1.usa.gov/1OfLGg6 "

What a freakin' bunch of hypocrites!

chollie

Seriously - does anyone believe for one minute that any of these 'please provide additional details' result in an actual investigation?

More likely, some foolish pax just got assigned 'points' against his/her Pre/GE status, if they have it; against Nappy's 'domestic extremist' profile if they're not GE/Pre.

Note: remember when Ross Feinstein, ex-TSA, told us the 'name game' was no longer be played at airports? He should have checked with the MSP FSD before he made that statement. HQ doesn't get to tell its FSDs what to do.

Boggie Dog

Post to TSA Blog.

Often1

Until it's your kid being taken abroad against your will.

You demean yourself when you attempt to demean others.

FliesWay2Much

I don't bloody care about your emotional assertion. Tell me again where Congress said that this is TSA's mission? I'm old, so I may have missed this legislation.

WillCAD

Hogwash. I'd use stronger language if it were allowed on the boards.

I can't deny that there are non-custodial kidnappings all the time, nor can I deny that some of those kids are taken out of state or even abroad without the consent of the custodial parent to evade US law enforcement. That's a well-known and well-documented crime.

However, it is NOT TSA's JOB TO LOOK FOR THEM!

TSA is NOT an agency of law enforcement. They have no police powers, no investigatory experience, they have NO TRAINING to handle such a situation, and they have no darn business EVER interrogating a young child.

The very idea that an airport screener is actively looking for any sort of criminal activity, rather than focusing on the job they're tasked with (i.e. finding weapons, explosives, and incendiaries on passengers or in luggage), speaks to the completely off-the-rails nature of the organization.

The excuse that they're trying to prevent bad things is ludicrous on its face. Nobody wants to see bad things happen to children, but allowing blundering amateurs like TSOs to poke their noses into such situations could risk a child's life if they actually do come up against kidnap victim.

If a TSO sees something that legitimately causes them to believe that a crime is taking place, they are required to call real cops, who have training and experience to deal with the criminal. They are not required to intervene in a potential kidnapping situation.

If they don't have any real, articulable suspicion, they should not be interrogating anyone, least of all minors. TSOs have no more business investigating what they think is a crime than any other ordinary citizen, like a bus driver or a garbage collector or a postal carrier.

And if there is a standard rule in place at any airport that all children traveling with only one adult will be interrogated, that's needless harassment of thousands of children and must be stopped.

If your child were interrogated by a stranger in a uniform and scared out of their wits, perhaps you'd feel different. In looking for monsters, we must never allow ourselves to become a different kind of monster.

petaluma1

Get real. You sound like many of the young mothers I know who think that if they let their kid out of their sight the kid will disappear forever.

It's none of the TSA's business and as WillCAD said, if the TSA thinks they've got a kidnapping on their hands, let them call the real police like they do when they find firearms and MJ.

Boggie Dog

Exactly whom are you addressing? Your never ending support of illegal acts by TSA has become tiresome.

chollie

I see.

So why is it that no Canadian, Mexican or US border agent has ever asked me and all the pax in my car, including children to state their names?

We have never had that requirement enforced on ferry, bus or train crossing of borders, either.

That's aside from the fact that asking a child to state his/her name on a domestic itinerary proves nothing - they are not required to provide an ID. Their name only has to match the name given on the BP. A child traveling internationally does have to provide matching ID, but again, unless TSA is doing actual computer checks on the spot, it's possible that the kid is being taken out of the country in violation of a court order - under his/her own name.

In short, it's a one-in-a-million long shot that merely distracts further from the real mission.

nachtnebel

I have been questioned at the Canadian border when my children were small. Because it was an expected part of their job, it didn't bother me much.

But as FilesTooMuch said, it's not part of TSA's job function, and their clerks are no more qualified to investigate this stuff than bathroom attendants. All it does is make the air travel experience all the more hostile.

DaveBlaine

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

DaveBlaine

You almost have to wonder if that's the whole point.

FliesWay2Much

Thank you. Mrs Flies and I chose to remain childless, but, the very thought of clerks doing this under the color of law enforcement to any of my nieces and nephews makes my blood boil. The very fact that I personally watched it happen makes my blood super-heated. If not for the fact that I had already hidden my iPhone along with my other valuables in various nooks and crannies in my carry-on before leaving the parking garage was the only thing that prevented me from recording the harassment. The other thing that bothered me was that the mother thought everything was fine.

jkhuggins

Do you know for certain that the mother thought everything was fine? Did she comment aloud about the incident? Or are you interpreting her silence as agreement with the screener's actions?

I can easily see a scenario where the mother disagreed with the actions, but decided that the best thing to do in that situation was to minimize any interactions with the TSO by remaining silent and proceeding through the checkpoint as quickly as possible. Not everyone has the option of staging a civil rights protest at a given moment. And given that she had her two minor children with her, she may have had more reason not to protest.

Just because someone is silent before an authority, or offers a smiling face, doesn't mean they agree with that authority.

As someone once said: never try to teach a pig to dance, for it frustrates you and annoys the pig.

GUWonder

The TSA is a rather lousy line of defense even in the war on contraband weapons/explosives/incendiaries, and yet you want to defend the TSA spending resources in some kind of war against international child abduction and other things that don't undermine the security of my flights.

Terrorists and their sympathizers gain from the encouragement of resource distraction/diversion away from a focus on contraband WEI interdiction.