FredAnderssen

From Here.

(bolding mine)

What a bunch of liars. If they're striving to treat everyone with "dignity and respect," they're certainly doing a poor job of it.

petaluma1

Is it my imagination or have we been hearing more episodes of abuse at the checkpoint linked to baby formula lately? Another one showed up yesterday:

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1045761

Boggie Dog

TSA picks on the weak, disabled, elderly, and others who can't fight back.

Bullies and cowards never go after the strong.

spd476

I don't get how the TSA can continue to use the ETD testing. They have to know it is flawed. It alarms on too many common items. It leads to harassment and abuse to innocent travelers like in this story. On top of that, no sophisticated terrorist group is going to have the bomb carrier handling the bomb in a way he would get contaminated to cause an alarm.

In one of these incidents, I would like to see the TSA use some common sense and not grope a small child or open medically necessary liquids that will spoil. I know that is asking for way too much.

jkhuggins

There is no incentive for a TSO to use common sense. Quite to the contrary, actually.

If the TSO "follows the rules", they'll be supported by management for following the rules. I can't see a scenario where a TSO would be reprimanded by management for following the SOP to the letter and denying entry to someone who keeps alarming the explosive detector. Sure, maybe the passenger will go public with their complaint ... but TSA has shown that they'll back their employees, even when the situation is so ridiculous that the TSO has to be overridden.

On the other hand, if the TSO uses common sense and breaks the rules ... their supervisor might notice and reprimand them. Or it will turn out that the child with medical liquids is really part of an unannounced test, and the TSO will fail the test and get reprimanded. Or, heaven forbid, the child with medical liquids is actually part of a real terrorist team, and Bad Stuff Happens which gets blamed on the TSO. (After all, I'm sure this sort of scenario is preached all the time to TSOs as a part of their training.)

Want common sense in TSA? Give TSOs a reason to exercise it, and make sure they don't get penalized when they do.

goalie

This rubber stamp has more miles on it than I do in my Mileage Plus account (and I have a lot )

HawaiiTrvlr

How long will it take for Blogger Bob to chime in and defend the screeners or repudiate what the mom said actually happened?

I would be mad as hell if I was that mother and I had the same encounter. Let's hope the mainstream media gets a hold of the story.

Boggie Dog

Bobbie should be on furlough since he doesn't play a secuirty role at TSA.

Spiff

Neither do any of the other TSA employees. @:-)

studentff

ETD is a perfectly good technology; the problem is with TSA's idiotic usage of it and response to alarms. TSA insists that all alarms be "resolved," which sounds reasonable at first until you realize how messed-up their concept of resolution is.

If they are going to use ETD as a form of primary screening (in the absence of any other suspicion), then they need a sane way to deal with the high number of expected false positives. (False = passenger is not carrying an explosive device regardless of what residue the passenger may carry.) If they would limit ETD to secondary screening they would have many fewer alarms.

No educated person who does scientific testing would rely on a single positive result with no negative control to trigger a freak-out response, they would repeat the test, probably with a different machine. If the second test is negative, then then "alarm" should be over.

Forcing passengers who ETD alarm into a private room serves no purpose other than to intimidate passengers and reduce the chance TSA harassment will be captured on video by bystanders.

One thorough pat-down that is in a private room only if requested by passenger, re-x-ray of belongings with a different person looking at the x-ray image, and reasonable hand search (not tear apart or painstakingly slow) of belongings are reasonable responses to an ETD alarm. Re-patting down a person you just patted down as per current TSA SOP is not reasonable. Delaying such a passenger more than 5-10 minutes in the absence of some other cause is not reasonable. Freaking out and willy-nilly prohibiting/confiscating medical liquids or other items using made-up paranoia-based decisions is not acceptable. An obviously factory-sealed bottle of baby formula or contact lens solution is not a threat, period.

chollie

(bolding mine)

1) I doubt that a supervisor's possible 'reprimand' matters much. Even before TSA went union, chronic problem TSOs weren't addressed. Both line TSOs and a few higher ups posted here and elsewhere that 'the government' made it impossible to fire or adequately discipline 'rogue' TSOs. If you take months to 'investigate' a group of TSOs who you already know are stealing from pax bags or are deliberately clowning around and not inspecting bags (HNL), and then all your disciplinary efforts are appealed and overthrown - well, I wouldn't worry too much about a simple reprimand.

2) So it turns out that the TSO applied 'common sense' to a completely bogus, statistically unlikely (remember: even Pistole said 100% guaranteed security isn't possible) test and fails the test - so what? Again, they have been failing the tests by a wide margin since the tests were implemented. One more failure - big deal.

These are just two excuses some TSOs use to justify their own foolish and degrading actions.

Sadly, IMHO, we're far less at risk from someone using common sense and making an error in judgment than we are from someone being so focused on their 'authoritay' and blind adherence to rules that they completely miss something right in front of their eyes.

Georgia Peach

most likely they will resort to one or both of their standard defense lines.
"We followed proceedure" or some vague reference to the screener being
retrained. Why can't they ever publicly admit the TSO made a mistake? If I were that mother, I would immediately file a request for the video.

Caradoc

Who wants in on the pool for the video being missing/stolen/too blurred/too fuzzy/cameras pointing in the wrong direction/unusable?

tanja

I agree completly. My third daughter is coming out here with her premature twins. Whey will be about 9 months at the time to celebrate my 60 birthday. I am bit afraid. S o far they have been told they can travel and so on. But not let any stranger even touch their kids. They live in Norway. Nowing my daughter she would"kill" anyone touching her babies.. What do I do? If anything.

InkUnderNails

I do engineering testing (not as critical precision-wise) and I do follow up testing and calibration checks. I have been working on a job this week in which I detected a potential problem and have run at least 10 variations of the same test to verify the results before we open up the machine. It is not rocket surgery. Double check and then verify.