Who bothers to read that dreary mess? After all it wouldn't be true security if you did the same thing day after day.

/sarcasm.

Yes, then you won't have any job. What an arrogant response from tsadude.

Or just avoid the USA

Do yourself and all of us a favour smart guy. Read and understand before you post. It makes you look stupid. We were talking about the guy who posted his experience on a UA flight in another thread. Why are you making me your target? It shows your bigotry.
Stating a fact is not whining. But you can't swallow it because of the bigotry, which you have amply displayed in your posts.

I lived in PDX for a few years and i find thats so strange, ive always found PDX TSO's generally to be the 2nd nicest in the country, 1st goes to PUW

Some TSA personnel are suspicious by banking standards in that they choose to search people's personal articles which includes those of monetary value.

totally unacceptable

response to said tso: if you like your job and would like to keep your job, please summon your supervisor, the tsa terminal manager for this terminal, the federal security director for this airport, the <insert airline name> ground services coordinator for this airport and a representative from law enforcement. you have 5 minutes to do so and i'll wait right here while you do. if after 5 minutes, there is no action on your part, i make a phone call.

Commuting into Mahnattan every day I've seen things I never would have seen if I wasn't. It was just a couple of weeks ago on the train in from White Plains I saw somebody use the tefillin. He was sitting across from me.

Did I think Terrorism? Of course not. Nobody was paying any attention, so if there was something unusual, it was in that I had never been exposed to that before.

A week or two ago when a friend posted on facebook that a plane was diverted for the same reason, I couldn't believe it. In my mind I could not picture any sane adult sitting there seeing the exact same thing I saw a week ago and thinking it was anything other then what I did, something totally harmless that I was not familiar with.

What is suspicious to one person, as already mentioned, is perfectly acceptable to others. Common sense, logic, and reason has to come into play at some point. That's the missing part in all of this, there's no common sense, logic, or reason being applied, just people reacting to things they find unusual in a closed minded way.

Good advice...for yourself and those TSO's who constantly complain how much easier their lives would be if the PAX would just read the 'rules' (undocumented) and do what they are told to do....

Good advice...for those TSO's who complain they are underappreciated, overstressed, underpaid and not always happy with their management.

The short answer is, yes, they say you can photograph all you'd like as long as it doesn't interfere with their searches of other passengers, and they either discourage or prohibit (it's unclear) photography of their computer monitors. For a more complete answer, read on.

TSA's standard operating procedures are designated by TSA as "sensitive security information" which is a class of document that is not classified, but not provided to just anyone who asks. So it's difficult to determine just what's in their SOP. Bits and pieces are discovered via FOIA requests, and one of their SOP manuals was recently discovered to have been published on federal business opportunities Web site.

Here's what we do know (or what I know, but I'm paying fairly close attention to this, out of general interest and because it directly affects me):

Bob Burns at TSA wrote about this in a January 31, 2009 post to the TSA blog titled "Can I Take Photos at the Checkpoint and Airport?" (emphasis added):

Note his use of the word ask. Discussion ensued, and on April 3, I left the following comment:

Bob later contradicted himself about photography of computer monitors, writing:

Despite numerous requests for him to do so (e.g., the following one) Bob never reconciled the two statements, and he never said whether he thinks it is unlawful to photograph TSA monitors or simply something that will result in TSA's refusal to allow someone past their checkpoint. One of my comments included:


I took Bob's advice about using "Got Feedback?" to contact airports directly. I submitted the form once for each of 50 major U.S. airports. About half of them eventually responded. I documented the entire process, publishing every e-mail message exchanged between the TSA airport representatives who responded and me, here on FlyerTalk. Bob refused to allow any comments on the TSA blog that linked to the relevant FlyerTalk thread, purportedly because I had published contact information for TSA's airport "customer service managers" -- who are to be public points-of-contact. What I published were the e-mails those people sent in response to a query that was submitted on the Web. They didn't know who their e-mails were going to; anyone, or even a machine, could have generated those queries. So it's not as if they trusted me, or anyone in particular, with the information. And it was their work contact information -- work they perform by interacting with the public as public employees.

In that FlyerTalk thread, in addition to correspondence with TSA and an index thereof, I posted a list of what I considered causes for concern with the responses. TSA representatives provided conflicting and sometimes threatening information. The thread was later messed up a bit by a FlyerTalk moderator who combined multiple posts by me, as reportedly is their policy when someone posts multiple times one-after-another, so some of the links are broken, but everything is still there.

See also the following FlyerTalk threads about people's experiences with photography and videotaping at and near TSA airport checkpoints:

• 2009-11-16: "Flyer `Processed' (Arrested?) in NM After Declining to Show ID" (reportedly, that flyer was also photographing and/or video-recording at the TSA checkpoint prior to the arrest)
• 2009-11-28: "TSA Agent order me to stop filming"
• 2010-01-21: "Blogger films TSA Gate Gropers in DTW, they followed he filmed encounters"

Really? Stay home or better yet just stay away ahl al-kitab

Since several members can't seem to play nice in this thread and instead throw insults back and forth at each other, we're going to close the thread.

________________________

Cholula
TS/S Co-Moderator