Welcome to the land of the...scared and begging to be violated. You lucked out with that screener. The pre-ETD patdown sounds like one of the old, pre-NoS, patdowns. She probably could have been fired if she had been caught doing things the old way. Maybe she didn't find you sufficiently attractive to want to touch your hooha. Or maybe she was one of the few screeners with a conscience who has decided to silently object to the new genital patdowns by simply not doing them unless she was being directly watched by a supervisor. If she refused to do them while her supervisor were watching I assume she would be fired. A willingness to fondle same-sex genitals seems to be a requirement for the job now. The TSA prime directive if you will. According to some TSOs here if you aren't willing to do that you will never make it out of training. Or maybe she was like one of my ex-girlfriends who was actually repulsed by the idea of touching another woman's labia. Who knows. But for whatever reason you made it through your first TSA potential sexual experience relatively unscathed. Well except for the under-the-waistband stroking.

If I had been in that situation I might have thanked her at the end for not touching my genitals and made some comment about at least some screeners retaining a small shred of their humanity. You may have been a little hard on her considering the fact that she probably risked her job by not sexually violating you (directly touching your labia/clitoris). OTOH if she didn't want verbal abuse she could always get another job, although probably not one as highly paid. I am undecided as to whether you did or did not get your cherry popped due to the under-the-waistband feel up. I would not have consented to that. There are trains and buses to New York from LA. You may also have been able to do a 1 day layover in LA by changing your ticket with the airline and trying your luck the next day.

There's nothing "honest" about the TSA. Nothing.

"Just following orders" became a non-excuse at Nuremberg, as I recall.

And I would wager that the vast majority are going to have sexual fantasies about you later, perhaps in the presence of a shower nozzle. Assuming that you are reasonably attractive at least. Why do you think someone would take such a job in the first place? It can't be just the money, although the job does pay well.

Ah. Prostitution beckons. Some may not consider getting paid to touch other people's genitals to be "an honest buck". I do however think the comment about the screener's intelligence was uncalled for considering the fact that she hadn't done any actual inappropriate fondling up to that point (before the post-ETD rubdown). She may have been one of the good guys, so to speak. A rare exception: a TSA screener with an ounce of humanity.

Do you define honest buck as stealing from passengers at the checkpoint?

Again, ugh. Fine, you can feel that way about the TSA, but it's an honest living by any reasonable standard.

Wow. You'vee got some issues if those are the scenarios playing out in your head.


Do you honestly think most TSA screeners do that? There are bad apples in any profession.

How many things have you had stolen in how many flights?

Questioning the "honesty" of the TSO role is not hyperbole.

If you accept the argument that many activities at the checkpoint are violations of at least one constitutionally protected right, it's hard to call those activities an "honest living".

This also discounts the many, many instances most of us, myself included, have witnessed where TSOs are simply bad at their jobs in ways that reflect a lack of positive work ethic. That's arguably dishonest. (And also ignores the few who are caught engaged in theft...)

There's hyperbole and there's an honest assessment of the reality of the checkpoint.

Perhaps a more accurate statement would be: "They're just trying to make a buck using whatever opportunity is immediately available to them."

Or simply: "They're just trying to make a buck."

What's honest about claiming that it's in the interest of national security to have a bunch of high-school drop-outs stick their hands down people's pants or expose them to unwarranted ionizing radiation?

You are almost infinitely more likely to have something stolen from your luggage by an employee of the TSA than to suffer any sort of impact from a "terrorist event" that could conceivably have been mitigated by the obscenely laughable circus put on by the TSA.

They claim leather bookmarks are "concealed weapons" just so they can claim they've found something. They regularly question people over the amount of cash they're carrying, touch people in objectionable ways with reused gloves, use the restroom wearing those same gloves (mentioned here on FlyerTalk!) and in the overwhelming majority of cases do not one useful thing the entire time they're uniformed.

What, exactly, do you think is "honest" about anything the TSA does? Just one thing that isn't part of the "security theatre."

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...enger-jfk.html

Many more examples, but I do not have time to find all of them for you.. Use the forum search function to find more.

By that same "reasonable" standard so was a job as a Geheime Staatspolizei or gestapo officer in WWII era Germany or an OGPU/NKVD agent in early 20th century USSR. Someone like you would have been saying the same thing back then. Don't blame them. They are just trying to make a living. They are just doing their jobs. Jobs which require violating innocent people just trying to exercise a basic human right: the freedom to travel. The fact is that the TSA couldn't get away with these abuses without people willing to perpetrate them. I think the TSOs are actually more to blame than the kingpins like Pistole. If I pay someone to kill/rape/molest someone who is the most to blame? I would say the person who was actually willing to commit such acts. The fact that they are doing it for money if anything makes the crimes seem worse to me. A crime of passion is at least something of an excuse. "I did it for the money" much less so, IMO.

I'd rather be patted down by a LEO than be patted down by TSA in a private room. And that's given my understanding is that Terry-Stop LEO searches are more intrusive than TSA's opt-out or resolution patdown. And that I'm no fan of LEOs. But they're better trained, more likely to know there are limits to what they can do, unlikely to demand you go to a private room because they know that constitutes a detention, and IMO less likely to cause physical injury than some TSO, LTSO, or STSO.

It would be instructive and possibly more effective if TSA were required to turn *all* resolution-patdown situations over to a LEO. But give the LEO 2 choices. Either arrest the person for carrying WEI illegally, and be prepared to back up those charges in court, or let the person go about their business and proceed into the sterile area. None of this "you don't fly today" BS--the passenger either goes to jail or goes to his flight. TSA's claim of the right to deny passengers entry into the sterile area without arrest gives them way too much power with way too little accountability.

Yes, as I said, there's bad apples. Like in any job.

You are definitely misinformed in that area. A Terry frisk is typically a pat down of the outer clothing, and perhaps nearby containers and hiding places, in response to specific reasonable suspicion of a weapon that could cause immediate danger to a police officer or the public nearby.

Several elements are different about what the TSA does, the most obvious being the lack of any reasonable suspicion.

Additionally, the sliding motion a TSO uses is not a "pat down". It is a more intrusive hand movement. Also, a TSO will search areas that are highly unlikely to contain a weapon, such as the hair and the groin area.

Federal Law Enforcement Training Center info on Terry Frisk

The groin area is a favorite hiding area for weapons. There is no prescribed method that is taught to officers concerning how the hand is moved. Some officers will "pat" some will "slide" some will grab cloth and twist.

FB

How do you know this? Does this mean any cop can fondle genitals during a terry stop for as long as he wants? There really should be certain limits of what the state can do to innocent people. I have been patted down by cops during a terry frisk and they never even came close to my groin. It was more like the pre-NoS TSA patdowns. Rather tolerable. If a cop grabbed my dick/balls I'd grab his right back and we'd have a real mexican stand-off on our hands. And, no, I'm not particularly afraid of being shot or tasered. Let them do their worst. This planet really does need at least one free society now that the US is no longer one. Too bad all the land is spoken for. Maybe in Antarctica? I realize that treaties cover that, but is any nation really going to go to war to defend The Antarctic Treaty? I suspect not.