by former TSA officer Jason Edward Harrington, and it is alarming, but just what FlyersRights has been saying for years.
He gives an inside look at why TSA makes air-travel so miserable for Americans. Throughout the piece Harrington emphasizes one thing: TSA is a joke.
In particular, the full-body scanners that passenger are forced to walk in and hold their hands above their head in the name of security, but look as if they're under arrest, are a giant waste of time.
"We enjoyed laughing at passengers' naked bodies", says the Ex-TSA agent, confirming everyone's fears.
He tells how TSA agents worried about radiation levels from the machines just like passengers but had to repeat the official government line, that everything was safe.
Harrington worked at Chicago's O'Hare Airport from 2007 until 2013 but then quit and is now writing a book about his time as an agent.
He confirms many of the suspicions about airport security screeners: they stop passengers for having an attitude, they confiscate snow globes from children and nail clippers from pilots, they profile passengers based on their nationality.
And yes, they do see travelers naked in the X-ray photos.
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| As the long-suffering American public waited in security lines, jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues. | AP |
'Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible.
Women who'd had mastectomies were easy to discern-their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area,' he wrote in the Politico article.
'All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels.'
The TSA issued a statement in response, saying: 'Many of the TSA procedures and policies referenced in this article are no longer in place or are characterized inaccurately.'
Harrington translated the underhanded code, words used by the agents to alert their friends to an attractive passenger approaching the line.
Fanny Pack Lane 2 and Alfalfa are both used to give a heads-up about an attractive woman headed towards the agents. Code Red and Yellow Alert are also used in the same way, depending on the color of her clothing.
While the overly-detailed pictures provided entertainment for the screeners, Harrington writes that the expensive machines did little else.
Even when a representative from the machine manufacturer came to give the TSA agents a tutorial on the $150,000 machines, he admitted that they barely worked.
Harrington tells how anything can get past the X-ray machines and agents regularly got back at annoying passengers by having them go through extra checks.
'He said we wouldn't be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket,' Harrington wrote.
A number of agents became concerned about the amount of secondary radiation they were being put through by working next to the machines day-in and day-out, even though they regularly toed the party line that it was safe when passengers asked them the same question.
While he expressed empathy to alarmed pregnant women, they were told to go through the machine anyway.
The more serious allegations that came through in his piece came to his description of the not-so-random security checks of 'suspicious' passengers.
A number of boarding passes have a code- SSSS- printed on them based on the passenger's name, indicating that they are on a watch list or have been flagged up for whatever reason.
Beyond that, a passenger's nationality could also automatically prove reason for an extra-thorough check and each TSA agent is given a list of a dozen countries that they should memorize (or pin to the back of their shield badge for safe keeping): Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan.
Conspicuously absent from that list? Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two countries with a history of harboring terrorists. Harrington explained that the slip was not accidental but political.
Political posturing and possible security threats were not the only reasons that you could be selected for an extra search, however, as he also explained that 'retaliatory wait time' was a common practice, as agents regularly made the process more difficult when they simply didn't like your attitude.
'Pretending that something in your bag or on your full body image needs to be resolved- the punitive possibilities are endless, and there are many tricks in the screener's bag,' he wrote.
