TSA Update

Jaunted: Apparently it's "Please Don't Do That" week in the world of airline and airport security. We had that post earlier about the drunk douchebag who tried to push around flight attendants so they'd give him more alcohol, which went about how you'd expect. On Monday the TSA blog has its own post about trying to bring weird and exotic pets through airport scanners, which doesn't work since full-body scanners can detect living turtles and snakes (who knew, right?)

We're even more interested in a TSA post from earlier this month, about a graduate student who tried to get a science project through airport security at OMA. The gadget was a home-built device that measured blood oxygen content, which is admittedly kind of neat. It also had the secondary characteristic of looking exactly like a bomb. That part is less neat.

TSA workers of course immediately shut down the screening area and called in a bomb squad. TSA officials later defended that decision because - hey - that thing really does strikingly resemble a bomb. Our instinct is to criticize the agency whenever it de facto shuts down airports over false alarms, but we kind of see their argument here. We especially appreciate their broader, blogged point: don't bring bomb-looking things into airports. Come on folks.

In other TSA news from the last couple of months, an LAX worker is under investigation for stealing watches and debit cards, a Fort Lauderdale screener got caught stuffing stolen iPads down his pants, and the agency itself recently announced that as many as 900,000 of their security badges may be compromised.

So naturally the TSA union is focused on making sure that TSA supervisors get to use their government credit cards to buy workers bottled water. Because they've got their priorities straight, that union.