Lisa Simeone's blog

A full five years after the TSA began installing airport scanners and forcing people through them, and almost two years after it was ordered by Congress and the courts to hold a public comment period on them, the agency is finally complying.

Never mind that logic and common sense dictate that an agency would take public comments before implementing a new, invasive procedure.

If they scanned and groped the unskilled workers (hired with cursory vetting by the TSA) before they left the airports, think of all the crimes they’d discover. In yet another of so many TSA-worker-perpetrated crimes, an Orlando TSA agent was arrested after he took home the computer that some honest traveler turned in to him.

Read the rest at TSA News.

As we reported here the other day, a wounded Marine wrote to his Congressman after being humiliated by the TSA at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport.

Another kick-ass post by our resident mathematician, Sommer Gentry.

Read the rest at TSA News.

Phoenix’s Sky Harbor has had its fair share of TSA complaints.

The TSA's VIPR teams, about which we’ve written countless times, have been at it again — this time in Chicago.

According to this CBS report (presented in an embarrassingly credulous, golly-gee-whiz fashion), a VIPR team slithered onto the Metra system and started manhandling bags and questioning people. Why? Because they had detected a nuclear isotope.

A former TSA screener at Newark International Airport concurs with other screeners and with rational observers and actual security experts: “A lot of what we do is make-believe.”

Read the rest at TSA News.

In a post today by the normally clear-eyed Jonathan Capehart — and in The Washington Post, no less — you will see plenty of admiration for the way the TSA handles children and the elderly (they get to keep their shoes and jackets on!) as well as cheery support for the some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others 

Indeed, bombs are too hard to detect by the TSA’s force of unskilled workers who take money for violating American’s dignity, genitals, and Fourth Amendment rights.

The LAX Millennium Bomber plot was discovered, over the phone, by a guy in Seattle — a highly trained FBI agent who heard a guy who had a passport saying he was born in Montreal but speaking with a French-Algerian accent.

Perhaps this would be better titled "Poetic Justice."

In another case of whistleblowing, a TSA administrator in Syracuse, New York has accused his supervisor of creating a hostile work environment.

Read the rest at TSA News.

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill has finally gotten a taste of the medicine she and her fellow Congresspeople have shoved down the throats of the rest of us.

Read the rest at TSA News.

They’re always there to cup your genitals — because the TSA’s unskilled workers violating your body and your rights aren’t about security. They’re about jobs for people who’d otherwise be out of work, money for the connected Chertoffs of the world, and training you to be obedient when your rights are yanked from you.

Read the rest at TSA News.

The New York Post has taken aim at DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano over her tall tale about fictitious delays at LAX and O’Hare supposedly brought on by 

Flying under the mainstream media radar is a case headed for oral argument in the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston this coming April 3rd. It may be off everyone’s radar, but that doesn’t mean it should be.

Read the rest at TSA News.

Last May, TSA News writer Bill Fisher reported on the TSA’s backlog of background checks at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.

Read the rest at TSA News.

The great blues guitarist and singer Eric Clapton is also fed up with the TSA.

Read the rest at TSA News.

The intertubes are full of wailing about the automatic, across-the-board cuts called sequestration that are set to take effect in 30 days if Congress doesn’t get its act together.

Tristan Higgins details in the Huffington Post how she was made to suffer for failing to conform to a TSA screener’s gender stereotypes. Tristan says, “I stepped out and waited in that spot where we all wait while some anonymous stranger decides whether we are a threat, whether our body scan matches up with expectations. Well, it turned out that mine did not.”

The TSA’s machine told Tristan Higgins that her body was unacceptable, therefore she was unacceptable.

I am re-posting something one of our writers posted at TSA News last year, because it’s important and because not everyone, obviously, reads everything all the time. The things we talk about need to be reinforced, the points we make need to be repeated, again and again. We have new readers all the time. It’s impossible for them to go back through the hundreds of archived posts, no matter how assiduous they are. So here is Richard Walbaum’s post from April 2, 2012: Why you must protect your children from TSA groping

Many readers reacted to the recent story of the crying three-year-old girl in a wheelchair who was searched and harassed by the TSA at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport (after she had already successfully cleared the checkpoint) as though this were an uncommon incident.

As we’ve indicated umpteen times (yes, I, too get tired of having to use that phrase) and as the TSA itself indicates on its own website, photographing, videotaping, or otherwise recording at the TSA checkpoint is legal.

The only time it isn’t legal is when a specific airport indicates by a public sign that that particular airport in that particular jurisdiction has regulations against it. And that’s very few airports.

Why we won’t stop writing about the abuses of the TSA, DHS, and the entire National Security State, why we won’t stop naming things by their proper names, calling them out for what they are, and speaking the truth, no matter how many people it disturbs.

Read the rest at TSA News.

In time-honored fashion, the TSA, once again, offers a weak, responsibility-avoiding apology to 3-year-old Lucy Forcke and her parents Nathan Forcke and Annie Schulte.

It took a while, but the national media finally picked up on the story we reported here three days ago about the TSA harassing the family after they had already successfully cleared the checkpoint.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley has written about this more than once.

It is simply false to claim that someone is violating a law if he/she makes a joke — about bombs or anything else — at the airport security checkpoint. I repeat: it’s false.

I wish I could say that this is a new low for the contemptible thugs in blue for whose equipment and “services” taxpayers pay billions of dollars every year.

Sadly, it isn't. It’s just par for the course; another Day in Despotism here in the Land of the Meek, Home of the Afraid.

Kansas is joining a list of states that are trying to curb the abuses and crimes of the TSA, since it’s apparent that Congress isn’t going to do it.

Read the rest at TSA News.

The millimeter wave scanners are no better at detecting contraband than their radiation-emitting counterparts, the backscatter scanners. But then, we’ve only been telling you that for years.

Read the rest at TSA News.

German cellist Alban Gerhardt says the TSA damaged his $20,000 bow (at Dulles International Airport or O’Hare International, depending on which press account you read).

Like most infrequent air travelers, Vicki Burton just wants to get through security without causing a scene. So on a recent flight from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Miami, she obediently stepped into the airport’s full-body scanner, held her arms up, and waited for the agent to wave her through.

He didn't.

Read the rest at TSA News.

We’ve only said it a hundred times, so what’s one more?

If the TSA can take something out of your bag, they can also put something in.

Read the rest at TSA News.