Lisa Simeone's blog

TSA Deputy Administrator John Halinksi was called to Congress to testify before the Subcommittee on Transportation of the Committee on Homeland Security. 

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 Last December I wrote a post here at TSA News laying out numerous facts and distilling certain principles of what might be called moral philosophy and human behavior. The facts — aviation history, risk assessment, statistical analysis, logic, empirical evidence — remain the facts, and I say now what I said then: most people will ignore them.

There’s a report that US traffic deaths in the first three months of 2012 jumped 13.5 percent — the highest number since 2008.  

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Finally. That’s all I can say. Finally, a federal court ruled that it does, indeed, have jurisdiction over at least some TSA procedures.  It's about time.

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Reader LeeAnne Clark has given us permission to reprint her account of watching the TSA harass two disabled children at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). As we’ve reported at TSA News many times, the TSA seems to have a penchant for singling out children, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, the weak, those least able to fight back — though they also heap plenty of abuse on other people, as well. 

Another TSA screener has been charged with a crime. Not only assault (which by now we’ve practically come to expect), but also “terrorizing.”

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The TSA has been tasked with finding “weapons, exposives, and incendiaries” (WEI) and preventing them from making their way onto airplanes. See 49 CFR § 1540.5 (“Screening function means the inspection of individuals and property for weapons, explosives, and incendiaries”). To that extent, the TSA can lawfully conduct an “administrative search” for that purpose and that purpose only.

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There was a lot of cheering last week when a Portland, Oregon judge found 50-year-old John Brennan not guilty of public indecency. Brennan is the software engineer who stripped naked to demonstrate that he was no threat when TSA agents started questioning him at a checkpoint last April.

There’s been so much abuse by the TSA over the past several days it’s hard to keep up.

TSA agents have, yet again, strip-searched another woman. But that wasn’t enough. They also endangered her life by handling her feeding tube.

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If you thought the TSA’s reputation as America’s worst federal agency couldn’t get any worse — and after its recent PR disasters, I wouldn’t blame you — you might want to think again.

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Carol Jean Price, one of the few people in this country who has fought back against the TSA at the airport, has been convicted of battery against a TSA agent. The jury took only 20 minutes to reach a verdict.

Just over a year ago, a woman did something that, in any normal society, would be considered good: she tried to protect her child.

But we aren’t living in a normal society. What was once good is now bad, and what was once unthinkable is now accepted. Not only accepted, but lauded, exalted, bragged about.

 This photo was posted on Reddit and has been picked up by other discussion boards on the web. Its caption reads:

As I wrote the other day, just when you think the TSA can’t get any more stupid or abusive, they prove you wrong. The agency is reliable: there’s always a new low.

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In the latest round of self promotion, the TSA announced that elite US Airways passengers at Sea-Tac (Seattle) are now eligible to participate in the premium program called PreCheck.PreCheck is an ostensibly elite program that, for a fee, sometimes allows some passengers to get through security more quickly. It is not, however, all it’s cracked

Every time you think the TSA can’t come up with anything more stupid or abusive, they prove you wrong.

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As we’ve reported numerous times, the TSA, despite its claims in public and on its website, routinely harasses passengers who have medical conditions and/or who are carrying prescription medicines.

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A San Diego man, a citizen of Somali descent, is stuck in Bahrain indefinitely.I can only imagine how terrible it must feel to not be allowed to come home, not go back to work, stuck in a foreign country, run

In an apparent attempt to make light of the fact that an 81-year-old man was forced to stand in public with his pants around his ankles, the Toronto Sun reported that actor William Shatner was chosen for a “random” search at LAX (Los Angeles).

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We’ve had yet another incident of a TSA agent humiliating and disrespecting a passenger. At Orlando airport in Florida, John Gross was transporting his grandfather’s ashes in an urn marked “Human Remains.” As he told the IndyChannel in his hometown of Indianapolis:

A reader wrote to TSA News with the story of his assault at the hands of a TSA agent at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Sunday, June 24th. After verifying his identity, we agreed to tell his story but keep his name private.

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by Wendy Thomson

With the May 30th passing of Rep. Jackie Speier’s legislation allowing the TSA to share data with all manner of ground transportation, the question comes to mind, what’s next? Will we be assaulted every time we try to travel from point A to point B, no matter by what means?  

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In an about-face from what the TSA has been claiming since 2010 — and from what hundreds of thousands of travelers have experienced — a TSA supervisor claimed the other day that TSA agents are, in fact, not supposed to use the front of their hands to grope passengers in a search, only the back of their hands, “unless there is a good reason to believe the passenger is hiding something.”

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Ah, well, isn’t it nice to know that it’s not just the hoi polloi who get bullied, harassed, and abused by the TSA, but also Congressmen, Senators, 

Yesterday and the day before TSA News had two posts on misleading news reports about the supposed safety of backscatter (x-ray) scanners.

by Bill Fisher

Over the weekend the Los Angeles Times featured a story with this headline: “TSA scanners pose negligible risk to passengers, new test shows.”

Some of us here at TSA News and at Travel Underground stopped flying long ago. Though we love — no, adore — travel, we stopped flying when the Reign of Molestation was implemented. I took the last flight of my life in September 2010.

by Amy Alkon

I’m not offended by traditional porn — the kind with naked people and and kinky this and that (as long as it isn’t kiddie porn and as long as the participants are consenting adults).

What I am offended by is the obscene constant daily violation by the TSA of Americans’ Fourth Amendment right to not be searched without probable cause. There was yet another disgusting TSA-inflicted ball-grabbing — that became an intense disgusting TSA-inflicted ball probing — of the husband of conservative commentator Dana Loesch:

by Deborah Newell Tornello

All the airport’s a stage, and all the blue-clad men and women merely players.

Actors often remark on the power of costume in terms of bringing a character to life: before donning the white-blonde wig, the pirate’s eye-patch, or the Batsuit, they say, it’s just line-reading and imagination. But once they emerge from wardrobe, Presto! The make-believe becomes near-reality.