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WASHINGTON — Hand sanitizer makes it through security in one airport, then it's confiscated at another. Screening lines back up because only two of six lanes are open. And then there's the occasional all-too-intimate patdown.
Those complaints and other frustrations make the nation's airport security agency about as popular as the IRS.
Indeed, only the Federal Emergency Management Agency, still suffering from its mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, ranks below the Transportation Security Administration among the least-liked federal agencies, according to a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
The TSA is merely window-dressing.
And it is not the individual workers' faults so much as their higher-ups.
It seems to me that more money should be spent on intelligence-gathering than screening. That way, the bad guys might not ever get to the departure gate.
All I can say, is if you disliked the TSA, you should have seen who they had screening for security before the feds took it over -
rent-a-bums, people that couldn't speak english, illegal aliens, guys that couldn't qualify to be baggage handlers. It used to be each airports responsibility to hire security personnel (at as little pay as they can get away with). It's a pain but at least you got some consistency and a little more profesionalism.
All I can say, is if you disliked the TSA, you should have seen who they had screening for security before the feds took it over -
rent-a-bums, people that couldn't speak english, illegal aliens, guys that couldn't qualify to be baggage handlers. It used to be each airports responsibility to hire security personnel (at as little pay as they can get away with). It's a pain but at least you got some consistency and a little more profesionalism.
Hate to break it to you, but it hasn't changed much.
Hate to break it to you, but it hasn't changed much.
Oh it's changed. Most of the security make a little more money and are half way intellegent now, thanks to consistent and regulated hiring practices by the feds. But that same consistency that helps in hiring, the beauracracy of being part of a huge nationwide agency, is their doom. Now you have strict policies and procedures and paperwork that don't make practical sense - searching 80 year old ladies, confiscating a grandma's sewing needles, confiscating a 4 year olds lollypop, policies forbiding selective enforcement, basically turning these employees into unthinking robots.
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