TSA's Abusive Non-Solution

My cousin-in-law recently had a humiliating and terrifying TSA experience.  She sent out a family email, which I copied and pasted below.  The story is told very matter-of-factly, but make no mistake, the experience has caused her considerable emotional trauma.  

I was traveling from Houston (IAH) on Sunday, December 19, 2010 with my husband and 2 year old daughter.  We prepared for screening as normal, emptying our liquids and dividing the small liquids in Ziploc bags.  I enter the metal detector and am not cleared because of the excessive number of hair pins I left in my hair from a wedding the night before.  I am told to hand my child to my husband so I can get pat down.  Fine, I get it.

As I am waiting, a TSA agent tells me (not my husband), that our stroller will be coming out of a different scanner.  I am then informed that I cannot touch anything, not even my daughter until I am cleared from the pat down.  I then wait a few minutes (not seconds) for a TSA agent (while my husband is left on his own to care for a 2 year old and gather all of our belongings).

The TSA agent (Agent A) then begins her speech of what she is going to do.  I interrupt her to ask for clarification on what the exact policy is for the pat down, where she begins to get irritated with me and continues on her prepared speech without answering my question.  During this speech, I’m watching my husband and daughter to make sure everything is going okay. I then see the stroller going out of the other scanner and call to my husband so he can get it.  TSA Agent A then yells at me and runs to grab someone else’s belongings.  As I’m trying to explain to her that those are not my belongings and I was just pointing the stroller out to my husband, another agent (Agent B, LT50 Demeke) comes up to yell at me as well.  Agent B, LT50 Demeke, informs me that I was being incredibly disrespectful and called it upon herself to oversee and verbally abuse me throughout the duration of the pat down.  She also walks over to my husband to lecture him on how his wife needs to learn respect for the sake of our daughter.

I am then cleared and ask for Agent B’s name and ID badge number.  Agent B, LT50 Demeke, then scatters my boarding documents over a table, grabs my driver’s license and boarding document, and takes it to her post to write down my information.  When I tell her she has no right to take my things like that (remember she was not the individual who was assigned to perform my pat down), she told me that she did indeed have that right and also had the right to have me arrested if she wanted.  She kindly gives me back my documents along with her name and wishes me a Merry Christmas.

I arrive at my destination and find that the bag that I checked did not leave the Houston airport.  After speaking with a retired airport employee, I am quite certain that Agent B, LT 50 Demeke, used my identification and boarding documents to pull my suitcase off my flight for further inspection (of course with no intent other than pure malice).

The inherent incentive for a democratic system to maintain and cause problems (please see Part 1:  Revisiting Enlightenment, Democracy Suffers From a Poisonous Incentive Structure) is at the heart of thousands of painful stories, just like this one.   Full-blown tyranny is here, and the abuses will only accelerate until you stop it.