Opinion

In defense of the TSA

Not long ago, I was taking a train from my arrival terminal at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport to the car rental area, and I ran across an off-duty airport employee.

She seemed tired and burdened with the day of work; she kept her head down and stuck to herself. I struck up a conversation with her and she, somewhat reluctantly, revealed that she was a Transportation Security Agency worker. I thanked her for doing a tough and often thankless job. After I expressed my thanks, she perked up immediately and mentioned how nice it was since very few people bother to do so. She even mentioned that she had been called an “Airport Nazi.”

We often hear about the negative side of airport security, but rarely do we recognize the great work that the majority of these agents do every day. Most articles that I found thanking the TSA were along the lines of “Thank you for taking my peanut butter TSA!”

But last week’s revelation that terrorists tried — yet again — to blow up an airplane using a bomb sewn into underwear should remind fliers why the patdowns and scans are necessary.

If this seems intrusive, it’s only because the madmen are depraved. Al Qaeda has implanted explosives inside bombers; they’ve used chemical bombs and shoe bombs and bombs in computers — all the things that the TSA bans or searches.

But I don’t look like a terrorist, you protest. Why am I being treated like a criminal? But what does a terrorist look like, when there are al Qaeda sympathizers from different nations, and women are being used as suicide bombers in the Middle East? And it’s the very randomness of the searches that serves as a deterrent.

Mayor Bloomberg argues last week that stop and frisk searches by the police, like DUI checkpoints, isn’t about how many guns you find or how many drunks you arrest. It’s also about those people who decide not to carry a gun or get drunk and drive in the first place.

The truth is no one likes to be stopped and searched. But it isn’t the police or the TSA who are to blame — it’s the criminals.

On a good day, security agents are criticized and thought of as scum. On a bad day, well — let’s hope that those days never happen. Because those same critics who complain about the TSA searches will be asking what went wrong.

That isn’t to say that a little more common sense could be used, a little more sensitivity to a child, an elderly person or the disabled.

But for every one outraged video on YouTube, millions of travelers pass through with little real intrusion into our lives.

In my going through TSA-controlled security nearly 300 times in the past nine years, I’ve never seen an agent act in an inappropriate fashion. I think that the tendency to criticize more than we praise is just part of human nature. We tend to ignore good service, but we latch onto bad interactions. We take the TSA for granted. Every day, they’re unsure of what they will encounter. It could be an old lady that is confused about the liquids rule, or someone with enough explosives in their underpants to take down a plane. Take a minute to think about that, and then tell me that a moment of inconvenience isn’t worth the trouble.

Graham Holt blogs about travel at grahamstravelblog.blogspot.com