Woman accused of groping a tsa agent.

[HRCNICK11]

http://news.yahoo.com/colo-woman-accused-groping-tsa-agent-ariz-215702921.html

[Uninformed Opinion]

Turn about is fair play.

[SirBrass]

To take devil's advocate, when I fly I fly out of Phoenix Sky Harbor, and I have yet to be harassed or otherwise ill treated by TSA agents... nor have I had to go through a terminal which sports one of those porno-scanners or "enhanced patdowns", and I'm about as suspicious as could be:  late twenty-something white male with firearms in his checked luggage.  Seems that overall, the TSA agents in PHX seem (important key word here) to be a least a level higher on the decency scale than elsewhere.

If this happened at LAX I wouldn't have any objections to this woman's actions, though.

[gitt1]

I'm about as suspicious as could be:  late twenty-something white male

See now that's your problem. If you were a 92 year old grandma you would be getting frisked and poked routinely.

[Devereaux]

I have the distinct unpleasant experience of flying anywhere from 4 to 8 segments a month. I get to interact with the TSA agents a lot.

I would say that overall there is very little "competence" nor real knowledge of what they are there for. They follow rote, do the "rules" and don't much care about the product. Some clearly enjoy the authority role they have and make an issue of it. If you show the least bit resistance, they will attempt to control the encounter, and generally take revenge by doing stuff that isn't "illegal" for them to do but is clearly not necessary.

One thing I can say from direct observation is that there is pretty much NO regularity or consistency in the system. I get a myriad of demands, sometimes even in the same basic unit, from trip to trip. Some DEMAND that I take off my belt (a stupid idea), others that I take out my BIPAP machine (I refuse, on the grounds that it is directly visible with no encumbrances - makes them mad). I will regularly refuse to go through the scanner, but its use is variable, with no real rhyme or reason. My wife and I recently flew to Boston. At Chicago we both refused the scanner, and SHE got a ration of grief from the female pat-down agent. I didn't but them I am physically not likely to get grief even though I am really just a pussycat wimp.

ULTIMATELY this is a simple 4th Amendment issue. The government DOES have a right AND need to keep us safe, but NOT by infringing our rights. ?Else what is the point. There are any number of OTHER means of arriving at the same result, but some of them are "politically incorrect" and others require real work and intelligence - both the pure mental kind and the collection kind. Neither are things the government would likely desire to do as they are time and resource consuming (as if the TSA is not! But it is a source of a large number of new union flunkies) and therefore hard to do well. Governments will always avoid such activity. Perhaps deep down they understand they are not usually good at such. Only with real will and effort do you get good results that way.