I started this blog with three primary messages to bring to the public. The Big 3 were often lost in the noise of the various controversies and viral events that came from this site. But to recap, here they are: 
 
 1. The full-body backscatter radiation scanners used to view nude images of passengers in private rooms were useless– a complete waste of taxpayer money. The TSA was lying to the public about the efficacy of those scanners; all of us TSA screeners on the floor were aware of their flaws. They were a blatant and unwarranted infringement upon people’s privacy. Within a few weeks of this site first gaining media attention, the TSA canceled its contract with Rapiscan, and officially began phasing out the full-body backscatter radiation scanners. Coincidence? Maybe. As I’ve said before, I leave that up to the reader to decide. 
 
 2. There are bad TSA screeners out there, as the public so often gets word of, but there are also good TSA screeners out there. Those on the inside of the TSA– those workers who are actually out on the checkpoint floor day in and day out– know that the central problem is that the TSA’s work culture and structure is one that encourages bad screeners to cling to the job, and makes good screeners want to quit as soon as possible. The TSA’s annual recertification system is a large part of the problem. 
 
 And finally: 
 
 3. The TSA’s SPOT program, also known as the Behavior Detection Program, is another sham. 
 
 Number 1 has been addressed by the TSA in many ways, as they were caught with their pants down in regard to the radiation scanners. Number 2 is an issue that the public still hasn’t taken notice of, and probably never will, since it’s not the kind of issue that’s conducive to splashy headlines. And now, at long last, number 3 is grabbing headlines, with the ACLU’s lawsuit against the TSA in regard to its SPOT program, and the release of documents detailing some of the absurd, headline-friendly details of that program. In the media and government game, the key to getting important information to the public is a headline-worthy aspect to the story. It is an unfortunate reality, but reality nonetheless. 
 
 So I’ll say it again, for about the sixth time since this blog’s publication: many of us have been trying to tell the public for years that the TSA’s Behavior Detection Program is useless and unnecessarily compromises people’s rights. Now it seems the broader population may have finally taken notice. I encourage you to read this article I wrote about it, almost two years ago, if you haven’t already. 
 
 Follow me on Twitter ||||| On Jan. 4, 2010, when my boss saw my letter to the editor in the New York Times, we had a little chat. 
 
 It was rare for the federal security director at Chicago O’Hare to sit down with her floor-level Transportation Security Administration officers—it usually presaged a termination—and so I was nervous as I settled in across the desk from her. She was a woman in her forties with sharp blue eyes that seemed to size you up for placement in a spreadsheet. She held up a copy of the newspaper, open to the letters page. My contribution, under the headline “To Stop a Terrorist: No Lack of Ideas,” was circled in blue pen. 
 
 One week earlier, on Christmas Day 2009, a man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to detonate 80 grams of a highly explosive powder while on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. He had smuggled the bomb aboard the plane in a pouch sewn into his underwear. It was a masterpiece of post-9/11 tragicomedy: Passengers tackled and restrained Abdulmutallab for the remainder of the flight, and he succeeded in burning nothing besides his own genitals. 
 
 The TSA saw the near-miss as proof that aviation security could not be ensured without the installation of full-body scanners in every U.S. airport. But the agency’s many critics called its decision just another knee-jerk response to an attempted terrorist attack. I agreed, and wrote to the Times saying as much. My boss wasn’t happy about it. 
 
 “The problem we have here is that you identified yourself as a TSA employee,” she said. 
 
 They were words I had heard somewhere before. Suddenly, the admonishment from our annual conduct training flashed through my head—self-identifying as a government employee in a public forum may be grounds for termination. 
 
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 I was shocked. I had been sure the letter would fall under the aegis of public concern, but it looked as though my boss wanted to terminate me. I scrambled for something to say. 
 
 “I thought the First Amendment applied here.” 
 
 She leaned back in her chair, hands up, palms outfaced. Now she was on the defensive. 
 
 “I’m not trying to tread upon your First Amendment rights,” she said. “All I’m saying is: Couldn’t you have run those First Amendment rights past the legal department first?” 
 
 She dismissed me with the assurance that we would discuss the matter further at some point in the future. 
 
 Most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds. 
 
 I never heard anything more about it during the next three years of my employment at the TSA, save for some grumbling from one upper-level manager (“What’s this I hear about you writing letters to the New York Times? You can’t do that here.”) It was the last time I would speak out as a government employee under my real name. 
 
 But it was by no means the last time I would speak out. 
 
 *** 
 
 My pained relationship with government security had started three years earlier. I had just returned to Chicago to finish my bachelor’s degree after a two-year stint in Florida. I needed a job to help pay my way through school, and the TSA’s call-back was the first one I received. It was just a temporary thing, I told myself—side income for a year or two as I worked toward a degree in creative writing. It wasn’t like a recession would come along and lock me into the job or anything. 
 
 It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism of U.S foreign policy; by day, I spent eight hours at O’Hare in a federal uniform, solemnly carrying out orders passed down from headquarters. 
 
 What Those TSA Guys Are Really Saying Definitions in “The Insider’s TSA Dictionary” taken from James Harrington’s blog, “Taking Sense Away.” 10-100: Originally, CB radio lingo for a bathroom break. This is what some TSA officers say when they’re tired of their co-workers. Alfalfa: TSA malespeak for an attractive female passenger. Baby-shower-opt-out: When a woman opts out of the full body scanner and accidentally lets slip the explanation: “I don’t want to go through the scanner. I’m pregnant,” evoking a shriek from her fellow traveling companions, “Why didn’t you tell us, Becky? OH EM GEE!?” A mini celebration then takes place right there in the line. It is one of the few heartwarming things that ever come about due to the full body scanners. BBC: Bogus Bag Check, or Bullshit Bag Check. What happens when a not-too-bright x-ray operator decides to call a bag search. Bin Loader: What a TSA employee is for the first month of his or her employment. Code Red: Officer malespeak. Denotes an attractive female passenger wearing red. Fanny Pack, Lane 2: Code for an attractive female passenger. Jif Peanut Butter: One of the main things you’ll be saving the world from in your day-to-day activities as a sworn federal security officer devoted to protecting the nation from the existential terrorist threat. Opt out: A smart passenger. Retaliatory wait time: What happens when a TSA officer doesn’t like your attitude. There are all sorts of ways a TSA officer can subtly make you wait longer to get through security, citing imaginary alarms, going “above the SOP” for “a more thorough screening,” pretending that something in your bag or on your full body image needs to be resolved—the punitive possibilities are endless, and there are many tricks in the screener’s bag. Run the Cat Through the X-Ray (idiomatic): Denotes a passenger, usually someone from out of country, who is so unfamiliar and lost in U.S. airport security that they are likely to make significant errors, such as running their cats through the x-ray tunnel. Ex: “We need an officer to go out and help that flustered gentleman out front before he runs the cat through the x-ray.” Suitcase Surgeon: Informal term for a TSA employee, derived from the blue gloves they wear. Used ironically, because it’s not like what the TSA ever does requires anything remotely approaching the mental capacity of a surgical procedure anyway, even though you may feel as though you’ve undergone a surgical procedure after they’re done with you. TSA Baby: Officer slang for the result of procreation between two TSA officers. This is not advised, because statistics show that the likelihood of a TSA baby turning out to be a mediocrity who reflexively snatches and cries incessantly about people’s liquids, gels, creams and aerosols and who tells airplane pilots that they are not allowed to bring Swiss army knives on the plane because they may use it to hijack the plane are substantially high. White Shirt: A TSA employee who still believes his or her job is a matter of national security. Xray Xray Xray!: Code for an attractive female passenger, general. Yellow Alert: Code for an attractive female passenger, yellow clothing. Ziptop baggie: A magical thing that renders liquids safe for airplanes. 
 
 I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying. 
 
 Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security. 
 
 There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22. 
 
 I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds. 
 
 Charges of racial profiling by the TSA made headlines every few months, and working from behind the scenes we knew what was prompting those claims. Until 2010 (not long after the TSA standard operating procedure manual was accidentially leaked to the public), all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List. It consisted of 12 nations that automatically triggered enhanced passenger screening. The training department drilled us on the selectee countries so regularly that I had memorized them, like a little poem: 
 
 Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan 
 
 Iraq, Iran, Yemen 
 
 and Cuba, 
 
 Lebanon-Libya, Somalia-Sudan 
 
 People’s Republic of North Korea. 
 
 People holding passports from the selectee countries were automatically pulled aside for full-body pat-downs and had their luggage examined with a fine-toothed comb. The selectee list was purely political, of course, with diplomacy playing its role as always: There was no Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a list of states historically known to harbor, aid and abet terrorists. Besides, my co-workers at the airport didn’t know Algeria from a medical condition, we rarely came across Cubanos and no one’s ever seen a North Korean passport that didn’t include the words “Kim-Jong.” So it was mostly the Middle Easterners who got the special screening. ||||| And yes, TSA agents saw you naked, although that was not as titillating as some might presume, according to a former TSA agent who once reported anonymously from the inside. Jason Edward Harrington has gone public in a Politico Magazine essay after causing an anonymous stir at the blog Taking Sense Away. He reveals how much he hated the key aspects of his job, and how little regard his fellow TSA agents have for their more intrusive duties: 
 
 I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying. Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security. There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22. 
 
 The big reveal in this piece isn’t the naked pictures, or the petty retributions of pat-downs for rude passengers, or even the fact that the scanner images provided a little inspiration for amorous activity inside the secure room — thanks in part to the lack of surveillance because of the naked images being reviewed in the booth. Harrington reports openly that TSA insisted on getting the original full-body scanners after the Underwear Bomber attempt, even though they knew full well it wouldn’t prevent a terrorist attack: 
 
 We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop. Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines. “They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket. We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone. 
 
 This confirms pretty much everything we suspected about the TSA. Harrington notes that morale is lower in this agency than anywhere else in the US government, and there are good reasons for it. At least in his telling, few of the people believe in their mission, the traveling public is held in contempt, and the backscatter machines had them worried about their health at the same time TSA was telling the public that there was no health or safety issues at all. One of the terms defined in the TSA “lexicon” is “opt-out,” which refers explicitly to passengers who refuse the scanner and go for the pat-down — but TSA agents use the term to mean, “smart passenger.” 
 
 Small wonder, then, that when having to watch backscatter images of dubious use, Harrington “personally witnessed quite a bit of fooling around, in every sense of the phrase.” Why not? Again according to Harrington’s account, everyone seemed to realize that they were providing security theater rather than real security. 
 
 Of course, one reason this story is so compelling is precisely because it confirms our previous assessments of TSA, both as travelers and in overall analysis of their function. It’s still one man’s perception of the environment, albeit one man who did go to some risk to publicize these issues while still at TSA. Harrington studied writing while working at TSA, and it shows; it’s an entertaining and compelling read, and tends to reduce the skepticism we would normally apply to tales from self-described disgruntled workers. 
 
 It’s compelling enough that Congress should invite Harrington to discuss these issues in hearings, and haul some of his former superiors and fellow agents to explain themselves. If Harrington is exaggerating or making the error of applying a local experience into a global rule, a fair hearing will bear that out. But given the experiences that Americans have had with this intrusive and perplexing TSA security regime, we are owed some accountability for its performance, and an answer to the issues that Harrington raises. ||||| Even airport TSA agents don't really believe they're making much of a difference. Or so suggests Jason Harrington, a former Transportation Security Administration employee who's written a revealing piece for Politico on what it's like to work for the agency on the ground floor. Harrington writes that many of his coworkers found their orders questionable, from selecting people for enhanced screenings based on their nationality to the broad use of full-body scanners. Harrington also writes that he hated that the job made him pat down children and the elderly and confiscate everything from nail clippers to homemade jellies under the guise of national security. 
 
 It isn't just passengers who dislike full-body scanners 
 
 TSA agents reportedly didn't take the job all that seriously in many cases too. Harrington writes that those tasked with analyzing images from full-body scanners often didn't pay attention or would crack jokes about passengers' bodies. In part, that may have been because the agents Harrington worked with didn't really care for the machines in the first place: they didn't like the idea of being around radiation all day, and they were among the first to realize that Rapiscan Systems' full-body scanners weren't very effective at identifying smuggled weapons. 
 
 If Harrington's stories sound familiar, that's because you may have read pieces of them before: he's run the blog Taking Sense Away for a couple years now, anonymously sharing his and others' experiences working with the TSA. His publication in Politico this week is this first time Harrington has identified himself, and he's already using the exposure to share some added insights:
– A former TSA employee has written a first-person piece for Politico Magazine, that, in the words of Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, "confirms pretty much everything we suspected about the TSA." Some excerpts from the article by Jason Harrington, who had previously posted anonymously at the blog Taking Sense Away: "I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly, and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security." "Just as the long-suffering American public waiting on those security lines suspected, jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues: Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible." "Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an IED, and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security." "We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop." "The only people who hated the body-scanners more than the public were TSA employees themselves. Many of my co-workers felt uncomfortable even standing next to the radiation-emitting machines we were forcing members of the public to stand inside." Click for Harrington's full article. The Verge notes that Harrington is now tweeting additional stuff, like this: "One thing I left out of that Politico piece: HELL YES airport employees often drink those bottles of alcohol you surrender at the checkpoint."