Jaunted

That answer, with due respect, is insultingly stupid. In fact this is rapidly becoming a classic example of how TSA goes about its business. First agency officials make some boneheaded mistake or institute some insane policy. Then—instead of fixing whatever they did—they condescendingly mislead the public to avoid criticism.

In December 2009, the TSA posted highly classified screening procedures on the Internet and tried to redact the confidential parts by digitally drawing big black boxes on the PDF. When confronted with how brain-dead that was, the agency absurdly insisted that the extremely sensitive data didn't matter anyway. Then last year the TSA started really rolling out full-body scanners, and privacy advocates said that of course the machines were able to save naked pictures because that's how engineers extracted calibration data. The agency sneeringly insisted that the machines couldn't do that and that citizen concerns were grounded in misinformation, which turned out to be flat lies.

Now we've got a situation where the TSA chief is borderline imposing unionization on the country and, to dismiss any public criticism, he's assuring us that union workers won't be allowed to bargain "on any topics that might affect security." But federal employees are already not allowed to bargain over pay, pensions, or compensation. That means the only things left for TSA employees to negotiate are performance evaluations and workplace practices, which are the definition of security-related. How could those topics not affect security, since they determine the minute-by-minute behavior and expectation of security officials?

Who knows. Maybe unionization won't negatively impact performance. But if these atrocious arguments are the best that TSA's unionization defenders can brainstorm, then probably the opposite.

[Photo: TSA]

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