This Week in Stupid TSA Tricks

July 15, 2011 at 3:51 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

So someone in the United States House found out that since November 2001 there have been 25,000 - that's the number twenty-five with three zeros after it - breaches of secured airport perimeters. Naturally they wanted to have a chat with the TSA about those breaches, since 25,000 seems like a pretty big number and reflects a fairly high level of incompetence, so they called a hearing. At that hearing a document was waved around that contained a bunch of information about how TSA protects airports. Now it turns out that the information in the document was classified, and that revealing it was a huge security breach.

Just so everyone's clear on what happened. In an effort to find out why TSA's covert security procedures were only working part of the time - something that's bad enough - Congress managed to leak those procedures so now they'll work even less well. That brings us to two questions. First, is there anyone, anywhere, at any level who isn't totally incompetent? And second, how can it possibly be that this wasn't the dumbest TSA stunt of the week?

That prize goes to this story, unsurprisingly captured by TMZ's "why yes, we do actually camp out in every American airport" cameramen. Donald Rumsfeld, who Wikipedia tells us is 79 years old, has twice run the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense and once run the White House as Chief of Staff. Earlier this week he was randomly choosen at O'Hare for an enhanced patdown, because it's important for TSA to show is that Donald Rumsfeld is just like everybody else. Except he isn't. And that's stupid.

Listen. Obviously this is a hard problem, and we've got to balance "common sense" with security, and no one is sure how to do that. But whatever the answer is, it certainly has to include not holding up the security line to pat down the guy who ran the entire US military twice. Apparently there were soldiers waving at him as he was being patted down. Come on. The point isn't that he's a celebrity who should get special treatment or anything like that, but just that he's just not a threat. He's not. We can all admit that, right?

Also, can you imagine being the traveler behind Rumsfeld in the glass cage, standing there for an extra five minutes while TSA agents went through the motions of patting down the former Secretary of Defense? Blood. Pressure.

[Photo: TMZ]

Jaunted

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