Tag: TSA

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8 Travel-Ready Beauty Products to Fit in a TSA-Allotted Plastic Baggie

March 14, 2013 at 10:55 AM | by | Comments (0)

We love tiny beauty products. Our bathroom could double as a beauty supply store, but when it comes to travel, efficiency and portability win out over changing lipstick color every day of the week.

These eight products will serve you well on trips from Tokyo to Tenerife and--bonus!--only two are liquid, leaving plenty of space in your quart-size baggie.

· Tocca Solid Perfume
You know that woman sitting across the aisle from you who sprayed on her favorite perfume even though it made everyone else gag? Congratulations. You are not that woman.

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Politicians and Airline Execs Now Going After TSA for Lifting Knife Ban

March 13, 2013 at 5:46 PM | by | Comments (0)

Week 2 of this nonsense. Now lawmakers—who usually grandstand by attacking TSA for having too many restrictions—are going after the agency for dropping some of them. It's not quite enough to make us wish for more sequester travel news—because, you know—but we're getting to a place where investigating travel pillows seems like a good idea.

By way of review: in the face of endless demands that the agency use common sense, TSA last week announced new rules under which passengers would be allowed to carry sporting goods and small knives on board airplanes. Everybody promptly lost their shit, and here we all find ourselves.

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What If Sequestration Had a Huge Effect on Travel and Nobody Noticed?

March 11, 2013 at 6:06 PM | by | Comment (1)

It's difficult to talk about sequesteration, even and especially as it impacts travel, in a non-partisan way. Both sides have their talking points, and collectively the debate is so grating that last week we got reduced to talking about vending machines instead.

Nonetheless you can kind of tell which way the political winds are blowing, because as of this morning the left is trying to criticize the right for celebrating too soon. As an apocalypse, at least from the outside, sequester is turning into the biggest letdown since Y2K. Sure the White House cancelled its tours, which was a delightfully bitchy inside-the-Beltway move (those tours are scheduled through individual Congressional offices so Congressional staffers were the ones who had to call constituents and explain that little Timmy couldn't go to the White House any more). But other than that, meh. Right?

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Pocket Knives are Cool to Fly, but the TSA Will Still Confiscate Liquids

March 6, 2013 at 2:52 PM | by | Comments (0)

This is one of those times when we really pity TSA. The airport security agency just can't win. Yesterday TSA officials announced that they were going to start allowing small - very, very small - pocket knives on board airplanes. One would think that the announcement would have been celebrated, since tiny knives that people forget they're carrying constantly slow down TSA lines. The new rules sound exactly like the common sense regulations everyone claims to want.

Instead the agency was immediately criticized by flight attendants and 9/11 families for endangering passengers. 6cm long, 1/2 inch wide blades were indistinguishable from box cutters, we were told. A popular political satire site ran a headline saying that TSA had been praised by the "National Arbitrariness Association," which as near as we can tell mocked TSA basically just for making a decision about something.

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TSA's Pre-Check Program Adds New Airports to Total 40 Spots

February 28, 2013 at 9:07 AM | by | Comments (0)

We can all agree that airport security—at least in the United States—is kind of a pain in the rear. At this point we’ve pretty much become used to being patted down, scanned, zapped, and viewed through x-ray glasses. The TSA has made some improvements with expediting the whole process, and their pre-check program—or Pre✓ as they like to call it—is probably one of the best. It’s at a whole bunch of airports across the land, but their most recent update improves the options a little bit more.

In total there’s five new airports in which the program should be kicking off, and this will bring the country’s total to about 40 by the beginning of April. Austin-Bergstrom International, Cleveland Hopkins International, Memphis International, Nashville International, and Raleigh-Durham International are the ones on the schedule to get the airport security upgrade.

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Coming Up Next: TSA-Friendly Airport Vending Machines

February 27, 2013 at 3:48 PM | by | Comments (0)

Hey, who's up for another week of shouting about whether the sequester is going to prevent TSA agents from doing their jobs? We wrote about the political back-and-forth last week and explained why the debate is surreal bordering on inexplicable. But if you're a travel junkie or a political junkie or just really hate yourself, here are links saying it's going to be a disaster (one, two) and here are links saying you don't have to worry (one, two). Consider yourself briefed.

Not to get all emo, but we remember a time when writing about TSA was fun. The word "stupid" came up a lot (a lot). Now it's all about economic disaster and crying, disabled 3 year olds. What happened to the days when airport security stories were just brief little reminders that people are totally insane, is what we've been asking ourselves.

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The Sequestration Debate Comes to the TSA

February 22, 2013 at 2:35 PM | by | Comment (1)

There's a huge Beltway debate afoot - Washingtonians like to think that people outside of DC care, but that's uncertain - regarding the probable effects of the increasingly likely sequester budget cuts. The left has been going issue by issue and insisting that cuts will be devestating. The right has been doing the same thing except concluding the exact opposite. CBS News describes this as the "will sequestration really be that bad?" debate.

Now each side has gotten around to TSA. White House officials say that the sequester will negatively impact the airport security agency. Their political opponents are saying not so much. The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in the middle, none of which is what we find so strange about the back-and-forth.

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Watch Supermodel Coco Rocha Dance Through Security at TWA's Terminal 5

February 11, 2013 at 3:52 PM | by | Comments (0)

Okay, travelers. Put on your dancing shoes because supermodel Coco Rocha has just introduced a little dance we're going to call the Airside Slide. Earlier today, Coco announced the airing of the video accompanying her work on the Spring/Summer 2013 campaign for french luxury fashion house Longchamp, and it's in this video that she and another model (Liisa Winkler) boogie down under the roof of the old Eero Saarinen-designed TWA Terminal at JFK Airport.

The premise is simple: Coco's running to catch a flight. She passes through security but keeps beeping. The TSA agent steps out to frisk her, at which point the music starts Coco spontaneously dancing, joined in the moves by Liisa.

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The TSA's Newest Security Measure? Puppies.

February 6, 2013 at 5:31 PM | by | Comments (0)

The TSA has, of course—famously and aggressively, though not always successfully—been moving toward what it calls "risk-based security." The agency would like to get to a place where not every passenger goes through the same procedures, partly because that seems smart but also because they're tired of having to listen to everyone complain about how they treat grandma the same way they treat 25 year old males.

Sometimes the changes take the form of more screening. Sometimes they take the form of less screening. In the context of today's story, we can't figure out exactly which direction the agency is moving. We did however notice that there were puppies involved. Puppies!

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Woman Suing Basically Everyone Over Airport Racial Profiling

January 23, 2013 at 5:53 PM | by | Comments (0)

You guys know how we feel about tales of TSA woe that are just too perfect: the conspiracy theorist who says he was personally targeted by government agents, the deaf rights activist who says he was subject to anti-handicap abuse, the model who says she was just so hot that TSA officials simply had to grope her, and so on. It's cliched but it's true.

Things that are too good to be true, by definition, never are.

Except maybe this case in which an Ohio woman is suing just about everybody related to airport security—the TSA, the FBI, the ICE, Frontier Airlines, a bunch of federal agencies, various airports and airport officials—over what sounds like a batshit crazy abuse of power on September 11, 2011.

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Let's Get This TSA Full-Body Scanner Switcheroo Straight

January 21, 2013 at 4:35 PM | by | Comments (2)


The L3 body scanners you will see in airports from now on

News broke on Friday that TSA is removing Rapiscan full-body scanners, made by OSI Systems Inc., from airports. We wrote it up with a somewhat immodest reminder that we had put the move on your radar last October and called your attention to two salient details in the story.

One, that this is a software issue and not anything having to do with hardware or with full-body scanning or anything fundamental like that. Two, that TSA would be subbing in L3's millimeter-wave machines for the Rapiscan machines, essentially replacing one full-body scanner with another.

What happened is Congress told TSA to use scanners that produce feature-less outlines. So TSA told companies to make scanners that feature-less outlines. L3 developed what they call "Automatic Target Recognition," which makes machines display gingerbread man outlines, but OSI didn't develop anything similar. Ergo, TSA replaced OSI's machines with L3's machines.

Cue mass confusion on the Internet. Half the stories we saw incorrectly implied that TSA had abolished full-body scanners. The other half (the more entertaining half) explained that the misreporting was part of a conspiracy to lull America's sheeple into giving up their rights. God love you all, but wrong and wrong.

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Booyah! TSA to Remove Invasive Body Scanners from Airports

January 18, 2013 at 3:23 PM | by | Comments (2)

You know how we've told you for years that you should always trust content from Jaunted? And you remember how we told you in October 2012 that TSA might be giving up on the agency's nude-o-scope scanners, even though the agency had issued denials and even though the scanners were still in the process of getting deployed to airports around the country?

News broke early this morning that the TSA is giving up on nude-o-scope scanners. It was confirmed—in articles published two minutes apart—by Bloomberg and Reuters. Thank you and good night.

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