A former TSA agent has revealed to Politico some of the most despicable things he and his colleagues did on the job, such as stopping passengers for searches if they seemed agitated, profiling passengers based on ethnicity and worst of all: looking at naked images of people in X-ray photos.
According to Politico, Jason Harrington’s confessional piece tells all as to how security workers amuse themselves during their painfully long shifts.
“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,” he wrote.
Harrington said that during his time at Chicago O’Hare airport from 2007 until 2013, his favorite shift in the Image Operator room where guards would take turns sitting in the windowless room (that was also void of security cameras) and viewing naked pictures of passengers taken by X-ray machines.
“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. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern — their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area,” he wrote in the Politico article.“All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels.”
The Image Operator room turned into a secret meeting place for workers because it was one of the only places in the airport without any security cameras.
Harrington, who took a graduate course in writing after leaving his job at the Chicago airport, also revealed the code words he and his former colleagues would use to alert each other should an attractive passenger be approaching.
According to Politico, “Fanny Pack Lane 2″ and “Alfalfa” were used to give a heads-up about an attractive woman nearby. If there was more than one approaching, the agents would say “Code Red” or “Code Yellow” to distinguish the women depending on the color of their shirts.
Yet arguably the most unsettling section of Harrington’s lengthy piece is when he confesses that the machines designed to detect weapons and drugs did little else but provide entertainment for the workers.
He distinctly remembers a representative from the company that makes the $150,000 machines telling the agents that they barely served their purpose.
“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,” Harrington wrote.
This, aside from pure boredom, was the reason Harrington and his colleagues would give supposedly “random” security checks to “suspicious” passengers.
If a certain name sounded suspicious for whatever reason, the agents would print a code on the passenger’s boarding pass to remind the agent at the gate to instruct him or her to step aside for another security check.
A passenger’s ethnicity alone could also warrant an unnecessary search. Each agent, Harrington wrote, was given a list of countries to memorize to know which people to watch the most closely: Syria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, North Korea, Somalia and Sudan.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are conspicuously left off the list, a decision Harrington says was not accidental but political.
Yet even if you weren’t from one of these countries, Politico reports, agents would often make the lives of certain people more difficult if they exhibited a bad attitude.
“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,” he wrote.
Harrington began expressing his concerns about TSA practices in 2010 in the form of a letter that was published in The New York Times.
His boss had “a chat” with him about it, he says, but didn’t fire him so he continued to write about the abuses of power on his blog.
That blog was called Taking Sense Away, and its viral status cemented Harrington’s decision to leave his job in 2013.
He is currently writing a book about the entirety of his time with the TSA.
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