Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Snakes on a Plane – Academics vs the TSA, round n+1
The airport security line has ground to a standstill. Again. Some bozo packed a giant plastic penis in his carry-on, and of course the bozos working for the TSA couldn’t resist. From the depths of the man’s carry-on, one TSA worker unsheathes “this mouse penis by its base, like it was Excalibur.” Yep. A Gigantic. Plastic. Mouse. Penis. 3-D printed.
If it makes you feel any better, it’s for science. The biologist carrying it is on his way to a two-day conference, and so has no checked luggage. Other times, scientists carry on stuff that can’t go into the cargo hold even when they’re checking luggage. Permits issued to biologists to collect live specimens may stipulate the specimens must be hand-carried onto planes. Other live specimens simply don’t travel well in cargo holds. A duffel bag full of ants. Live frogs in Tupperware containers. Roaches. These things:
Those are amblypygids. Whip spiders, colloquially. They’re not dangerous. Just horrid-looking. Which isn’t to say venomous spiders aren’t ever your fellow airline travelers. Scientists have been known to pack along black widows, too.
Ophidiophobes might be relieved to know that snakes are perfectly happy in the cargo hold. According to guidelines, not only do snakes go in the hold, they’re very securely packed:
Snakes should go into a pillowcase or cloth bag tied with an overhand knot and then into another pillowcase that is also tied.
The animals should then be placed inside a box, which can be made of plastic foam. This whole package finally goes inside a wooden box, which has to be screwed down.
Venomous snakes are permitted, though they must be duly labeled as such. Of course, these guidelines don’t keep smugglers from secreting snakes and other reptiles somewhere on their persons, hoping they won’t get caught. Last summer, one smuggler was caught because airline security noticed a suspicious “wiggling in the passenger’s pants as he walked through the X-ray machine”.
It’s not always animals, of course. Eerie looking (and smelling) liquids, along with devices that look suspiciously like bomb hardware, might attract the most suspicion. Vials of blood and urine might be disgusting, but it’s the odd mechanical contraptions scientists sometimes carry with them that TSA personnel could be forgiven (if TSA personnel should ever be forgiven for anything) for mistaking for explosive hardware. Series of timers and fuses. Animal-monitoring collars that look like explosive belts. The “Petterson D500x bat detector“, which, as the scientist who got caught with it, explains,
is a “big, black box with blinking lights on the front.” She had one in her backpack on a flight going into Houston. “The security people said, ‘Take your laptop out,” and I did that. But they don’t really say, ‘Take your bat detector out,’ and I forgot about it.”
Well, you know what they say about academics. Book-smart and life-dumb. Just the sort of people who’d thoughtlessly inconvenience regular Americans by forgetting about their bat detectors. Or by furiously scribbling away in “secret code” while looking dark and shifty. What’s worse, these thoughtless academics can hold up the line even further with their impromptu scientific outreach:
Airport security lines, it turns out, are a fantastic venue for scientists to try their hand at outreach. Various scientists are said to have claimed that you don’t really understand something if you can’t explain it to your grandmother, a barmaid, a six-year-old, and other such sexist or ageist variants. But how about this: can you successfully explain it to an TSA official—someone who not only might have no background in science, but also strongly suspects that you might be a national security threat? Can you justify your research in the face of questions like “What are you doing?” or “Why are you doing it?” or “Why are you taking that onto a plane?”
At least some scientists have the decency to keep their replies to the TSA short:
Published in HumorAstrophysicist Brian Schimdt was once stopped by airport officials on his way to North Dakota because he was carrying his Nobel Prize—a half-pound gold disk that showed up as completely black on the security scanners. “Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?” they said. “The King of Sweden,” he replied. “Why did he give this to you?,” they probed. “Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.”
Has she tried detaching her legs and leaving them at home?
Several years ago I was returning to California after spending Christmas with my family in Minnesota. Among the gifts in my carry-on luggage were a tin of Oreo brick, a bag of mandarin oranges, and an MP3 player with headphones. which all happened to be packed in the same pocket on the bag. The way they were arranged led the TSA agent to describe what he saw on the x-ray as follows:
I didn’t blame him when he asked me to unpack my bag to show him what was in it.
Cargo holds on commercial aircraft are generally pressurized just like the main cabin.
Don’t worry, neither you nor your son were the bozo in this case.
Everything in the aircraft’s fuselage that is forward of the rear pressurization bulkhead is pressurized. Most large aircraft don’t have a non-pressurized area, though some smaller aircraft do.
Now we know how Midge has to travel. (It saddens me that it took me all day to think of this.)
I remember that. That guy was an idiot.
“My balloon-animal snake is wearing a Mickey-Mouse hat.”
I take it that’s a Rudert original!
I guess I should sign these things. Were you not there when I was taking requests to draw countries?
Wait… now I see… It’s a baguette. A baguette wearing the hat. Oh, it’s Euro-Disney!
Clearly, the country drawn is France.
Happy air travel requires a very, very low expectations bar.
I’ve travelled on a weekly basis for seventeen years, sixteen of which have been under the TSA regime. In that time I don’t recall a TSA agent being rude, snotty, or otherwise causing undue trouble. I’ve seen more of that from travelers who look down on the agents.
You can easily pick out the ‘new guy’: he’s the one barking at the folks in the line, trying his best to sound like a drill sergeant, with his “…remove your shoes and your belt! Place all liquids in a separate container! Remove all laptops!”. My guess is that lasts a few shifts and his buddies tell him to cool it, that his “inside” voice will work just fine.
Now, I’m not happy with the crushing illogic of why I cannot bring a bottle of water on a flight but I’ve found that a smile and appreciation for their utterly thankless job seems to help. I doubt they like patting down someone’s three-year old.
So, while I sympathize with the agents for the most part, my real issue is that they’re doing it all wrong: The TSA is equally concerned with keeping a bottled water off a flight as a bomb or gun. Or, you know, an actual terrorist. They’ve lost sight of the root purpose.
The real pity is that it’s all because of ‘shut up, racist’.
On the other hand, I don’t think that everyone who’s had a bad experience with the TSA was rude or deserved it.
I agree happy air travel requires lower expectations, and acceptance that you can’t take the illogic of TSA rules out on TSA agents.
Nonetheless, everyone knows that it’s the unusual things you bring with you, not other stuff, that’s “supposed” to single you out for suspicion under the TSA’s official policy, and those of us who most likely won’t have the option of leaving all their unusual things at home, can find themselves trapped in this mind-game of, “Will the agent understand this weird thing? Will he understand that I’ve done my best to make my weird thing conform to the guidelines available to me? What will happen if he doesn’t understand that?”
I don’t regularly travel by plane but during the last time I was doing it regularly, it was always a crapshoot whether agents would understand that liquid or gel prescriptions aren’t supposed to count toward the 3x3x1 limit. Oddly enough, the one time I had to bring an entire refrigerated Styrofoam crate of IV medicine along with me, they gave me no hassle, but pretty much every other time, they did. The problem wasn’t that they would be rude to me, or I rude to them. The problem was, if there was a misunderstanding, and I couldn’t convince them that I’d packed my prescriptions according to regulations, what would happen to my prescriptions?
Even when everyone’s polite, you can feel the stares of the people waiting in the security line behind you boring into you every time there’s an irregularity. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, not just yours, when your compliance is not immediately understood, and some of us know we travel with added risk of not having our compliance immediately understood. That’s really the point I was trying to humorously make.
My hunch is that this may be because KCI is one of the very small # of airports with private (meaning not TSA) security. As a consequence, they take their job extra-seriously. Certainly has been my experience. That and the setup at KCI is decidedly not post 9/11 friendly. Took them way too long to adjust simple things like food stands/shops at the gates that were now hermetically sealed so that security processing could happen the way they had it laid out.
As for T(hey)S(tand)A(round) in general, I’ve learned that my go-to coping mechanism is to obey, keep my eyes straight ahead, never show any emotion at all, and thank them on my way through as that may be the only positive interaction they have all day. The folks doing the job didn’t create the stupid process but some of them are really, really challenged to execute it in a humane and sensical manner.
I was traveling pretty much on the hour that the liquid ban was imposed. Having already followed through on my promise to pick up a couple cans of some local cuisine for a fellow Okie who lived here, I decided to take my chances. Sure enough, I got flagged and pulled out of line.
“Ma’am, these are over the liquid limit.”
“Yeah, but they’re not ‘liquid’, they’re beans.”
“Yeah, but . . . the beans are in liquid.”
“And then packed in a sealed can. There’s no way in the world these could be a danger to anyone as anything other than a projectile.”
“Uhhhhh . . . ”
“I’ll tell you what. Search my bag. If you find a can opener, you can take the beans.”
He shoved the cans back in my knapsack and told me to get going.
That’s the last time I got away with anything like that. Next trip I took, they were pulling tiny concealer tubes and mascara out of my makeup bag and examining them like they were secret, multi-purpose implements of Death that “Q” had given me to aid in my takeover of the flight.
Wait … there were special beans in Oklahoma and you didn’t tell me?
I did not know this. I’m headed there next weekend and plan to pay closer attention this time.
Funny thing — WAY before 9/11 and the liquid ban — back when family could still come in and wait there at the gate with you, my dad drove me out to MCI for very early-morning flight. We both had metal travel mugs of coffee with us and stood there wondering what to do with them at the metal detector.
“Oh here, let me take that,” said a helpful security guard. He grabbed our cups, we walked through, and then he handed them back to us on the other side, which (even pre-9/11), blew my mind.
“Well that was weird,” I whispered to my father, afterward. “We could have had anything in these cups and he didn’t even look inside!”
That’s a bygone age we were in.
They’re really good. Sort of a “Texarkana” area thing that we couldn’t get up here in the Northeast and it’s killing me that I can’t remember the name of them right now. I’ll have to ask when I’m home if my dad remembers. The girl who asked me to bring them took them for granted as much as I did but her husband had gotten hooked on them during a visit to the in-laws, hence the ask.
I have to doctor beans to my mother’s recipe. It requires brown sugar and ground mustard.
Not dangerous, you say?…
Okay, then. That would just be the end for me. No snakes ever in my house!!! My husband, long ago, mentioned that he’d really enjoy owning a big python or something. I replied, “Sure! You can get a snake. On the way home from my funeral, you stop off at a pet store and buy one.”
(I’m fine dealing with bucking horses, and stampeding cattle…just not quiet, slithering reptiles.)
Great.
Now I want beans.
Have you ever tried to formulate employee harrasment policies? You have to be overbroad because the people who will implement the policies will be dumb and need to have bright line rules. My understanding is that the same thing applies to TSA agents. We built the TSA from nothing in an exceptionally short period of time and need the agents to work for affordable salaries while having reasonably extensive personal skills. In particular, they need to be able to withstand near endless sneering and contempt from jerks who hold them personally responsible for the existence of a security regime. They need to be able to take abuse from people who believe that they ought not to be searched, or that their possessions ought to be exempt, and are not capable of expressing this in a reasonable manner. They need to do this again and again and again and still be able to make a reasonable show of giving the next passenger the benefit of the doubt about whether or not they will be reasonable.
On the positive side, it works. We’ve had a few suicide bombing attempts since 9/11 and they have been foiled by the TSA and its equivalents. Because the TSA made it clear that bombs put into carry ons would be intercepted and the bomber incarcerated, the bombers put the bombs into shoes or into their underwear, under which circumstances the bombs failed to go off. Sometimes, as with the Paris plots, their efforts (in that case, to use liquids to sneak bombs on board) have delayed attacks until they could be prevented and have required them to engage in more contact than they could safely manage. Through a variety of means, they, and their equivalents abroad, have meant that the closest terrorists have come to being able to succesfully target their number one priority (and if you read any terrorist literature, the airport fixation bordered on fetishistic, despite post-9/11 non state actor successes being ground based) was the Istanbul airport attack. There, they successfully attacked the outer borders of airport security on the less classy side of the airport. In Glasgow, they were able to prevent even that through the use of concrete bollards; few people could have predicted that that would be enough, but even security that appears worthless turns out to be pretty darn helpful.
We’ve all been inconvenienced by the need to have drinks checked or finished beforehand, but we would be far more inconvenienced if terrorists had killed more Americans and scared others into avoiding flying. Even if one doesn’t fly and benefit from the frequent, cheap, flights oneself, everyone benefits from a successful America. The thriving survival of the US airline industry is a key part of what makes our economy and society hum. The security permits it is a core public goods, the sort of thing that distinguishes principled libertarians from anarchists, and that all conservatives ought to support.
Yeah okay but that said, it’s still just downright silly of them to confiscate my mascara.
Obviously any sensibly written rules would exempt you from their concerns, but you’d be surprised how difficult it is to identify charming patriots with sensible views in a short, objective, document such that the TSA would know to let you pass. No one could cause people to melt with their voice in the manner that you do, but if you set up an objective test the TSA will still stop you when you have a cold, while any number of Arabs will be able to train themselves to fool the meter.
One key flaw that I will admit is that they allow eyeliner. As @vicrylcontessa can tell you, any Arab allowed to keep their eyeliner automatically becomes twice as Middle Eastern.
Bugger the TSA.
Are these monkey-fightin’ snakes? On a Monday to Friday plane?
And I’m the one with the artificial knee, yet I keep sailing through.
Not if they’re properly-packed snakes, they’re not. They will stay in their pillowcases and like it!