Those Newspaper Columnists and Internet Bloggers Who Ridicule the TSA Have Very Short Memories

The media is full of attacks against the Transportation and Security Administration. You can hardly spend a day at a computer without reading the snide remarks of bloggers attempting to ridicule the people who make you take off your shoes and wristwatches as you pass through electronic security gates at the airports. You read sarcastic newspaper criticism to the same effect. Columnists looking for a topic to titillate their readers invariably fall back upon various colorful examples of the TSA's alleged rigidity. We are told that airport agents recently "patted down" a two-year-old toddler. The same thing, apparently, has been done to senior citizens over the age of 80. People in wheelchairs, we're advised, are also subject to totally unreasonable searches. After all, the pundits chortle, those wheelchair-bound elders couldn't possibly be terrorists. And terrorists wouldn't dream of concealing weapons on a wheelchair-bound senior. How stupid can the federal agents be? And so it goes. Without ever suggesting a realistic alternative to the TSA, a steady, withering barrage of criticism has been leveled at the people whom we have chosen to protect us from being blown up in the air. And recently, at long last, those humorous quips have led to an actual practical proposal: Let's go back to the way it was. Can you believe that certain local airports -- some of them on the verge of bankruptcy, many staffed by municipal officials of dubious virtue -- are arguing that they should again privatize the function of security, should substitute their own local paid employees for those of the TSA? One wonders whether these brave airport officials have a memory, a recollection of the way that airport security worked prior to 9/11. Do they remember the bumbling, bored, types -- you'll notice I don't call them stumblebums -- who used to casually wave us onto airplanes? The way it was. Airports wanting to spend the least amount of money possible in hiring private companies to handle airport security. The companies themselves desperately pursuing a profit by paying the least amount of salary possible to the persons they hired. The private security agents themselves working for sub-standard wages, willing to accept the worst possible conditions because of their inability to get a better job.
Frommers.com contributor Sascha Segan wrote this on the anniversary of 9/11:

In 2001, airport security paid less than the starting salaries at airport fast-food restaurants. In 1987, security screeners allowed 20% of dangerous objects to pass through checkpoints, and their performance had actually gotten worse by 2001, General Accounting Office official Gerald Dillingham said then.
Argenbright Security, which ran screening operations at 46 of the nation's busiest airports in 2001, had been convicted in federal court of hiring felons as security screeners; that year, the DOT found it still employed 37 people with outstanding arrest warrants. According to the TSA, federalizing airport security has lowered worker turnover from 125% per year to 6.4%.

 I thank heaven for the zealousness of the TSA. Every time I am patted down, I am grateful for security agents who take their jobs seriously. I am conscious of the fact that their zealousness is deterring all sorts of would-be terrorists from attempting to carry weapons onto planes. And I am astonished at the shortsighted lack of memory on the part of various newspaper and internet commentators who enjoy the act of ridiculing the TSA. Thank heaven we at last have a security agency that isn't affected by the profit motive. Thank heaven they are patting down even the most unlikely suspects, in the hope of deterring a terrorist from attempting to avoid their security barriers. Thank heaven we have an agency that remembers 9/11. Remembers it in the way that various newspaper and internet pundits haven't.