Author Archives: Lisa Simeone

As I wrote earlier this month, TSA incompetence and stupidity—combined with American populace passivity—are causing thousands of people to miss their flights. The amount of time travelers are supposed to allow to get through airport security keeps ballooning—from one hour to two hours to, now, three hours before their flights. And that’s for domestic flights, mes amis, not just international ones. Continue reading →

Because the level of ignorance and stupidity in this country can never be overestimated, we have the latest incidence of one of America’s fine upstanding citizens displaying her intellectual acumen for all to see. And supposed airline professionals going along with her. True, this didn’t involve the TSA, but we can easily see how the stupidity and paranoia exhibited by that organization—and constantly hyped by our “security” overlords—has spread to the population at large. Continue reading →

For months now, there have been so many stories in the news about the fact that airport security lines are getting longer, that the TSA is getting more onerous (as if that’s possible), that people are arriving earlier and earlier and still missing their flights. With increasing numbers of travelers during the summer, things will only get worse. Continue reading →

No matter how often we hear these stories, one after another after another after another, for years now, each new outrage is still infuriating. No matter how low you think the TSA can go, it always goes lower. Continue reading →

As many people have discovered from the latest news, the Department of Homeland Security has suddenly decreed publicly what anyone with reasonable observational skills knows they’ve been planning from the get-go: that the TSA will, at whim, force passengers through the strip-search scanners. Continue reading →

Anybody who thinks the TSA is doing anything to prevent an attack needs his head examined (but hey, that’s only about half the population of the U.S.). While they’re confiscating breast milk, peanut butter, perfume, and cupcakes, strip-searching Granny, and sticking their hands down your pants, they’re letting loaded weapons on planes. This isn’t the first time, and it sure as hell won’t be the last. Continue reading →

On Monday, November 9, 2015—in other words, well before the attacks in Paris—the TSA, combined with the paramilitary forces of its parent agency DHS (Department of Homeland Security) did again what it does best: overreact, in an almost certifiably insane way, to a security “breach” at an airport, and then terrorize scores of ordinary passengers just trying to go about their business. Continue reading →

In Portland, Oregon, at the same airport where John Brennan was arrested, the TSA has abused yet another elderly woman. Continue reading →

I get tired of having to write the same stories over and over again. Such as this one: yet another TSA agent caught with child porn. Continue reading →

Almost every day I receive emails from people telling me about their TSA experiences. They often wonder if they could have prevented the abuse meted out to them by dressing differently, talking differently, acting differently, flying out of a different airport, you name it. As I always tell them, no. You have no power over how the TSA treats you. The TSA has absolute power. Whether a TSA agent woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning or is simply being sadistic, it has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with them. Continue reading →

British indie rock musician Stephen Patrick Morrissey—better known simply as Morrissey—became well known in the 1980s with his band The Smiths. He’s now 56 years old. And yesterday he filed a complaint against the TSA for sexual assault. Continue reading →

As ever, air travel in this country is increasing. I wrote last year about the fact that summer travel was expected to increase, and it did. Now we see that BWI—Baltimore-Washington International Airport—is planning to expand to accommodate the increasing, ahem, load. Continue reading →

From KCNC, the CBS affiliate in Denver, comes this completely unsurprising “news”: TSA clerks at Denver International Airport deliberately messed with the strip-search scanners to alarm on attractive male passengers so one of the blue-shirted goons could grope them. Continue reading →

Everyone’s been sending me the article from First Look/The Intercept about the latest “confidential” TSA document. Continue reading →

Ha ha ha ha! Don’t you just love it when someone—or in this case something—gets hoisted on its own petard? Not that it matters, of course; rarely does. People and organizations whose stupidity, hypocrisy, and incompetence are laid bare for all to see rarely change their ways. On the contrary, they double down. Continue reading →

Another passenger learns about the scam of Pre-Check the hard way. Continue reading →

Yeah, I have to keep using scare quotes, because they’re a reflection of this country and its insistence on finding a terrorist around every corner. Continue reading →

Today we have news of yet another TSA agent arrested for child sexual abuse. Continue reading →

This incident happened two years ago, but we’re only just finding out about it because the case recently got thrown out of court. It’s yet another instance of abuse perpetrated by both the TSA and the police against an innocent man. Continue reading →

Oscar season may be upon us, when movies, actors, actresses, directors, etc. get recognized for their achievements, but never let it be said that our hardworking civil servants, who do so much to Keep Us Safe, go unnoticed. Continue reading →

We’ve only been saying it for years. Continue reading →

At TSA News, a civil liberties watchdog site I run, we often call your attention not only to news reports but to other blogs and websites that discuss the TSA. Consumer Traveler is one of them. Continue reading →

I know I sound like a broken record. That’s why, as the years have gone by, I’m writing less and less about the TSA. Because I increasingly see it as pointless. And judging by the activity of our other writers here at TSA News, I’m not alone. Continue reading →

Actually, debacle is too tame a word. Crime is more like it. Continue reading →

Remember the guy who dressed up in a blue shirt, khaki pants, and blue gloves and impersonated a TSA agent in San Francisco last month? He succeeded in leading two victims into a curtained booth and groped at least one of them. Well, we don’t know exactly what he did, since he was hidden. We only know that he got away with it, and that if he had been an actual TSA clerk, whatever he did, including sexual molestation, would’ve been legal. Continue reading →

This is what it takes to get answers from the TSA and DHS: you have to sue them. And even then you’ll be stonewalled. Continue reading →

I’m sitting in the Metropolitan Lounge of the magnificent Union Station in Chicago, waiting to board the fabled Southwest Chief on my way to Santa Fe. Continue reading →

Every year at this time, we can count on the appearance of TSA Administrator (aka Molester-in-Chief, as we like to call him) John Pistole at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, solemnly intoning on the grave risks posed every day by those Terrorists Hiding Around Every Corner™, especially ones with bombs in their pants. Continue reading →

It doesn’t take many brain cells to figure out that the TSA, institutionally and individually, holds us in contempt. In their eyes, we’re all potential terrorists. Also peons who have to be put in their place. Never mind that we pay their salaries, every penny of their $8-billion-a-year budget, and that they are supposed to facilitate flying, not impede it. Continue reading →

Ah, I love waking up to stories like this! It’s like living in absurdist theater, only the people running the theater are too stupid to see it for what it is. Continue reading →

It’s pretty common these days to have your resumé/curriculum vitae publicly available on a website. Most people use LinkedIn, which I can’t abide (it plunders your private email account, sends invitations without your knowledge to everybody under the sun to “link” to you, pretends to get you jobs, and other things not worth going into), so I use a site called Brand Yourself instead. Continue reading →

Jennifer Abel is a freelance writer who’s been an eloquent—and scathing—TSA critic for years. Continue reading →