Jason Edward Harrington, former Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener and once anonymous author of the TSA-themed blog Taking Sense Away, writes a lengthy piece about his time with the TSA:

I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. 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.

We learn of the agency's racial profiling, the ineffectiveness of the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners (reviewing the scans turn into an "an unofficial break" time for officers), guyspeak, and various other unsettling secuirty lapses and issues that any frequent flier probably does not want to know.

The LA Times reports the TSA has responded saying that Harrington is either "lying or describing long-abandoned practices" and furthemore the TSA will not "pursue the allegations of misconduct that Harrington raised."

[via the Economist]