What does it take to get you detained at the airport these days? Well, other than being Ted Kennedy or being randomly placed on the no-fly list by some prankster at the TSA that is, or unfortunately having been born with a skin tone other than white? Call the director of the TSA, Kip Hawley, an idiot.
Last week, Ryan Bird, of Milwaukee, dutifully put his highly explosive personal grooming liquids into a plastic baggie (because Lord knows, when a bomb's about to go off, nothing stops it faster than Ziploc), and wrote the words "Kip Hawley is an idiot". It was his own little way of protesting the stupidity of the whole theatre of security we're being made to go through with planes right now.
Instead it got him detained for almost 30 minutes while the TSA and a sheriff's deputy and the TSA supervisor questioned him. According to the TSA supervisor, and the deputy for that matter, we don't have freedom of speech past the checkpoint at the airport. Because the phrase maybe made the supervisor feel "threatened", writing that wasn't protected speech.
Wow.
Ryan's first-hand account of the incident if available here.
Wow. It's nice to know we feel so safe in the air, with all of those high-explosive hair gels and shaving creams and what not. The TSA is on a real roll here as of late. When I was coming back from Tampa last month, they have at the airport a machine in which you walk in, it "sniffs" you, blows air all around and over you, up under your shorts/pants/shirt, and it supposedly is trying to detect explosive residue or something. I asked the TSA guy who was manning this device what the price tag might have been, and he replied, "oh, about $300,000 apiece to General Electic (that's the manufacturer)." I was like, "Nice. Good to see our taxpayer's dollars being put to good use." They have 4 of them at Tampa airport, and supposedly, they're going to be standardized in many other large traffic airports. Just goes to show how efficient and sensible this agency has really become.
The interesting thing about those types of machines described by Jeff is that recently a Marine, Dan Brown, who was in uniform, was detained at LAX and placed on the no-fly list because they detected gunpowder on his boots. He was returning from Iraq at the time.
The full story can be found here for those who don't believe me:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12284855/