And yes, TSA agents saw you naked, although that was not as titillating as some might presume, according to a former TSA agent who once reported anonymously from the inside. Jason Edward Harrington has gone public in a Politico Magazine essay after causing an anonymous stir at the blog Taking Sense Away. He reveals how much he hated the key aspects of his job, and how little regard his fellow TSA agents have for their more intrusive duties: 
 
 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. Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security. There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22. 
 
 The big reveal in this piece isn’t the naked pictures, or the petty retributions of pat-downs for rude passengers, or even the fact that the scanner images provided a little inspiration for amorous activity inside the secure room — thanks in part to the lack of surveillance because of the naked images being reviewed in the booth. Harrington reports openly that TSA insisted on getting the original full-body scanners after the Underwear Bomber attempt, even though they knew full well it wouldn’t prevent a terrorist attack: 
 
 We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop. Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines. “They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket. We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone. 
 
 This confirms pretty much everything we suspected about the TSA. Harrington notes that morale is lower in this agency than anywhere else in the US government, and there are good reasons for it. At least in his telling, few of the people believe in their mission, the traveling public is held in contempt, and the backscatter machines had them worried about their health at the same time TSA was telling the public that there was no health or safety issues at all. One of the terms defined in the TSA “lexicon” is “opt-out,” which refers explicitly to passengers who refuse the scanner and go for the pat-down — but TSA agents use the term to mean, “smart passenger.” 
 
 Small wonder, then, that when having to watch backscatter images of dubious use, Harrington “personally witnessed quite a bit of fooling around, in every sense of the phrase.” Why not? Again according to Harrington’s account, everyone seemed to realize that they were providing security theater rather than real security. 
 
 Of course, one reason this story is so compelling is precisely because it confirms our previous assessments of TSA, both as travelers and in overall analysis of their function. It’s still one man’s perception of the environment, albeit one man who did go to some risk to publicize these issues while still at TSA. Harrington studied writing while working at TSA, and it shows; it’s an entertaining and compelling read, and tends to reduce the skepticism we would normally apply to tales from self-described disgruntled workers. 
 
 It’s compelling enough that Congress should invite Harrington to discuss these issues in hearings, and haul some of his former superiors and fellow agents to explain themselves. If Harrington is exaggerating or making the error of applying a local experience into a global rule, a fair hearing will bear that out. But given the experiences that Americans have had with this intrusive and perplexing TSA security regime, we are owed some accountability for its performance, and an answer to the issues that Harrington raises. ||||| Even airport TSA agents don't really believe they're making much of a difference. Or so suggests Jason Harrington, a former Transportation Security Administration employee who's written a revealing piece for Politico on what it's like to work for the agency on the ground floor. Harrington writes that many of his coworkers found their orders questionable, from selecting people for enhanced screenings based on their nationality to the broad use of full-body scanners. Harrington also writes that he hated that the job made him pat down children and the elderly and confiscate everything from nail clippers to homemade jellies under the guise of national security. 
 
 It isn't just passengers who dislike full-body scanners 
 
 TSA agents reportedly didn't take the job all that seriously in many cases too. Harrington writes that those tasked with analyzing images from full-body scanners often didn't pay attention or would crack jokes about passengers' bodies. In part, that may have been because the agents Harrington worked with didn't really care for the machines in the first place: they didn't like the idea of being around radiation all day, and they were among the first to realize that Rapiscan Systems' full-body scanners weren't very effective at identifying smuggled weapons. 
 
 If Harrington's stories sound familiar, that's because you may have read pieces of them before: he's run the blog Taking Sense Away for a couple years now, anonymously sharing his and others' experiences working with the TSA. His publication in Politico this week is this first time Harrington has identified himself, and he's already using the exposure to share some added insights: ||||| Airport scanners, pat-downs and tens of thousands of new federal employees have made searches too intrusive but haven’t made us any safer. Time to fix this broken system. By Robert W. Poole, Jr. 
 
 “If you touch my junk,” John Tyner told a TSA agent who was frisking him, “I’ll have you arrested.” 
 
 Welcome to the security theater of the United States. 
 
 In its rush to improve airport security following the tragic 9/11 attacks, Congress created a monster. President George W. Bush and Congress federalized airport security in 2001, forming a massive new government bureaucracy that has now reportedly grown to more than 67,000 employees. 
 
 These days, those thousands of Transportation Security Administration employees are conducting invasive searches, making 3-year-olds scream while they are patted down for weapons, frisking nuns, looking at naked images of your body, and forcing you to throw away perfectly good liquids. 
 
 And yet our airports are still far from secure. As USA Today reported in 2008, “A November GAO report said investigators repeatedly smuggled liquid explosives and detonators past airport checkpoints in 2006. An internal TSA report said screeners in Los Angeles and Chicago airports missed fake bombs on agents in more than 60 percent of tests in 2006.” 
 
 And the privacy-invading new scanners being installed at airports won’t automatically fix that. A government report found it “remains unclear” if the scanners now being installed would have caught the underwear bomber last Christmas. 
 
 People are outraged at the TSA’s aggressive pat-downs and privacy-invading scans. Yet the TSA continues to foolishly pretend that everyone boarding a plane is equally likely to try to blow it up. This equal-risk assumption has caused knee-jerk reactions to the shoe-bomber (take your shoes off), the liquids bombers (small toiletries, no liquids through the checkpoint), the underwear bomber (body scans and pat-downs). Heaven help us the first time a would-be suicide bomber is caught with explosives hidden in a body cavity. By the TSA’s logic, they would have to make body-cavity searches routine for all of us. 
 
 The TSA continues to foolishly pretend that everyone boarding a plane is equally likely to try to blow it up. (David Goldman / AP Photo) 
 
 This nonsense needs to stop, and that means shifting to a risk-based screening system. Passengers should be divided into three risk groups and dealt with accordingly: high, medium, and low-risk. 
 
 Low-risk travelers would be those about whom solid information exists that they are not a threat to aviation. Obvious candidates include cockpit crews and those already holding government security clearances. By the same token, frequent air travelers should be able to volunteer for trusted traveler aviation-security clearances by submitting to a rigorous background check. If you pass, you get a biometric ID card, present it at the airport proving you’re the person who was already cleared and go through minimal security. 
 
 In its rush to improve airport security following the tragic 9/11 attacks, Congress created a monster. 
 
 High-risk travelers would be those on any of the various watch lists maintained by the Department of Homeland Security—not just the current TSA no-fly and selectee lists. Yes, this would be a form of “profiling,” but not based on race, ethnicity, or religion. Rather, it would be evidence-based profiling, using intelligence information and previous travel history information. 
 
 • Conor Friedersdorf: Who Pats Down Your Privates?Everyone else would be considered medium-risk. They would face old-fashioned checkpoint screening, fully clothed (including shoes and jackets)—walk-through metal detectors and two-dimensional X-ray of their carry-ons. And as with the low-risk people, a small fraction would be randomly selected for secondary screening. ||||| Revealed: How TSA agents 'laugh at travelers' naked scanner images in backrooms while flirting with each other 
 
 A former Transpiration Security Administration (TSA) agent-turned-anonymous blogger recently revealed that his co-workers routinely make fun of passengers' nude body images while reviewing them in backrooms. 
 
 
 
 The unnamed ex-TSA officer, who writes for the blog Taking Sense Away , received a note from a reader which said: 'Tell us, please, what really happens in that private room and why the TSA does not want it seen in public or recorded.' 
 
 In response, the blogger wrote that while he has not experienced or heard of anything outright illegal or illicit going on in the private screening rooms, officers manning the image operator (IO) rooms where passengers' nude X-ray images are reviewed often behave in a highly inappropriate manner. 
 
 
 
 Immature: A former TSA officer has revealed that he had witnessed his co-workers laughing at the nude X-ray images of passengers going through full-body scanners 
 
 'I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers,' the former agent wrote. 
 
 
 
 'Bad' behavior: The whistleblower said that poorly trained TSA screeners fresh out of high school have been tasked with looking at nude pictures in sealed image operator rooms 
 
 The blogger partially attributed this childish behavior to lack of education and training, saying that this is what happens when people 'fresh out of high school or a GED program' are put in charge of analyzing nude images of people in a hermetically sealed room. 
 
 The writer explained that according to TSA rules, no one is allowed to enter or leave the image analysts room without warning in an effort to ensure that the agents on duty never see the passengers whose nude image they had just viewed. 
 
 
 
 The blogger added, however, that he had personally witnessed some officers sneaking a peek at the people whom they had seen on the scanner. 
 
 
 
 The former airport security agent went on to argue that there should be no backrooms at all, and that the agency should have never put the full-body X-ray machines in place, calling them 'useless.' 
 
 'TSA officers should never have been viewing nude, radiation-rendered images of passengers in those private rooms, period,' the blogger wrote. 'The entire thing was, as usual, a hare-brained, tax payer money-wasting, disaster of an idea.' 
 
 The whistleblower said that is the reason why there are several federal lawsuits pending against the agency, which is 'trying to backpedal and sweep the radiation scanners under the rung from oversight committees and the public at large.' 
 
 The anonymous writer confessed that his former colleagues would go so far as to arbitrarily punish disgruntled passengers by subjecting them to unjustified and pointless luggage searches. 
 
 
 
 The Daily Mail has reached out to the TSA about the allegations, but no one was immediately available for comment on Christmas Day. 
 
 
 
 Out of sight: The ex-agent claimed that the TSA is trying to avoid having the radiation scanners subjected to oversight or public scrutiny 
 
 Dirty secrets: The blogger revealed that TSA agents would take revenge upon passengers with a bad attitude by subjecting them to unnecessary bag searches 
 
 In a separate post, the former screener revealed how top officials within the agency are well aware of the public’s purported hatred for the TSA, which has become 'the laughing stock of America’s security apparatus.' 
 
 Other posts on the Taking Sense Away blog highlight some of the more absurd polices implemented by the agency, among them the ban on snow globes, which the writer dismissed as one of many 'intelligence-insulting rules.'
– A former TSA employee has written a first-person piece for Politico Magazine, that, in the words of Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, "confirms pretty much everything we suspected about the TSA." Some excerpts from the article by Jason Harrington, who had previously posted anonymously at the blog Taking Sense Away: "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." "Just as the long-suffering American public waiting on those security lines suspected, jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues: Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible." "Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an IED, and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security." "We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop." "The only people who hated the body-scanners more than the public were TSA employees themselves. Many of my co-workers felt uncomfortable even standing next to the radiation-emitting machines we were forcing members of the public to stand inside." Click for Harrington's full article. The Verge notes that Harrington is now tweeting additional stuff, like this: "One thing I left out of that Politico piece: HELL YES airport employees often drink those bottles of alcohol you surrender at the checkpoint."