Twelve Years of Taking Your Lotion – TSA Today | SnällaBolaget.com
Cast your mind back to 2006. It was a simpler time. A better time, some would say. You could still take your lotion with you on the plane. And your water, that you shelled out several bucks for just before embarking on an every lengthening security line. Then, something happened. Or didn’t, rather.
Someone tried to build a bomb, allegedly, using liquids. And for twelve years, security checkpoints around the world have been confiscating liquids and lotions. And all things in between. In the US, you can thank Richard Reid for the fact that you still have to take your shoes off before getting on a plane. They don’t do that many other places around the world. In fact, please send a thank you note to the TSA for most of the more or less ineffective, and more or less effective, security measures you have to go through in order to get on the place and sit in the seat you’ve paid hard earned money for.
So where have twelve years of having our lotions taken away brought us?
Not very far.
The fact is that all of the tips we wrote about years ago, still apply, and still work, if you want to take something you shouldn’t through an airport. You can still read an x-ray scanner image the very same way, and your luggage still goes through the same checks it always did.
The TSA still brags about the same things, and the same confiscated items, the weapons they supposedly find and the “layers of security” that they claim to have implemented. Our explanation of those layers is still as valid as always, so check it out here. We decoded them once, and we still haven’t had to revisit that thing since then.
In recent sessions of “explanations” and “information”, the TSA said that they have to “adjust” to an “ever-adapting” enemy, but it seems that they haven’t changed much in these last twelve years. Most things are still the same, and if we could decode them then, we can decode them now. Just to rub it in a little bit, we’ll show you an image of this last effort to explain their ever adapting and adjusting strategies for catching the terrorists that apparently lurk all around us:
Shoes. Liquid. Pants. Computer.
The enemy doesn’t seem to have changed or adapted all that much, seeing as how these are the things the TSA still think may be threats to air travel security.
As we’ve said time and time again, “security theater” is actually a valid and quite effective deterrent, but the TSA seems to have stalled their “adjusting” somewhere along the last twelve years, and most of what happens at airports these days, when there’s no show and tell, is all show, no tell, and not much related to security either.
Let us know what you think in the comments, and share your best airport security stories! We love those.
About Author
