The Transportation Security Administration official checks my boarding pass against my green Bangladeshi passport and gives me major side-eye. “Where are you going?” he asks. “To college,” I tell him. “Want to see my ID?” I am told that “that attitude won’t be necessary,” and 40 minutes before my plane to Pennsylvania is set to take off, I am finally allowed to pass through the frosted glass doors of my secondary screening room into the terminal for my gate assignment.
Fast forward two years later, and I am patted down in plain view of perhaps 50 leering men because my hair contains a “suspicious bulge.” The culprit? A hair donut, courtesy of Palmer Mall in Palmer, Pennsylvania.
Another year, another airport. The TSA is relentless in its pursuit of oversized lotions, nail clippers, bottled water, and pickles that smell like vinegar. All of these items have been seized, dumped, and hauled off.
All of these items have caused requests for “secondary screenings,” “additional questioning,” and “cross-checking of names against the no-fly list.”
I am denied curb-side check-in by American Airlines because the “system has an error.” Later, my friend Nancy’s parents show me how to use the CLEAR program to check for my name on the government’s no-fly list.
Perhaps if I had been a savvier traveler -- packing all my travel-sized bottles in one clear Ziploc bag, putting my nail clippers in my checked luggage as opposed to my carry-on bags -- I could have avoided the three dozen times I have been stopped for primary, secondary, and tertiary screenings at airports throughout my adopted homeland.
The Atlantic’s November 2011 article, “The Things He Carried,” details extensively the many ways a passenger can get past the TSA with photoshopped boarding passes, saline bottles filled with non-saline solution, and controlling facial twitches to bypass the TSA’s “Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques,” the belief that “involuntary facial-muscle movements … can betray lying or criminality.”
Vanity Fair’s December 2012 “Smoke Screening” follows a similar vein -- how to dupe the TSA, courtesy of forging boarding passes, inability to produce secondary forms of photo identification, and by-passing the three-ounce liquid limit by filling up twenty-four ounce contacts lens solution bottles that have been shrink-wrapped to prevent the TSA from double-checking.
All to say that the $1.2 trillion dollars the US government spends on airport security -- amped up since the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- is what Vanity Fair calls “security theater,” providing only an illusion of security when in reality true terrorists could gain access to public arenas with far less fanfare than the average passenger bound over the fly-over states over some holiday weekend, bedraggled, red-eyed, yet gripping a Ziploc bag of three-ounce bottles to boot.
The ineffectiveness of the security measures aside, the racial profiling of passengers with a certain concentration of melanin remains a reality.
Thanks to the SPOT program, TSA officials at major airports have been reported to “indiscriminately target” racial minorities under suspicion of drug possession, arrest warrants, or having an uncanny resemblance to a bearded Aziz Ansari.
I have stood in line while a family of 10, hailing from South India, was randomly selected to proceed through “secondary screening” en masse.
Meanwhile, I clutched my (now) blue American passport and prayed that this time, for once, I would be spared.
The TSA official looked up, beckoned me to the podium, double-checked my boarding pass against my New York State driver’s license, and said: “Ma’am, I’m going to need you to step aside for additional screening.”
Another crisis averted. Transportation Security Association saves the day.
