Eric Cheng, writing on his blog:
I arrived at the security area, flagged down a TSA agent, and told her that I must have left my computer there, but that I didn’t remember seeing it on the belt. She left to look around; I waited for about 5 minutes and never saw her again. I flagged down a second agent, who started looking again. Someone brought over a computer in a bag, but it was a Windows machine in a black case—not mine. Mine was nowhere to be found.
We moved over to the camera footage station, and a nice agent began to review archived camera footage. After a few minutes, he found me coming through the security line, and sure enough, my computer was not with my bags when I retrieved my belongings. Moving further back in time, we watched as a TSA agent pulled my computer off of the belt as soon as it came out of the machine—there is an area where agents can remove things from the belt before passengers have access to belongings. He moved my computer to a holding area immediately behind the x-ray machine. And then, we watched as the computer was inspected, after which it was handed back… to a random woman. The woman took my computer and left the security area. Someone remembered that the woman had been with the other woman who had been making the scene, and that they had both been rushing to the 4:15pm flight, but I couldn’t remember whether this was the case or not.
Shudder. This is a story to which I can definitely relate. That moment when you are forced to surrender your phone, your wallet, your computer, then hope that all your goods are there when you go to retrieve them after the security scan.
I can’t believe somebody would accept a laptop that wasn’t theirs and just walk off with it. People suck.
They would if they were in on a theft
I had a TSA agent do this to me at PDX a few years back. I travel quite often and have a system for how many bins I need to use and what goes in each bin. She took my MacBook Pro out of the bin I put it in (with my wallet and a few other small items), and placed it in another bin by itself but after another travel’s bags on the conveyer. So, when my stuff came out at the other end, I had everything in the same bins– except my laptop. I started making a racket and after a few other agents and travelers started looking around, this TSA agent stepped forward and immediately went to the bin where she had placed my laptop (it was still back in the “tunnel” of the scanner) and brought it forward. She was either incompetent or attempting to set it aside so she could steal it.
Remember, TSA = They’ll Steal Anything.
when the TSA loses your sh!t … or their “sh!t” the terrorist win.
One reason to like “old” things, though if they would simply let the law abiding citizens carry their mighty one inch knives, we could defend ourself from the terries and stop this madness!
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It’s facile and light-brained to dump on TSA staff. They are humans no more and no less than your own ranks, whatever professional sector one may belong to. The fear about losing possessions to airport security is exaggerated here. I travel 30+ times a year all over the US and the world. In only one single instance in last 10 years did I ever lose sight of my possessions while they were being scanned. And this is not because I was lucky. Unless you believe there is a magic trapdoor inside the scanner, the number of times they take a computer for additional inspection are so low. In those instances, they often they do it only confirming the computer is yours, and they carry it out in front of you using Smith chemical sensors. I don’t know what happened in this story, but it’s an exception and not a trend.
TSA is just a bunch of thieves given authority by Homeland security.
The chance to lose anything to the ‘TSA’ should be exactly 0.0% – or less – they really should find things that are actually lost – or even stolen by actual thieves (assume the TSA is not a ring of thieves). In theory they should be a group one could trust that protects us from a variety of problems, threats, intimidation, bodily harm or death.
In reality the TSA does nothing but a dog and pony show … at best. I think the Israeli model is probably best. Yeah, Religion of Peace!
Incompetent; the odds of someone “forgetting” they had an expensive laptop 60 seconds ago are so low as to make a set-aside theft implausible.