My 100g shampoo bottle was safe for me to fly with, but not my 130g toothpaste bottle. I offered to empty out 30g of it, but no, it’s the size of the bottle not the volume of contents that is the problem. Apparently empty air in contact with toothpaste is just as dangerous as the toothpaste itself.
I used to work for TSA as a screener. Not a bad job and your cargo holds filled with checked luggage* is* a lot safer from bombs now, I can say that much. That’s about all I can say though. lol
I don’t buy it, sorry. I fly all the time and the folks I have observed (and I was in line a long fucking time… 
) did not appear competent in the least. I am talking about wanding bare feet for 5+ minutes without a sound from the wand, x-ray folks who are spun around backwards in their chairs chatting with co-workers (wow, she has eyes in the back of her head!), and similar shenanigans. And God forbid you ask one of these rocket scientists about the necessity of a procedure, or voice an opinion about how you are being touched, or about how your children are being led away from you. The little man complex flames up like I am one of Osama’s wives…
There is zero danger of liquid explosives on planes. This restriction, like the “everybody take shoes off” requirement, is busywork bullshit.
Inconvenience does not equal security.
ETA- oops, digglebop was talking about the cargo hold… my vitriol is mainly for the airport staff that interacts with passengers, but I also don’t feel safe and cuddly about checked bags…
From the AHD:
So, no, it is not.
Yeah, I think the OP was thinking of “misnomer.”
When they first started the “everyone take off your shoes” it was only done at some airports, and sometimes you were told that you only had to take off your shoes if you thought they might set off the metal detector. I always wore slipons without any metal when I flew, so I didn’t take off my shoes unless I had to. Generally I didn’t find this out until I got to the metal detector and the TSA drone told me to, since there were never any signs telling you the policy for that airport (or for that day, since at O’Hare it seemed to vary). When I once dared to comment on this inconsistency when I was ordered to take off my shoes, she screamed at me about how I had to do whatever I was told, and for a moment I thought she was going to start smacking me around.
The TSA has long passed the point of being totally out of control, and sadly as long as Americans are absolutely positively without fail addicted to air travel, it’s going to not only continue but get worse. I did my part - over the last 4 years I’ve reduced the number of trips I take each year by more than half, mostly because of the fucked up bullshit from the TSA and airlines. I wish I traveled even less than that, but it’s approaching the point where less travel = no job.
I was thinking about this on a plane the other day: Who’s worse, the TSA idiots, or the traveling idiots who have no idea how to go through a security checkpoint?
I don’t mean the “I have two carry-on bags” dorks, I mean the people who get to the head of the line and suddenly realize they need to take their shoes off, and they don’t have their liquids in a little baggy (Did you see the table where they give away free baggies, man? They’re not for sandwiches!), don’t have their laptop out, and generally waste everyone’s time?
My vote is that the TSA is worse, only because they are the arbitrary rule-makers, but that’s a tight race.
I flew lest year with a broken foot. I wore a big black fabric, plastic & metal walking boot brace thing (y’all know what I’m talking about) on my right foot. On my left foot I wore a clear plastic flip-flop.
Let me repeat that: Transparent. Plastic. Flip-flop.
When I went through screening, I told them the brace was full of steel. They took me over to a side area and asked me if I could remove it. I said no. So they wanded the rest of me and swabbed the bottom of the boot for explosives. Then the took my (Clear! Plastic!) flip-flop and ran it through the x-ray machine.
Did I mention that you could see, completely, through every inch of this shoe, with a naked eye?
And then I got on the plane, wearing a boot that could have easily contained two handguns and 4 hunting knifes in there with my foot and a flip-flop that been carefully x-rayed, just in case it had a false bottom and magic optical illusion properties that meant it wasn’t really clear.
Felt safe, I tells ya.
In the past three years on several occasions I had realized that I had forgotten to put my pocket knife (a swiss-army type with multiple blades) into my checked bag. So I took it out of my pocket and stuffed it into my carry-on bag. Not once did the person running the scanner notice it was there.
Also: My mom was flying with a tube of chapstick. Since it was just the one little thing, she put it in a clear zip-top sandwich bag. TSA made her take it out and put it in a quart-sized zip-top bag. Apparently, it’s quart sized only and they’re serious about that. :rolleyes:
“We’ve secretly replaced Pamela Anderson’s saline breast implants with napalm gell. Let’s see if this TSA employee can tell the difference…” :eek: 
So.
What’s the answer? Or what is AN answer? I am all for changing this nonsense, but how? A bombardment of mail complaints to the agency? Closing down their website with a zillion emails?
All out war on the TSA checkpoints; packing oddball items that make it necessary for TSA agents to open and inspect bags? Superslow walking/compliance with wanding, key/change/cellphone unloading?
Boycotting of flights? (I’d be more than happy to do that, but it takes, best case scenario, about 4 days driving to get from Anchorage to the lower 48, fewer days if you’ve got a partner so that you can tag team).
The airlines have gotten really ridiculous, it’s as if they’re doing us a favor, not that we are valued customers (though at several hundred dollars a ticket you’d think we’d count for more), now they’re charging for meals (ugh, I didn’t eat them when they were free, I’m not PAYING for them!), dropping the checked bags to one only, and you now have to pay for the second one (oh yay, now those morons who think a cello case counts as a carry-on will be even MORE pathetic with what they try to cram into the overheads!).
There’s got to be something we the traveling public can do, but what?
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I occasionally feel some existential angst about my work… that it really makes no difference in the big scheme of life whether I show up or not, whether I do my job or not, that I’m just a meaningless cog doing busywork, etc. etc.
However, if I was drone standing in a TSA uniform at a security checkpoint, I’d seriously never survive the pointless bureaucracy of my existence. I’d be invalided out after a suicide attempt within weeks from the sheer pointlessness of my life.