This is getting depressingly tedious, and I’m starting to think that “TSA” stands for “Terrorist: Squeeze his Ass.”  With wallet, belt, keys, change, and all other things removed from my clothing, I still set off the detector in the See-You-Naked Machine, and the problematic area was the same as always: a yellow patch on my right buttock (or left; I can’t tell from the diagram). That earned me a full patdown, this time with the agent running his hands inside my waistband as well as groping both buttocks (“with the back of my hands”—does that make it better?) and running his hands inside my thighs from the knees to the groin. And they swabbed my hands for explosives. Of course they found nothing.

Now it’s 4:25 in the morning (I have a 6 a.m. flight) and, after buying a “blueberry” muffin and a coffee, I discovered that the muffin had exactly ONE blueberry in it. But I nommed it before I could photograph it. Now I will write a few posts and fume at the TSA. For the first time ever, I glared at the agent who was goosing me.

Just yesterday the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) put in place a regulation that even air passengers who opt for a pat-down security check could be required to go through the See-You-Naked Machines (SYNMs), euphemistically known as full-body scanners. (Full disclosure: they no longer see an image of your naked body.) Right now 2% of passengers opt for the pat-down as an alternative to going through the machines but now they may require the Official Peeping. Apparently this rule is in place because full-body pat-downs miss some things that the machines can detect, but I’m invariably groped (sometimes intrusively) after going through a SYNM, and they’ve never detected anything.

But do those machines really work?

No. They should, for they cost $150,000 each, and the bill so far is over $120 million dollars for the units in place.

As Politico reported, their failure rate is abysmal:

A recent security audit found that TSA had failed to find fake explosives and weapons in 96 percent of covert tests. And members of Congress familiar with the classified details say the body scanners are to blame for much of the problem.

Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said that while the TSA has spent a fortune on new equipment, he is “troubled about their capability to detect and prevent dangerous materials from passing through security checkpoints.”

Johnson said that while bomb detection is obviously a complex undertaking, “these things weren’t even catching metal.”

House committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) confirmed that L-3’s body scanners were the technology fingered in the audit and said that “the technology failure was a big part of the problem.” The chairman — a former federal prosecutor who spends much of his time thumbing through secret documents in the windowless bowels of the Capitol — added that the manufacturer guarantees an accuracy far below 100 percent.

. . . Anthony Roman, a pilot and security expert who also designs management software, said probably only a small percentage of the body imaging machines’ failure rate can be chocked up to the technology itself. The rest is likely because of the TSA’s “low-paid, under-motivated, not incredibly well-trained personnel,” he said.

The TSA of course is promising to do better, including adding software “patches” to help detect contraband, but even if the failure rate goes down to 50%, one out of two people smuggling weapons or explosives onto planes will still get through.

I tend to show respect to government officials (after all, they’re representing all of us), but the TSA is an exception. Its behavior is a comedy of errors, it’s reactive rather than proactive, and my experiences with its employees have been dire. They’re rude, loud, and seem to revel in throwing their weight around and humiliating travelers. In all my interactions with them—and I travel a lot—I’ve met exactly two who I thought were trying to be nice and pleasant.