Fasten Your Seatbelts

TSA lets loose with blog permitting passenger gripes

• By Megan Weadock
• May 01, 2008

Everyone’s been there: the maddening situation that is modern airport security. The inconveniences— and absurdities—that travelers face just to get through that checkpoint line seem to increase each year. But now, seven years after Sept. 11, 2001, forever changed the flying process, the Transportation Security Administration is letting travelers vent their frustrations like never before.

The Evolution of Security blog, written by a group of TSA’s own employees, went live in January as a forum for fliers to rant about and question the group’s airport security restrictions and requirements. The Web site, www.tsa.gov/blog, carries an ominous slogan that encourages passengers to become active participants in the security process: “Terrorists evolve. Threats evolve. Security must stay ahead. You play a part.”

Just Asking For It
Within the first 24 hours of the blog’s existence, more than 700 people posted comments. Kip Hawley, TSA administrator, got the ball rolling with a welcome message to readers.

“There isn’t much opportunity for our security officers to explain the ‘why’ of what we ask you to do at the checkpoint, just the ‘what’ needs to be done to clear security,” he said. “The result is that the feedback and venting ends up circulating among passengers with no real opportunity for us to learn from you or vice versa. ... The opportunity is that we will incorporate what we learn in this forum in our checkpoint process evolution. We will not only give you straight answers to your questions, but we will challenge you with new ideas and involve you in upcoming changes.”

Hawley’s hope that the blog will change people’s perceptions of TSA is obvious.

“One of my major goals of 2008 is to get TSA and passengers back on the same side, working together,” he said. “We need your help to get the checkpoint to be a better environment for us to do our security job and for you to get through quickly and onto your flight.”

A Hot Topic
Among the site’s five main bloggers are Bob, a behavior detection officer and songwriter who has worked with TSA for five years; Jay, a federal security director who used to coach high school football; and Ethel, an enthusiastic TSA employee who apparently loves ice cream—a lot. The blog team posts new entries every few days, with topics ranging from fluffy (e.g., the role specially trained dogs play in airport security) to downright defensive (see “Why We Do What We Do: When Security Officers Find Illegal Items at the Checkpoint”).

A quick glance at the blog and its writers’ sugary autobiographies may cause a reader to see the project as little more than an attempt to steer public opinion of TSA workers from abysmal to slightly less than abysmal. However, delve deeper into its pages. There may be some actual debate, and action, going on here.

The blog’s Hot Topics sections, which include “shoes,” “liquids” and “lighters, nail clippers and lithium batteries,” allow readers to comment about common issues with checkpoint security. Sure, the topic headings sound dry, but the heated debates they are causing are anything but. And while many comments are simply angry, ridiculous or funny—“Ever since you started X-raying our shoes, I’ve been forced to carry all my plastic explosives in my pants, which I find most inconvenient”—others are sincere and foster an actual conversation with TSA’s bloggers.

Not surprisingly, the blog receives its fair share of unpublishable comments. Hence the Delete-o-Meter, which, in the “spirit of transparency,” displays the number of comments TSA has deleted each week due to profanity, personal attacks, threats, sensitive information and other unpleasantries.

Change You Can See?
OK, maybe TSA launched Evolution of Security as a way to placate members of the traveling public who are itching for an outlet for all that built-up rage caused by hours spent in checkpoint lines, shuffling forward in their bare feet while they juggle their jackets, shoes and unpacked laptops. But maybe Hawley and his crew genuinely saw it as a chance to get to the bottom of some of TSA’s problems and inconsistencies.

In one case, the blog has already succeeded at the latter. In the first week of the Web site, TSA bloggers were bombarded with complaints about certain airports that were requiring passengers to remove all electronics from carry-on bags, including cell phones, iPods and even cords. The group discovered that this requirement was set up by local TSA offices—and admitted it “was not part of any grand plan across the country.”

So, in early February, TSA advised all airports to allow those smaller electronics to stay packed, letting the lines move a little quicker than before. One TSA blogger, Christopher, saw this as vindication for the blog and its readers.

“Our hope is that examples like this validate our forum and show the solid partnerships we can form with our customers— the traveling public—in not only increasing security but in making all of our lives just a little easier,” he said.