Have fun in Vegas, don't let them ruin your mood, bro.

That's pretty silly but they also are standing there telling everyone over and over to take everything out of your pockets -- you can't really complain too much if you don't comply. But yeah - should have just sent u back thru the detector or something. Weird. Maybe protocol.

Airport Security has a tough job -- monotomous as hell and tasked with something extremely important with peoples lives on the line if they f up.

Sounds like you need to relax.

This is why more an more people are opting for driving long distances (or via train) vs flying. The hassles of driving outweighing the hassles of flying these days...

If you don't like it don't fly. I don't mind a little inconvenience if it helps keeping planes from crashing in to buildings again.

Everyone complains when something is missed by security and something horrible happens yet god forbid they have to go through security. It's amazing people still complain about air travel, you can get across the country or world for that matter in hours all while connected to the internet and having a drink with ice in it. People used to make these same journeys in wagons and 1/3 of the people used to die along the way. All in all I'd say a small search at the security check point is a pretty minor inconvenience. I also never understand how something so minor can "ruin" someone's day. If that's your problem for the day, you have it pretty well. As for the airport security, you know the gig and process, its no surprise. If your not willing to abide, please opt out of air travel. Also do yourself a favor and go through the tsa pre check process, you'll be happy you did.

Maybe your wife should listen up when they asked her 2-3 times if everything was out of her pockets.

Ahh....American hypocrisy. I love how many people will freak the hell out over a cop wanting to search their car during a traffic stop, but being effectively personally violated at an airport makes it A-OK. Exactly how many deaths a year can we attribute to bad/drunk driving versus how many deaths by "planes being flown by terrorists"? You don't get it both ways, people. Either you're okay with the government performing unreasonable searches at all times, or never. There's no grey area here.

Sounds to me like this could have been easily handled by the slightest amount of competence on the part of the TSA, but as we've learned over the years, the government has no interest in paying salaries that competent people are interested in. 95% of those people are RUDE and dumber than a sack of ball peen hammers. The rude is forgiveable....I understand dealing with the public and I wouldn't want to be doing it either. But the incompetence? They operate on the opposite way that criminal justice works in this country. You're guilty until proven innocent. It's gone far beyond "reasonable" when they can't just ask someone to empty their pocket AGAIN when there's GOVERNMENT ISSUED LEGAL TENDER setting off their scanner...ridiculous... not everyone knows that crap is printed with magnetic ink....but every TSA agent should, and people SHOULD be treated with respect for minor missteps like that, not groped up or stripped.

Only thing I'm going to say, and I feel like I'm already risking a pee-pee-slap from the mods, so no responses to replies on this one.. feel free to downvote, as I'm sure I'll get a ton just like anytime I do where I'm not Team America World Police around here..

Enjoy your flight. Maybe you should have stayed home.

Why are you so upset? Was it Special Agent Bonesteel that took your wife in the back room?

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Two totally different things, don't be dumb.

Wanted to share this with pinball community? Smh......

just doing their job .

A few years back going through the screening, I held my cash in my hand. Which is perfectly ok. So the screening guy had me fan it out and asked where I was going. I said Vegas. He said, "Just give me all your cash, you're going to lose it anyway" I laughed and thought he was just being funny, but God damn if he wasn't totally right!

Should've asked him which pinball machine would be worth 10k by Christmas. Some people really can see the future.

I read this topic thinking it was going to be "I'm going to the pinball hall of fame bitches!" And I get "dumbass airport security" whining? Bro, do you even pinball?

Actually your vehicle is an extension of your residence whereas when you decide to go to the airport your agreeing to any and all searches. If your not okay with that, please don't go to the airport. It's people that believe they should be stripped searching if the tsa decides to do so that throw fits and create lines that the rest of us end up dealing with. Nothing more annoying than being at the airport and arrogant rude passengers feel they have rights to act how they want and look around for people to agree with their tantrum. Those are the people who should be banned from air travel. Just because you pay for a service does not give you the right to think you can skirt the rules you agree to when you purchase said service.

Don't you just love how when you prove Frax wrong or point out his obvious ignorance that he gives you a down vote? Real classy individual.

Wow, that is so much ignorance packed into one post. So almost every person who works for the government is incompetent? For someone who spends half of their time bitching about being broke, you sure have a lot of judgement to cast.
"Unreasonable searches at all times".... Oh, boy.

They probably read some of your posts.

Really? Give them complete power or none? That's just silly. There are times when it's necessary and times when it's not. The issue for me is not the search. It's that the tsa is ineffective. They do not do their jobs. That has been proven time and time again. I don't mind being screened for a reason. I do mind being inconvenienced by a system that's completely broken and ineffective. Their only purpose is to scare the bad guys.

So the other day I'm traveling to Vegas, and the person in front of me in line sets off the x-ray machine and now everyone's waiting while the traveler says "it's just a 5 dollar bill!" as they're escorted to secondary screening. I wish they had TSA agents repeatedly reminding everyone to take all their crap out of their pockets. What a bunch of morons. It's ridiculous.

Explain...?

I thought the funny part of this whole thing was when I first read this 2 minutes after he posted this 5 hours ago, was he felt the need to go on pinside and post that airport security just took his wife to re-check her. Well I got a little free time to kill, let me go on pinside and after I post this, let me see what's for sale. Just making light of awkward moment. Take that 5 bucks and play a 5 dollar slot machine.....

I thought it was normal practice to remove all tips when leaving the stage at the end of the performance.

Everything done at TSA is by the books protocol-- not "logic". That saves their asses and is a smart way to do things. They try to help you by stating over and over what you need to do before going thru.

Anyway -- are you in vegas w/out a plan now? Figured if you were going there and already arrived you'd have stuff planned out? Shows, gambling, drinking, hookers, shopping, pb hall of fame -- isn't that about it for vegas?

Gold, Jerry. Bravo.

How quickly, the sheep are ready to give up their liberty for the illusion of a bit of security! The kabuki theater that passes for security doesn't really do much more than make everyone feel like they are doing something while basically they are just reacting to the last incident. As long as security gives middle aged Americans a thorough search while allowing obviously middle eastern males of military age to pass by unmolested, we are just kidding ourselves. It's kinda like all of the spying the government does on all of our emails, calls and texts, yet they never seem to stop the terror attacks like boston, orlando, la, etc etc. They are paralyzed by too much information in an effort to be fair and politically correct.

You might want to blame ISIS instead of TSA.

https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/credible-islamic-state-propaganda-video-features-short-clip-of-las-vegas-strip/

This is so unbelievably false it angers me. If every thwarted terror attack was made public knowledge there would be MORE fear in the streets. Plus it hinders further invistagations. I assure you the good guy are hard at work stopping these people all across the world. Just because it's not on your yahoo feeds doesn't mean it's not happening. You listed the few attacks that were successful because you didn't hear about the dozens of attacks that were prevented.

sorry i have zero tolerance for stupid passengers at security. so many delays are caused by muppets not being organised or just not on the ball.

Liquids out, laptops and electronics out, everything out your pockets, yes that includes your 400KG bag of make up, yes that includes the bottle of water.

Oh you've turned up and aren't ready or you have haven't followed the procedure -> GET TO THE BACK OF THE QUEUE AND TRY AGAIN.

if they ran it like that there would be none of this shit and the queues wouldn't exist.

The people who don't take all of the stuff out of their pockets right?

I don't know whether to bitch in this thread or have a cigarette.
Better than most shows in Vegas.

I couldn't agree more with your middle paragraph above. Not sure how people can disagree and thumb you down, likely your first paragraph got you the thumbs down.

I travel a lot by the way. I have so many funny TSA stories it would make your head spin.

It was probably a tip from the night before.

I went to Zion last time I was in vegas , I enjoyed that .

DO IT...!!!...It's Amazing...!!!

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Stay out of the Bacchanal buffet. It's a horrendously overpriced monstrosity that isn't worth the money, with a few novel trinkets to make you not so annoyed you paid like 120 bucks each.... If you have a hankering to gorge on crab legs, surprisingly Paris was one of the better places for that, and predictably, their desserts were good. The MGM breakfast buffet with the drinks wasn't too bad, but the highlight was DEFINITELY the crotchety-ass curmudgeon that was pouring all the free drinks while freaking out over the drink limits at one time per guest...and then knocking over trays of TONS of glasses when people were berating him at closing time for not pouring more booze. I still can't figure out if it was karma, or if I feel sorry for the guy. Something tells me he's used to it. =P

I stopped flying after on my way home in Heathrow I was given a very public and incredibly embarrassing patdown. I took the train from providence to Pittsburgh in April; 13 hours but you can bet your ass it was better than flying and getting "randomly selected". The fact that a five dollar bill is now a security event is embarrassing to our country.

And don't give me this "you don't know how many terrorism events they stopped" like these agencies who can't tie their own shoes are suddenly going to go shy and hide all these miraculous plots they stopped. They are very public when they foil a "plot" they mostly hatched by convincing mentally ill people to commit attacks they otherwise would have no ability to carry out.
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/13/another-terror-arrest-another-mentally-ill-man-armed-fbi/

My wife was a block from the Boston marathon bombs in a retail store; the FBI had visited those dudes houses over a year before; Russian security forces tipped us off. Still doesn't change the fact that if those dudes were just tracked, or if a $100 security lock was installed on every cockpit, there'd be no terrorism. Instead we do this awful kabuki theater at the airports pretending we are safer.

The entire post is mind boggling, but I will not argue the philosophy with you. I will however point out that every cockpit does have a security lock ever since a few weeks after 9/11 and they cost more than $100 each.

Yeah I know. What I am saying is a security door to the cockpit would have stopped 9/11... but instead of just beefing up the cockpit security we are now pulling random strangers out of security lines over $5 bills in their pockets.

strawman

there are a lot of misguided points in these two posts.

yes, it's true that some ground-level TSA agents are not the brightest bulbs. they don't have to be. the system is designed by pretty smart people and serves multiple useful purposes. (by the way, any plan is a terrible plan if it requires geniuses at every level of its execution).

stopping people actively carrying out an attack is only one small facet of the effect of these security systems. the real benefit is that they stop an unknown number of plots from even being attempted or considered. yes, unfortunately, of course, there is no way to quantify the number of events that simply don't happen. this seems like a weak argument, but bear with me for a minute and consider an analogy:

passwords are an extremely flawed security system for identity verification on computers: the encryption methods used transmit or store these passwords are sometimes possible to defeat through brute force or software vulnerabilities. plus, they are often easy to guess. plus, attempts to make them harder to guess also make them harder to remember -- resulting in people inevitably writing down their passwords, which of course makes them easier to steal. plus, on top of that, people every day are tricked into giving their passwords away. plus, on top of THAT, databases full of password/login combos are stolen every day as well.

and since many people use the same login/password combos for multiple systems, a single stolen password can get a thief access to many of that person's accounts ... and so on and so forth.

there are more secure alternatives that exist with today's technology. digitally signed certificates. multi-factor authentication. thumbprint scanners.

these are valid criticisms, and valid alternatives. so ... why does Pinside, and a majority of systems we use, rely on passwords?

simple -- although it's a flawed tool, it's still extremely effective, and extremely cheap.

do you really want to go through the trouble of getting a certificate signed by an official certification authority just to create a Pinside account? and do you want to deal with that hassle again when the cert expires? do you really want a text message sent to your phone with an access code every time you log on? do you really want Pinside to send out specialized thumbprint readers to every user so they can verify they are who they say they are? of course not, none of that is practical, when the simple measure of login/password combo, though flawed, works fine 99% of the time.

security is never about making anything impregnable. it's about making a security breach more trouble than it's worth for the set of people with incentive to attempt it. that's the fundamental point here. it's ALWAYS in EVERY CASE a cost-benefit analysis, even at the highest levels of the military. it simply has to be, since there's a fundamental principle that the only way to make something 100% secure is to make do without it.

so, back to the password analogy. you can go on and on about how dumb passwords are, but in the end, if we didn't have passwords here on Pinside, there'd be shenanigans all day long with jokers impersonating each other and deleting each other's PMs and so forth. it couldn't actually function without some basic form of identity confirmation. passwords do that without requiring too much hassle or hardware or expense, and in the end breaches don't happen often on this site, and aren't damaging enough to warrant more extreme measures.

so back to the so-called "kubuki theatre" of the TSA. it's a lot like passwords. it's not perfect, but it certainly stops a ton of base-level shenanigans from even being attempted, and also works to necessitate that any organized plots would have to be far more complex and sophisticated than they otherwise would be -- which is a strong disincentive for all but the most determined, organized, intelligent, etc, of extremists. ultimately, in the end, although the system cannot stop all terrorist plots, it does make other countries and other means of attack more attractive targets, and less risky for the terrorist, thus reducing the risk of an attack based out of any of our airports. in that way, it is very effective not so much at preventing in-progress attacks, but ensuring that terrorists look for easier targets elsewhere.

this i actually strongly agree with, but it's really primarily a symptom of the virtually non-existent care our country provides for the extremely mentally ill. i have a close friend whose sister is (in my non-medical professional opinion) clearly deeply schizophrenic. she is incapable of holding a job, she lives with her parents. she constantly has episodes where she's convinced they and/or others are trying to kill her, implanting things in her brain, and so forth. she regularly turns their house upside down looking for surveillance equipment. she calls up relatives and howls at them, terrified and hysterical. and there is nothing anyone will do for her. they have taken her to doctors, and the only advice they get is "try to get her arrested for a felony, then the state can put her away and medicate her." this is outrageous and inhumanly cruel. she is not a criminal. she is extremely ill! she should not be forced to become a branded-for-life criminal just to receive treatment for a completely debilitating and excruciating mental condition. she is not evil, but it is possible that her condition could cause her to harm others. these types of people should be a matter for our mental health care system, not the TSA, but since we do not have a functioning mental health care system, well, these people become the TSA's problem and they are frankly not equipped or trained for that purpose. they're the wrong tool.

I've been pulled a few times too (even with military ID), but I have nothing to hide and always provide everything TSA needs. Totally understand it's an inconvenience and maybe it could be done better. Hope it doesn't ruin your trip. The world isn't as safe as it use to be and our enemies are using unconventional war tactics to get their message across.

How would you feel if your junk was touched by a TSA person as part of a pat-down? Compliance has limits; especially compliance just for compliances' sake.

Call me when someone weaponizes a $5 bill.

I get patted down at the Pentagon. In uniform.

I get patted down at the airport. With a military ID.

Who gives a shit? I certainly don't. Better I get my package fondled by every TSA agent within shouting distance than one more innocent life lost by some terrorist asshole.

I'm sure a few years back someone would have said that about a shoe or cell phone. Or can you imagine back pre 9/11 what a couple of box cutters can do?

Mixed emotions here. I got turned inside out in late 2001 when my secretary booked me for a trip with 2 one-way tickets through international airports instead of a round trip. Took the ride in the electric cart to the office and gave the queen's wave to the crowd.

As they started swabbing the handles of my luggage I let them know to expect GSR since I was a regular target shooter and might get trace but not concentrated.

In the end I cooperated and they got me to my flight on time. I think it was all good and did not expect a phone call from them. Some times it is just a one terminal stand.

Seriously. People are too trusting these days in some respects. I love it when someone checks my signature on a credit card.