TSA Moron Mistakes Ipod Charger For Bomb Equipment

If ever you needed evidence that airport security is theater, here you go. A TSA guard at JFK refused to let a freqent flyer through because he didn't like the look of a DIY iPod charger. According to this guard, to whom our safety is entrusted, the device pictured immediately below "looks like an IED."

There are times when some home-made electrical junk just looks fishy, because it has hidden spaces, boxes, cylinders, writhing snakepits of wire, and so on. This, however, is a a USB port stuck to a chunk of plastic.

"I tell her it's a battery charger. She asks why I have it, and I begin to explain that the iPod only has about 2 hours of video time ... She interrupts me and says she doesn't like the look of it. She starts in with the typical, "In these times..." excuse for the concern. I explain to her that I have flown with it 4-6 times a month for a year now and nobody has questioned it."

Dumb as the guy is to drag half of Akihabara onto a plane, to conjour a security incident out of it is unnecessary. The scenario sparkles with the enthusiastic uselessness of everyone involved. When the police arrive, they side with the traveler, who gets his crappy charger back, minus the batteries.

The problem isn't just mere incompetence, but that we've got to the point where the world tacitly accepts this incompetence without doing anything about it. It's clear from what happened that airport security is little more than a naked simulation— after all, a TSA officer declared something to be an IED-resembling device that would not be going on board a plane. And yet, aboard it went.

Source [Natch via Make and BoingBoing]