Ask Lemmy

I had a bag of coffee taken. It was from a company called "Doomsday" and had a logo of a gas mask on the bag. It was very clearly labeled as whole bean coffee, but TSA deemed it too unsafe.

$11.8 billion dollars a year in tax money and airfare fees.

Since they were formed in November 2001, they've never stopped a terrorist plot, never prevented an airport attack, and never prevented an attacker from getting on an airplane. So literally everything they've ever taken in their two decades, including their budget, has been useless.

TSA took a half-eaten banana away from my crying toddler niece to run it through the X-ray scanner.

ಠ_ಠ

Wow ok I have two. The first is long.

I moved to the Netherlands in 1991, and in the spring of 1992 my parents asked me to come home for a visit because my grandmother was dying. Which sucked.

Anyway I think I'm going to be the cool kid and smuggle some of this sweet Dutch weed back to the States. But how? Checked luggage, no control. Something on my person but not obvious? Yeah, that's the ticket, so I stuffed my longest glove finger full of dank weed and put in my overcoat pocket thinking I could drop it without notice if things looked bad.

I land at Hartsfield and go to get my checked luggage, my weed infested glove in my overcoat pocket thrown over the back of the luggage trolly. There is this cute girl in a uniform with a beagle on a leash. The dogs starts walking toward the luggage trolly, and I'm getting nervous. He has a big old sniff and the cute girl gives him a treat. She walks up to me and says, "Sir, do you have any ...fruit?"

I'm trying very hard to play it cool, but I'm sure I was not. My then girlfriend now wife had put a banana in the other overcoat pocket so I'd "eat healthy." I answered yes, I have a banana and she says, "Then you'll have to go to Agricultural Customs."

Which at that time was in the basement of Hartsfield. There is only one counter with two official dudes behind it and my hand to god, two dudes with a fucking goat. These four have a very long back and forth until one of the dudes makes a call, and this other dude comes down and starts speaking French to the Two Men and a Goat. All's well, the dudes and their goat are free to go.

[The entire time about 50m away there were constant patrols with the actual drug dogs, the german Shepards walking past me while I'm thinking fuck they are going to catch me, put me in a hole and sodomize me.]

I walk up to the two dudes at the counter and they ask me what I have. I pull out the banana which is pretty banged up at this point. They asked if I wanted to eat it, and I said no, so they directed me to a trash can behind them told me to throw it away and be on my way.

The great irony is when I finally got home to SC my mom had scored what turned out to the best weed any of us had ever smoked, and my nearly-failed career as a drug mule was all for naught.

The second one happened recently. I was going to my company's office party at their HQ in Cyprus, flying out of Schiphol (Amsterdam). My bag goes through the scanner, gets sent down the "we gonna open this son" track. The dude points at my suitcase and asks what is on this side of it. I open it and show him one full half of the suitcase is filled with this https://www.oetker.nl/recepten/r/gevulde-speculaas which are rectangular stuffed pastry things we eat around the feast of St Nicolas (eve).

He pointed at them and looked at me somberly and said, "This is bad, very bad." I said, Ummm, they are just treats for my coworkers." He looked at me, back down, and said "This is forbidden, you are in trouble." Then he said nothing and I said nothing and then he busted into laughter.

He said, "I'm just fucking with you man. Under the scanner those look exactly like C-4."

So for any Dutch traveling around xmas, many don't bring those with you.

I had a flight safe multitool, one that specifically had no blade, nor anything sharp. It only had tools for my camera. I also had a fisher space pen which they said looked too much like a bullet.

Both were confiscated, but they couldn’t figure out how to open the front flipper knife I had with me, so they let it through.

The TSA bullshit isn’t about keeping us safe.

I got an opposite kinda thing. I picked up one of those credit card sized folding knives. Forgot it was in my wallet, and wasn't even stopped at TSA. Didn't even realize it until a couple days after I landed at my destination.

It's ALL theatre.

This one time I was in Berlin with my girlfriend and the guy is taking a long time looking at the xray of my bag. Finally, he asks me, "do you have a flashlight in your bag?" and I told him no. He looked puzzled and he asks me "what is the device in your bag that is shaped like a flashlight?" and I told him I really had no idea but I was sure I don't have a flashlight in my bag. Then he tells me he needs to search the bag. Of course I agree.

He opens the bag, chuckles, and closes it back up and says "its ok have a nice flight!" and I'm so confused. Right then my gf comes from the line and grabs my hand and drags me to the gate.

We get a little bit away and she starts laughing her ass off "it's my vibrator!" because of course she stuck it in my bag without telling me but no he did not confiscate it.

A water bottle with shards of ice in it that had melted partially. I'm being dead ass serious, btw. Happened to me at Louisville airport.

There was a soda machine a few feet from the TSA line. I bought one and noticed the agent looking my way. I walked up to them within a minute (small airport) and they took my unopened Coke, that they watched me purchase, and threw it in the trash. It was a dollar more at the machine on the other side.

This was a while back when the TSA was a new concept. I had no idea you couldn’t carry a closed bottle of soda through the checkpoint and was very irritated at the lack of common sense.

Another item I didn’t have confiscated but did create a big stir with was a bullet on a keychain. It contains some of my dad’s ashes. I put my keys with the keychain in the basket and several agents were shaking it saying “there is something inside there” they took me aside and I explained it was my Dad and they dropped it like a hot rock and apologized. I was surprised by that reaction given my soda experience.

I took my bike, but they confiscated my entire tyre patch / repair kit because it had an allen key in it. Apparently I might try to disassemble the plane from the inside or something. Then I learnt it's surprisingly hard to find a tyre repair kit in my destination. Hooray

I had a torx handle with a single screw driver bit attached, left over in my backpack. (So basically just a screwdriver)

Combined, it barely exceeded the maximum safety length. If I'd stored it separated, it would have been fine.

I offered to separate it, that wasn't going to work. I needed to leave one of them behind. ...as the rest of the socket set (at home) needed the torx handle, I left them with the screw driver bit.

I've never had anything confiscated but, I did have an argument with security about whether my backpack was allowed to be used as a carry on or not. It contained a portable battery that strictly is not allowed to be in checked luggage by TSA guidelines and must be via a carry on. It took me having to pull up the TSA regulations on batteries in order for them to give me the backpack back.

I had a blender bottle from which I had drank all the liquid, which still had ice in it. Because the ice was above the 100ml line (the limit for LIQUIDS), they took it and threw it away. They wouldn't even just dump the ice, but tossed the whole bottle. Being that I was running short on time for my flight and I got my work to pay for a new one, I didn't fight it (also just because I'm correct doesn't mean the argument is going to go my way in a situation like this) but I'm still flabbergasted that ice was a liquid according to the pair of TSA seat fillers checking my bag.

I almost had a multimeter confiscated on a different occasion when they couldn't figure out what it was. That one I put my foot down until a supervisor thankful instantly waved me through when he showed up.

My sister knows I like knives. She went to Switzerland with her husband and bought a Victorinox for me. I think it was at the airport so she didn't had the chance to check in with her luggage. TSA equivalent at her layover in India confiscated it. She was livid.

A coworker had a pair of boxers shorts confiscated because of the camouflage pattern. Equatorial Guinea is paranoid when it comes to security, and anything that can be interpreted as being of a military nature is a big nono.

Toothpaste

I had a bottle taken from me because the bottle was rated for 250 milliliters, even though it only had about 30 in it, and it was translucent, and you could see how little liquid was actually in the bottle.

It was on a return flight as well, so I had already flown in with the bottle, but I was not allowed to fly back out with it.

I traveled to a manufacturing expo last year. I had so much stuff to bring back that I needed extra room in my carry-on. So I loaded it up with these: box of drill bits and some endmills (very sharp), set of dial calipers, set of metal files, small containers of superglue, a couple books of sandpaper, set of precision pins for measuring holes (basically looks like a bed of nails in a box). Also I had a bottle of water. Yep the bottle was confiscated but they didn't care about all the other crap even if it looked like MacGuiver was planning to hijack a plane.

Before even being allowed to queue, security cared a lot that I present some email of the company I'm flying with. I had just sent the QR code to my phone, but the person doesn't have a scanner (so what is this going to prove?) and so she requires seeing the email for the privilege of confiscating toiletries. Of course the airline later scanned it just fine but I'd not have gotten on the airplane that day if I had given my laptop away as checked luggage (didn't have email on phone back then)

Of course she didn't more than glance at it, no identity card check to compare the name or anything. An invoice from my mom's dentist would probably have done the trick. Balancing a laptop on a knee, trying to two-handed type a password that you only know as muscle memory, is the sort of reason they require you to plan two hours "just in case we come up with more bullshit than expected for you or a passenger ahead of you"

And yes, my backpack with electronics needed to be flagged, bomb tested, and the last sip of water needed to be finished because the bottle was theoretically capable of holding an amount over the limit. Makes sense.

Not airport security, but at a venue in NY that thankfully died, they confiscated a small silicone plunger I use to take out my contact lenses. It's literally a medical device, and I can't take them out without it (glass sclerals)

My partner yelled at them and dug through the garbage for it

I had a small piece of broken mystery metal tucked in my wallet on my way to a trade show. I knew a supplier who had X-ray fluorescence equipment on hand was going to be at the conference and I wanted them to ID the metal piece (there were like 50 sheets of it in the warehouse, and I figured it might be worth something).

Unfortunately this random piece of metal broken off a corner happened to be shaped like a box cutter blade, lol. Sure, it was like 4mm thick and as dull as a Republican voter, but still shaped like a knife on the scanner, so away it went.

In the army fully kitted out with gear. This means we have full plate and a M4 strapped to our chests, all mags were empty though. My friend had to give them his nail clippers out of his shit kit.

The file/nail pick part of a nail clipper. They opened it up, twisted the file out, snapped it off, and gave me back the nail clippers.

A salt-shaker sized container of MSG

A finger's worth of cream/moisturizer from a container I bought as a gift. It was labeled as being 0.1 oz over the carryon limit, so they asked me to open it and scoop out a tiny bit so that it would be under the limit.

🤦

A block of Skyrr butter in Iceland. Was told its a liquid. And double checked, yeah, it was considered a liquid

A 5mm Allen wrench was taken from me in Istanbul. The 4mm was ok, he looked at both, but the 5 could be dangerous. They were THE EXACT SAME SIZE. Standard L-shape