Online Tweet-Monitoring Reveals Widespread Anti-TSA Sentiments

Patrick Seitz, a technology business journalist, has for one full year evaluated traffic on Twitter, monitoring people’s experiences with the TSA. The results of his monitoring endeavors, aggregated from December 18 2011 to December 18 2012, have revealed no less than 23.000 complaints about the TSA, varying from racial profiling to vandalism, theft, confiscation of harmless personal products and other infringements.

Seitz’s online sampling independently confirms countless other reports by people across the United States, who have reported on the TSA’s handling of the task of safeguarding airport security after 9/11.

Exactly one year after he started his investigation, Seitz broke down in some detail the results which he collected on his Twitter account TSA Rants:

“Over the past 12 months, I’ve documented more than 23,000 complaints about the TSA. And that barely scratches the surface.”

As Seitz points out, his collection of tweets makes out the tip of the iceberg, as his monitoring was limited to a few hours a day:

“I sampled just a few hours of Twitter traffic a day, when my schedule allowed. The actual number of TSA complaints on Twitter is easily several times higher than that.”

In his evaluation, Seitz discerns the complains, collecting them into several categories:

A complaint heard often is TSA employees’ molesting and otherwise physically attacking attractive women. Here’s just some of the comments describing the behavior of TSA personnel:

“Hey TSA guys, wanna not hit on me? Thanks.”

“The TSA Agent just spent so much time patting me down that I feel like we are in a relationship now.”

“That TSA officer was unnecessarily frisky. I’m fairly certain I saw a ring on HER finger.”

“Did the TSA really have to squeeze my bun tho?”

“Missed my flight by 2 minutes!! But I did get to 2nd base with a TSA agent  ”

The list of TSA-misdoings literally goes on forever. All familiar aspects of the TSA’s infringing upon elementary rights are covered extensively, such as the aggressive pat-downs, the theft and destruction of passenger items, the overall incompetence, the mistreating of the elderly and infirm. The most disturbing thing is, that Seitz only took an extremely rudimentary sample, albeit for a full year, pointing to widespread abuses by TSA personnel- and, by extension, a widespread distrust by the general public.