Former TSA agent divulges abhorrent agency practices, protocol

If you’ve ever worried about the TSA abusing your privacy rights during a routine airport screening, chances are you were right.

TSA agents institutionalized racial profiling and the objectification of female passengers, and perversely handled images taken by full-body airport scanners while on the job, according to Jason Harrington, a former TSA (Transportation Security Administration) agent and screener at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

“We could see nipple piercings, we could see breast implants, we could see if someone had a mastectomy… there was the occasional instance of people making fun of genitalia size,” Harrington said in an interview with Warren Olney on Monday.

Harrington added that he and other TSA agents routinely gawked at the naked images of passengers passing through full-body scanners. He added — in a piece for in POLITICO Magazine — that images of overweight people garnered the most laughs, “their every fold and dimple on full awful display.”

Harrington, who joined the TSA to help pay for his college education, wrote that he never enjoyed his job and vehemently disliked many of his responsibilities as a TSA agent, especially the patting down of the crotches of children, the elderly and infants. He wrote about the TSA anonymously on his blog, Taking Sense Away, until outing himself in POLITICO Magazine.

He joined Warren on “To The Point” Monday to shed light on some of the TSA’s most-maligned practices: