Given the TSA’s latest [ahem] “image problem”, it was inevitable that a TSA documentary would come out eventually. Please Remove Your Shoes is just that:
Vagabondish is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read our disclosure.
… a revealing documentary about broken government process. It is also an empathetic story about a half dozen public servants who try to fix it. And it is a familiar topic to all of us who have flown in the last fifteen years: the security routine at the airport – first the FAA and now the TSA.
Please Remove Your Shoes examines the period before 911 and the current situation eight years later and asks the questions that make Washington squirm: “Are we really any better for all our money spent? Or is it safe to say that nothing has changed? The answers come in excoriating detail in places, and by unnerving implication in others. Direct disobedience of agency charter, subversion of management practices, and terrifying abuse of power and secrecy become the film’s markers for the superagency charged with protecting us on airplanes.
According to the PRYS website, a few interesting fun facts about the TSA:
According to GAO, TSA inspectors spend 33% of their time inspecting, 8% on incidents, 5% investigating, 5% on “outreach”, and 49% of their time on “other.” Other?
During the first 3 months of 2007, the TSA Logistics Center received eight explosive detection systems units at a cost of about $7 million. As of January 2009, all eight explosive detection systems units remained in storage at the Logistics Center.
TSA has not deployed any of the 10 technologies it has created since 2002.
This should prove interesting.