As someone who (used to) travel a lot, the TSA have signs plastered throughout the entire security line to remind you to look through your belongings and make sure you don't have any banned items (they included what they were and had pictures of them too). If you went through airport security with a banned item (such as a knife), what they did was offer you three choices:
- They let you go back outside of security and come back without it (the idea being is you go back to your car and put it back)
- They had a small mailing station where you could mail it back to yourself (you had to pay for mailing, IIRC it was like $5-10)
A friend discovered that he had a pocketknife with him just before he was about to go through security. So he went out to the airport smoker's area, dug a little hole in the ground, and buried the pocketknife. When he returned from his trip he went back and dug it up.
I had a family member who tried to do a similar thing with a potted plant in the airport lobby, but it was still gone as security apparently runs metal detectors over common hiding places every so often as part of a bomb sweep.
The TSA is responsible for creating the roadblock, and therefore should be responsible for keeping travelers whole. "read the rules" is not a justification for their policies, as it's common to have an arbitrarily-prohibited item hide in your bag. Especially the types of items that you want to live in your backpack (eg pocket knives) that you have to make sure to unpack before the airport.
For anything that can be checked on the airplane, there should be a free miniature bag that gets added to your checked luggage.
Anything that cannot ride on the airplane but can be ground shipped should get you a free envelope to ship.
For the remaining stuff (eg bulging lithium batteries), there should be a system whereby you can leave it at the checkpoint to be picked up by someone else within the same day.
Failing all of those, disposal should be the last option.
> The TSA is responsible for creating the roadblock, and therefore should be responsible for keeping travelers whole. "read the rules" is not a justification for their policies, as it's common to have an arbitrarily-prohibited item hide in your bag. Especially the types of items that you want to live in your backpack (eg pocket knives) that you have to make sure to unpack before the airport.
Knives aren't "arbitrarily-prohibited item[s]". There's a quite famous case of a series of hijackings that were done with box-cutters (e.g. utility knives), that resulted in 3,000 dead.
... and which will never succeed again. "Arbitrarily-prohibited" was a jab at everything else they've seen fit to condemn by extension, for example pliers. It's not just knives that you have to be concerned about, but anything remotely non-basic that you otherwise keep in your backpack.
That seems a little...overconfident. While some of the TSA stuff is definitely security theater that adds little value, not all of it is.
> "Arbitrarily-prohibited" was a jab at everything else they've seen fit to condemn by extension, for example pliers. It's not just knives that you have to be concerned about, but anything remotely non-basic that you otherwise keep in your backpack.
You can carry on pliers, just as long as they're less than 7 inches long:
The pair of pliers I have is 7.25 inches long. That rule seems quite reasonable to me.
They do have a difficult task: write rules that can be executed quickly by relatively low-level employees to exclude items that could be used as a weapon or be a danger to the plane. I doubt that's even possible to do without creating corner cases that someone could gripe about.
Just a guess, but the TSA probably pays a contacting company to take all of the confiscated items away. Then the contacting company disposes of can't be sold and sells the rest.
If they consider them to be safe enough that it is not unethical to sell them in job lots to members of the general public, maybe they shouldn't be seizing them in the first place?
Before the change in policy you could choose to have the items moved to checked baggage, or packaged and shipped separately. Seizing the items is not the only alternative to letting them into the cabin.
Since they are legal items that are merely prohibited to transport through the checkpoint, and since no forefeiture action has been taken which would lawfully deprive the owner of title, only a seizure of possession to prevent the prohibited action, they should be held for return to the owner outside of the secured area with storage charge (and shipment charge if an option for remote return is provided) covering reasonable actual costs only.
Anything else would seem to be deprivation of property without due process and taking for public use without just compensation, in violation of both the due process and takings clauses of the 5th Amendment.
The owner is given the option to either go put it back in their car, ship it to themselves for a small fee, or let the TSA take it. It's not like "hey, you screwed up and now you lose this item for good!"
“small” fee my ass. When the TSA confiscated a camping knife I kept in my backpack and forgot about, the agent said it’s about $20. Also, for someone who boards in 30 minutes with a TSA line just as long, they don’t really have a choice: it’s lose the item, or miss your flight. So I had to let them take it.
Why? It's common knowledge and well signed [1] that knives aren't allowed on planes. IIRC, the TSA does people with knives the option of getting out of line to take their knife home, but most people don't bother because it's more important to them to catch their flight.
