Journal SJS's Journal: TSA
It's either that, or they're incompetent.
If you travel enough, you might begin to see a pattern. Stuff disappears when TSA gets involve -- not the expensive stuff, necessarily, but little things. Things that may only have sentimal value. And stuff gets damaged. Not everytime, surely, but at a high enough level to be aggravating.
I'm not saying that all TSA employees gleefully vandalie the contents of suitcases, or steal trinkets and suchlike from duffel bags. But it seems that some do, and the rest apparently don't care. Trying to report this sort of thing puts you into a voice-mail hell, and contacting a human tends to result in a "so what?" attitude.
(The alternative, that the TSA inspectors are, in general, incompetent to pack suitcases, brings up a worse issue -- if we're hiring incompetent goons for security, how does that make us any more secure? Assuming incompetence has far scarier implications... I don't want to go there.)
It's preposterous that by travelling, we should be expected to give permission for some faceless cretin to damage, steal, or lose our possessions, despite all the money we spend buying quality luggage to protect those possessions.
I think we need some basic rights back in our travel. Nobody, but nobody, should be allowed to search your possessions without your presence, and if they damage your possessions, they should replace them and be penalized for the damage. Automatically. Making someone run a bureacratic gauntlet is just another penalty for daring to complain. And that's just wrong.