Revenge, Courtesy of the TSA

It’s amazing that this hadn’t happened before, given the message hammered home time and again by Homeland Security.  If you see something, say something.  Or if you want to get revenge on someone who pissed you off, say something.  Or if you’re a blithering idiot and think it would be hysterically funny, say something.  Then sit back and enjoy the show.

Via Kevin Underhill at Lowering the Bar :


Hey, you know what’d be a hilarious prank? Calling the airport to claim (falsely) that a specific traveler is trying to get liquid explosives past the TSA and onto a plane. If the plane has already left, they’ll probably turn it around and arrest him when it lands! Ruining everybody’s day for no reason at all! Hah! Hilarious!


This morning a US Air flight from Philadelphia to Dallas was indeed turned around after some jackass called in a fake bomb threat, a call that unlike most such calls named a specific person. The call was made about 7 a.m., but the plane had already left by the time the warning was passed on. The usual cast of thousands (all heavily armed) surrounded and boarded the plane after it landed back in Philly, extracted the suspect and searched him and his luggage. Ultimately they found nothing, and cleared the flight to proceed. “It was a hoax all the way through,” an official said.


Unsatisfied with the hilarious combination of making a planeful of people miserable and mobilizing an army in the expectation of finally catching someone doing something bad, to prove to the public the value of the TSA, Kevin goes on to spell out a few inherent issues with how this was handled.



Note that no one involved seems to have taken the position that, hey, nothing to worry about, because even if this is true he’ll never get past the TSA with liquid explosives; that’s a crack team on which we can safely rely. No one was detained by that thought for even a moment.


Also, note that the call came in “about 7 a.m.,” and the information still had not been passed on by the time the plane departed at 7:39. That is, even though they had a specific name of a possible terrorist and so presumably knew the specific flight he would be on, it took over half an hour to get this information from a phone in the airport to another location in that same airport, by which time the plane was well on its way.


Nor does it appear that anyone thought, wow, you know what, this is probably a hoax, and calling the plane back now really wouldn’t do any good anyway. If the guy does have a bomb, he’ll just set it off when he sees the plane turning around. If he doesn’t, we’re ruining everybody’s day for nothing. There’s no need to worry about him taking over and crashing the plane into something, because if he uses the bomb to blow the cockpit door open then that’s pretty much a done deal. So why doesn’t somebody just meet the plane when it lands and we’ll check things out then?


And anyway, the have all that cool SWAT stuff, and it would be a shame if they didn’t get to use it.

It was subsequently revealed that this wasn’t a hoax for lulz, but revenge.



T]he Philadelphia Enquirer is reporting the call was allegedly placed by a 26-year-old Philadelphia man who was upset about a “compromising” photo the passenger had posted on Facebook depicting himself and the caller’s girlfriend. (She was the passenger’s ex-girlfriend, which is presumably where he got the compromising photo.)


According to the report, the caller, who I’ll refer to as “Kenny Smith” because that’s his name, called authorities from a pay phone at about 7:20 a.m. the morning of the flight to make the threat. Smith was at least clever enough to avoid using his real name, although I can’t say that his alias choice, “George Michaels,” is especially convincing.


Yet again, Kevin has done a masterful job of recounting TSA zaniness that not only showcases the stupidity, but the incompetence, of our protectors.  The problem for the TSA, of course, is they’ve got their nuts in a vice of their own making. Having justified their existence and intrusiveness on the basis of protecting us from terrorists, the possibility that a terrorist not of the FBI’s making might explode a bomb on a plane is intolerable.  It can’t be allowed, no matter how extreme (and poorly handled) the reaction may be.

Here, the hoaxster was a moron. While the joke probably wasn’t funny to the passengers on the place, and, had one of the multitude of armed saviors accidently tripped and blown away a few dozen passengers, their families, few hoaxsters concern themselves with such eventualities. After all, what’s a few dead bodies compared with potential hilarity of nailing one’s love rival?

Had the hoaxster been a bit more thoughtful about his handling of the joke, he would have not only have caused a similar reaction, maybe even  scrambling some fighter jets to take down the plane before it reached Detroit, but he could have done so without getting caught.  A well-placed anonymous call isn’t all that hard to do, especially if the caller isn’t a total moron.

Didn’t anyone at the TSA think about this possibility?  No doubt they did, but what would you have them do? Ignore calls they suspect to be hoax’s and risk being wrong, thus revealing that this is just a huge farce and monumental disaster?  The only aspect of this story that seems truly shocking is that it doesn’t happen all the time. 

And if it does, you can bet that eventually someone will accidently pull the trigger and compel a brief explanation by a government spokesman about how they were just following procedures.  But at least we can rest assured that the dead folks were killed by good, well-meaning Americans, and not those terrible terrorists.

7 thoughts on “Revenge, Courtesy of the TSA

  1. Onlooker

    Yes, this kind of “prank” has got to catch on. Any number of people would love to take this kind of poke at our Homeland Security theater; from the crazy guy down the street, to Al Qaeda. Just make the call and sit back and enjoy. And given the fact that they will react to any kind of threat (for reasons you’ve pointed out) it shouldn’t be hard to make one without detection, using some minimum level of sophisticated communication.

    Hoist with their own petard, indeed. But hey, it’s just taxpayer money after all. We’ve got plenty of that. And it creates jobs, and jobs are good, no matter how inane.

  2. Pete

    This kind of “prank” already has caught on. This may be the first time I’ve heard about someone using TSA for purposes of revenge, but similar deceptions of SWAT teams have become increasingly common to the point where Wikipedia even has an entry for this practice.

    [Ed. Note: Link deleted per rules.]

  3. C4

    Whatever happened to the old fashioned bag of burning dog poop on the porch as a way for children like Smith to lash out when they discover that unavoidable truth that life just isn’t fair?

  4. John David Galt

    This practice (and SWATting) raises two different important concerns, and I wouldn’t want either to get lost in the shuffle.

    One, of course, is that the “prank” is a serious crime, which can not only destroy the career, reputation, and even freedom of the accused, but may very well result in harm to bystanders. Clearly such acts should be prosecuted every time and punished severely.

    But we also need to consider changing our police agencies’ rules of engagement, so that they hesitate just a little more before shooting someone or bashing his front door in, at least if the only “probable cause” they have is the naked word of an anonymous phone caller.

  5. Al Czervik

    I agree that these incidents are serious crimes – far beyond pranks.

    I’ve yet to hear, however, of the police agency that shoots people, or even forcefully enters a dwelling, based on the allegation of ONE unidentified, unsubstantiated phone caller. The lawyer in me thinks it would be a bit difficult to use any evidence one might glean therein.

    Maybe we live in different parts of the country?

  6. SHG

    Maybe you need to read more? That’s one. There are thousand of such cases. That you’ve “yet to hear” about them is a problem you need to address.  Spend some time in the blawgosphere, after which you will have “heard” more than you ever wanted to.

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