LIKE many Americans, Jason Edward Harrington suspects that most of the airport security measures enforced by the country's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are useless theatre and unlikely to catch actual terrorists. There's one important difference, though: Mr Harrington is a former TSA agent. For years, he wrote an anonymous blog, "Taking Sense Away", about his experiences as a screener at O'Hare airport in Chicago. Now he has quit his job and gone public, writing a lengthy piece in Politico magazine about his time with the agency. The whole piece is worth your time, but here's a highlight:

We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop. Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines. “They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket. We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone.

The saga of the first full-body scanners at airports is a testament to government incompetence. Within three years of the machines being ordered, Congress forced the TSA to discard many of them. Now we are told that the machines never worked correctly in the first place. (Mr Harrington links to one blogger's video alleging that a metal object held sideways to the body would not show up on the scanners, and adds that this flaw was "known to everyone I talked to within the agency".) What the scanners did do, though, was allow officers to gawk at Americans' bodies: "Jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues," Mr Harrington reports, to no one's surprise.

Congress did, eventually, force the TSA to get rid of some of the worst body scanners and replace them with machines that show only a Jane Doe-like outline of a body.

The Federal Aviation Administration recently scrapped its ridiculous ban on using personal electronic devices during takeoff and landing. That is a positive step. But there is still a lot more that lawmakers could do to make flying faster, better, and less humiliating. (Allowing passengers to keep their shoes on and bring larger containers of liquids onboard would be wonderful.) Let's hope Mr Harrington's piece generates some real action.

Correction: This post originally stated that the TSA now allows passengers to carry pocket knives on planes. In fact, after saying it would, it then dropped then plan. Sorry.