TSA to ax worker who left note in bag with sex toy

A Transportation Security Administration baggage screener who left a note saying “Get your freak on girl” inside a woman’s suitcase that contained a sex toy will be fired, the agency said Friday.

The unidentified screener at Newark Liberty International Airport wrote the message on the back of a Notice of Inspection slip that TSA places in bags that require a physical search.

Jill Filipovic, a Manhattan blogger and lawyer, discovered the personal message when she unpacked her bags after arriving in Ireland on Sunday.

She tweeted a photo of the slip and blogged about it Monday: “Total violation of privacy, wildly inappropriate and clearly not ok, but I also just died laughing in my hotel room.”

TSA responded Thursday in a message posted on the agency’s blog:

“TSA has completed its investigation of this matter, and has initiated action to remove the individual from federal service.”

“Like all federal employees,” the agency added, “this Transportation Security Officer is entitled to due process and the protections embodied in the Privacy Act. Pending the completion of the removal action, the employee will not perform any screening duties.”

That’s official federal lingo for: The worker will be fired.

Filipovic, who didn’t respond to an email Friday, later wrote on her blog, Feministe, about the impact: “Lesson learned: Don’t tweet anything you don’t want to appear on The View,” a reference to the television talk show that was one of many places her story was told.

She wrote Wednesday that she feared she always would be known for the tale and that she wanted the story to fade away. She also wrote that she didn’t want the worker fired as a scapegoat.

“The problem with the note,” Filipovic wrote, “is that it’s representative of the bigger privacy intrusions that the U.S. government, through the TSA and other sources, levels every day.”

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Live Q&A TONIGHT

Still defiant?Fugitive Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi has reappeared in what could be his sixth audio message since rebel forces overtook the capital.

Once again, Gaddafi sounded defiant and contradicted the statements of rebels and officials in his message, this time insisting he had not fled to Niger. And once again, the physical Gaddafi was nowhere to be seen — he hasn’t been in months — and no media organization was able to say they had verified the message, instead using words such as “purportedly,” “unverified” and “believed to be” to describe the recording.

In large part, that’s because of the messenger. Thursday’s five-minute long audio was aired on Syrian-based Al Rai TV, and past audio messages have been aired on its sister al-Ourouba channel, both owned by a controversial Iraqi who is believed to be a Gaddafi supporter. Mishan Jabouri launched his TV career by airing videos of U.S. soldiers being blown up and has recently become “Gaddafi’s last remaining mouthpiece,” the Atlantic Wire reports.

Instead of verifying the messages themselves, reporters have noted that the “voice and rhetoric strongly resembled Gaddafi,” that he was referring to himself in the third person, that the “style strongly resembled Gaddafi, who has used the TV channel in the past.”

But is that enough to go on?

In Thursday’s message, Gaddafi said that loyalist forces “are ready to start the fight in Tripoli and everywhere else, and rise up against them,” referring to the rebels. That promise had been made in earlier messages, and yet loyalist attempts to fight back in recent days have been weak.

“Gaddafi won’t leave the land of his ancestors,” the message also said. While rebel forces also believe Gaddafi has not left Libya, reports earlier this week suggest the strongman could be in Niger or Burkina Faso, or headed there. Dozens of other locales have been suggested as his hiding place.

The lesson, it seems, is that these audio recordings are “unverified,” and until Gaddafi is seen in the flesh, should be taken as such.

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