So this is just theft by the government in open daylight, right?
Pretty much theft and resale.
Recycling perfectly good pocket knives would be rather wasteful.
If they are allowed to sell them and profit from the sale then they have a perverse incentive to take more things.
Its like those tiny towns in rural USA who are funded by bullshit traffic violations on people driving through.
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.
- 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)
- You let them confiscate it
It's not like what they consider banned items on airplanes are a secret. They even have a Twitter https://twitter.com/tsa/status/862098615472455680 and facebook page https://www.facebook.com/AskTSA where you can ask if an item is ok to go through security!
I am genuinely curious as to what they should do better.
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.
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.
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:
https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/Stock-Images/Rights-Mana...
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
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.
As far as I know counterfeit goods seized by the border guards are destroyed.
> Pretty much theft and resale.
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.
[1] https://www.agefotostock.com/age/en/Stock-Images/Rights-Mana...