God bless Bob Burns. He’s the 12-year TSA agent who, last year, decided to create an Instagram account for the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA, as you know, is responsible for keeping all the guns, knives, bombs, rocket launchers, grenades, snakes, Samurai swords, cocaine, and so on and so forth from getting on planes. It does this through myriad security procedures, of cutest of which involve detection dogs.
Hmm, what to put on the Instagram page ….
And that, in short, is the Instagram’s MO: Incredibly insane weapons and other illegal whatnot, and dogs. It’s a thing of beauty:
Burns updates the page himself, the TSA’s one-man social media powerhouse, according to Wired. He gets reports from around 450 airports each week, and when he hears about something interesting, like a nine-blade circular knife, he asks for a photograph.
“I’ll ask for a photograph and a lot of times I’ll be surprised by what I see,” Bob tells Wired. “A lot of times I’m not even sure what the photo’s going to look like — the report might just say ‘a four-inch knife,’ but for all I know it could be a steak knife or it could be one of these fantasy Klingon knives.”
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The account also serves to educate people what is not allowed on planes — some seem to think novelty items (like that watch above) and inert explosives are OK, but they’re not. Of course they’re not. What are they thinking?
But before you can descend into a puddle of fear looking at the site, shaking your head over what goes on in airports, bam! Another adorable dog, who just happens to be saving lives. Good work, Bob.
Via Wired
Read about dogs in the news on Dogster:
