It’s a ritual we’ve all no doubt been through at some point in the last two decades: Standing in the line for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screening at the airport, you realize as you step up to the conveyor belts that you either still have a drink in your hand, or a bottle of water stowed in your luggage, and you must now begin the oddly specific humiliation of chugging your water or searching for a receptable to ditch your contraband so you don’t have to face down the accusing eyes of an agent in a blue sweater vest. For 20 years, this has been happening to the harried traveler, not just in the United States but worldwide, as part of a wide-ranging suite of anti-terrorism initiatives and screenings implemented in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the 25th anniversary of which is today. This week, however, also brings rather unexpected news given the looming, portentous anniversary: The former head of the TSA told The New York Times that the agency was considering an elimination of the longstanding rules around bringing liquids through airport screenings … but only for flyers who are already paying the government for TSA PreCheck.
TSA PreCheck members may soon be able to bring larger bottles of water through security at select airports, in a major shift to longstanding rules.
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 10:13 PM · Sep 10, 2026
Apparently, two decades of privacy invasion–and more importantly, the development of even more finely tuned, dystopian scanning technology–have ameliorated some of the risk of allowing “trusted travelers” to bring a bottle of water onto an airplane. John Pistole, the former head of the TSA, told NYT that the change had been long debated within TSA, but was unlikely to be implemented before the high-volume holiday season, presumably beginning with a trial run in specific airports. In similar fashion, the TSA just last week began piloting a program that allows PreCheck members who don’t have tickets for a flight to pass through security in order to accompany someone else who is flying to their gate, or meet arriving family and friends. Gone too in most places it the requirement that one must remove their shoes for scanning. In its official statement, meanwhile, the agency doesn’t confirm or deny that it is preparing to finally loosen the rules around liquids in scanned luggage.
“TSA will continue to explore opportunities to enhance security and improve the traveling experience for the public,” said the official statement. “As technology evolves, TSA’s multilayered security protocols will evolve, including benefits for our most trusted travelers.”
It is perhaps easy to forget that the current TSA rules on bringing liquids through security–known as the “3-1-1” rule because it allows containers of no more than 3.4 oz, in a single clear, quart-sized bag per person–did not begin immediately following the 9-11 attacks and the fall of the Twin Towers. Rather, it was a direct response to a foiled plot five years later in 2006, in which British Metropolitan Police using surveillance systems claimed to have disrupted a terrorist plot to destroy transnational airline flights through the creation of liquid explosives. In the cited plan, members of terrorist cells would board planes with bottles of seemingly inert liquid in their luggage, and then combine those chemicals on board the flight to create an explosive for suicide bombings. Of the 24 men arrested as part of the plot, only nine were ultimately accused of crimes and tried, with seven found guilty of conspiracy charges. The rest of the world chose 100 ml (which equates to about 3.4 fluid ounces) as a maximum size for carried liquids, under the rationale that this would make the creation of a similar explosive plot more difficult.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the subsequent lack of successful terrorist plots actually involving aircraft in the next two decades has inspired a level of derision in the public, and a persistent question of how effective the TSA would ever actually be in dissuading such a scenario that wasn’t already uncovered by police or intelligence/anti-terrorism operatives plugged into our hyperactive surveillance state. The agency has subsequently become something of a cultural punching bag, often parodied in segments like this classic Key & Peele sketch, in which a cave full of would-be terrorists cower in fear of the “elite force of anti-terrorist commandos,” while bemoaning that “the cunning and mighty TSA is always one step ahead of us!”
If you’re willing to take one big swig out of your water bottle at TSA, they should let you bring the rest of it on the plane.
— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman.bsky.social) 12:57 PM · May 3, 2024
For the average traveler, however, the TSA of the last 25 years has perhaps been less likely to function as a punchline, and more likely as a source of rage or feelings of persecution. The march of technology has steadily given agents in airport security more and more power to demean or objectify the people attempting to pass through the checkpoints where they wield outsized power. The advent of full body scanners with millimeter-wave technology in the 2010s provided graphic outlines of passengers’ bodies, leading to accusations that the agency was engaging in “virtual strip searches,” and forcing the organization to update its software to give agents less of a peep show. The increasing sophistication of this technology dovetailed with increased surveillance in public, with expanded biometric and facial recognition scanning becoming a standard part of the process, raising obvious privacy and civil liberty concerns and the potential for surveillance misuse, exactly as we’ve seen with tech such as Flock cameras misused by police. And even on an individual, human level, the TSA has managed to profile just as aggressively and unfairly via initiatives like the “Quiet Skies” domestic surveillance program, in which armed, undercover Federal Air Marshals were inserted onto flights and tracked individual passengers with no criminal history, simply because those passengers displayed such suspicious signs as “excessive fidgeting” or “used the bathroom a few times.”
avoiding tsa tossing my water bottle by firing up a bunsen burner in the security lineup and converting it to steam
— Frances Meh (@francesmeh.reviews) 10:13 AM · Jun 30, 2026
Still, any of those things is still probably better than getting actively groped by a TSA agent during a security screening, a reality that also became a persistent part of the TSA narrative in the last decade. In perhaps the most publicized and infamous incident, two TSA officers at the Denver International Airport in 2015 were found to have intentionally colluded on a scheme to manually enter alerts on the scanner, allowing them to perform groin pat-downs and fondling on selected passengers passing through. And in another, even more disturbing incident at LAX in 2019, a male TSA officer instructed a female passenger to leave the main security area for a follow-up “inspection,” only to then tell her to remove her clothes so he could inspect her body. That agent was thankfully prosecuted and convicted of felony false imprisonment.
So yeah, as nice as I’m sure it would no doubt be for TSA PreCheck members already paying the government $85 for the privilege of being a Known Traveler to be able to bring an actual water bottle through security–a process that may still take years to implement–I would say the rank and file traveler still probably has bigger questions about the TSA than the ongoing inconvenience to their drink supply. I don’t suppose there are plans to return any other form of human dignity to travelers in the near future? Or am I being unreasonable, and I should really be happy about that water bottle?
