The investigation is tied to an incident on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Boeing also told a Senate panel that it cannot find a record of the work done on the Alaska plane.
While mostly true, the TSA was also a stealth jobs program for flunkies who couldn't get jobs anywhere else (and to help Bush pump his jobs numbers, which were abysmal). You kind of have to be a motivated fucking idiot to spend every day undermining the fourth amendment and acting like you're doing a service to society. Especially with all the evidence of TSA agents using their authority to just outright steal shit. They're not hiring the best, and everyone knows that they hire the worst of the worst for these jobs, so it's hard to even call it "theater" anymore when everyone sees right through it. Hypernormalization.