There are many people who enjoy controlling or even abusing others and positions that give people power over others obviously attract those people - psychopathy prevalence in those groups is statistically higher than in general population. This is not as rare as you might think - if you work in a home for elderly with Alzheimer's disease (who are especially defenseless) I can almost guarantee that apart from caring hard-working employees you also encounter a psychopath (although nowadays this problem is relatively well known and the screening of potential employees is much better than it used to be).
Also I can imagine a number of rationalizations and psychological mechanisms that can explain how working for this kind of organization affects people - the Stanford Prison Experiment etc.
>Also I can imagine a number of rationalizations and psychological mechanisms that can explain how working for this kind of organization affects people - the Stanford Prison Experiment etc.
I up-voted your comment, that comic strip is spot on, but I was trying to express my feelings more than stating some general statement about human nature.
I remember that when I was reading Zimbardo's book I was most touched when he was describing how he himself was under the influence of the experiment and his empathy to "subjects" deteriorated. Only after his girlfriend expressed her concerns he realized that something went horribly wrong. We are influenced by the context, behaviour of others, interpretation of the situation etc. way more than we would like to believe and I can easily imagine that if I were one of those TSA agents I could behave in a way that I now find despicable. That's why I think we really need to be aware of those things despite the fact that they might not be conclusively proven as a 'part of human nature'.
EDIT: also let me mention another IMO super-interesting book about this subject: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm. One of the best books I've ever red.
They appear more vigilant to their managers and overseers, for one. If every single traveler is simply ushered through, it could look like they're being lazy (not necessarily efficient). And there is a clear bureaucratic incentive to meeting a quota of passengers who will get extra scrutiny. Without marking at least some minimal number of passengers for increased scrutiny, the TSA interrogators, FBI stand-by, etc would have nothing to do and no opportunity to gain real-world "practice" applying their job training and skills.
What does the TSA agent get out of needlessly fucking with some random person?