Old Saybrook — It’s not about the lobster, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Thursday.

A complaint from a local fish market owner about a Transportation Security Administration officer’s handling of a 15-pound crustacean she sold was illustrative of a larger issue, Blumenthal said: the privacy that airline passengers should expect when they check their belongings at the gate.

“It may seem less than monumentally important,” he said. “But before (the TSA) shares photographs of packaged contents with the world, it ought to ask permission from the owner.”

Blumenthal stopped at Atlantic Seafood in Old Saybrook on Thursday and spoke to reporters with Lisa Feinman, the store owner, who inspired him to take on the TSA over the agency's social media policies.

Feinman inadvertently became an advocate for passenger privacy last week when she vented about a photo that TSA spokesman Michael McCarthy posted on his Twitter account of a lobster she had imported from Nova Scotia and sold to a man visiting Connecticut.

The lobster was at the bottom of a cooler holding about a dozen live lobsters caught in Nova Scotia that Feinman sold to a customer, she said. The cooler set off an alarm at Boston Logan International Airport and TSA agents opened it to check for dangerous materials, a TSA spokesperson said last week.

McCarthy posted the photo of a TSA agent holding up the lobster to show that “officers are skilled at screening all sorts of items in checked baggage,” he wrote in the tweet.

Now Blumenthal is asking the TSA to revise its policies to require that TSA officials ask passengers’ permission before they post photos of their items online, he said Thursday.

“They not only unpacked the lobster, but then they posed with it and shared their amusement and curiosity with the world,” he said. “But they never asked permission from the person who owned that lobster.”

In response to a reporter's question, in this specific case Blumenthal said TSA officials should have asked both the actual owner — who told the Boston Globe he was “ticked off” that his lobster was mishandled — and Feinman before they photographed and posted a picture of the animal.

McCarthy said Thursday that TSA officials are discussing Feinman's concerns with her and Blumenthal's staff.

"TSA shares images through social media to better inform the traveling public about TSA's mission with behind the scenes look at operations around the country, but our posts never reveal passengers' identities or include inappropriate content," he said.

“We share images through social media daily to provide helpful travel tips and to better inform the traveling public about TSA's mission,” Lisa Farbstein, TSA’s acting director of media relations and press secretary, said in an email last week.

Feinman doesn’t buy it, she said Thursday.

“If there was anything educational about it, it was how not to hold a lobster,” she said, adding that she didn’t think posting photos of any personal items — crustacean or not — is appropriate without permission.

“Maybe you’re into leopard print underwear,” she said. “It could have been anything.”

Blumenthal’s stop in Old Saybrook was one of several events he attended in Connecticut during Congress’ Fourth of July holiday recess. After a memorial service in Watertown for U.S. Navy Sailor Ngoc T. Truong Huynh, one of seven sailors who died when their destroyer collided with a container ship off Japan in June, Blumenthal planned to hold a public meeting in West Hartford on Thursday to discuss Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

He also plans to visit a health care center and a Planned Parenthood clinic Friday.

“What I’m hearing is that Connecticut health care is at serious risk because of this grotesquely cruel and costly measure,” he said Thursday. People at a previous public meeting on the bill told him the bill, which would cut Medicaid spending and erase tax increases on high-earners and medical companies, is “not a health care plan, it’s a wealth care plan.”

m.shanahan@theday.com