Well can't do much to fight security when you have a flight to catch but were all the lithium batts for laptops and cameras also taken from passengers? I fly a bunch and always carry a cork screw on my carry-on, never had a problem except last May from LAX to NRT, a young TSA girl told me I will have to throw it away, had time so asked for a supervisor and he said it was OK. Now if I was rushing for the flight I would have had no choice but to throw it away.
No, they didn't confiscate any other batteries. Not even the ones for my laptop. They told me no battery could be outside the item it powers. I tried to put two of the extra batteries in my camera flash in the attempt to save them but they were just a tad to round to fit in the hole. I didn't want to pull my prodigy out to show them for fear they would take that as well. I don't speak Spanish so there wasn't much I could do in terms of debating them. I wasn't in a rush for my flight. they had a table set up right before you could enter the waiting area. I had an hour before the flight even boarded.
It is traveling to a country where I don't speak the language that worries me. I am going to Latin America again soon and I am about to buy a provari and sell my prodigy and lavatube. Worried because of the circuitry in there they might freak out at a foreign xray and try and make me throw my 250$ ecig away and I will not be able to argue with them. Considering keeping my Lavatube until the trip and taking that, if I have to throw it away it is only a 40$ tube to replace vs a 200$+ one.