Tag: TSA

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment

TSA Abuse

TSA, Transportation Security Administration, civil liberty, privacy, airport security

Among the rights-​trampling bureaucracies, many and various, the Transportation Security Administration is far from the most beloved.

Millions of Americans, in the course of trying to catch flights, experience TSA agents up close and personal. 

Some of these official gropers are way too “handsy.”

One report comes to our attention from Charlotte Ann Kimbrough, former law enforcement officer. 

When she told TSA agents that she had had two metal hip replacements, she expected to be wanded. Instead, “The woman groped my crotch — twice. She went underneath my dress. I knew I had to be calm for the man I was traveling with.… But he could see the look on my face. He started yelling. They got the woman who was groping me out of the way and brought in a boss, who tried to stop the situation from escalating. I do have anger at myself, that I let her do it to to me.… I keep getting feelings of guilt.”

Some TSA workers may be uncomfortable with what they are “forced” to do to innocents. Others enjoy the power they have to humiliate people. Still others — whistleblowers — do speak out against abuses.

But they face retaliation from higher-​ups for doing so. All of these employees are subject to abuse by TSA bosses. 

A government report details alleged misconduct that includes sexual harassment, verbal abuse of employees, and obstructing investigations into misconduct. 

We should not be surprised. As Reason magazine puts it, “this isn’t an agency with a great track record when it comes to treating people well.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

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Categories
folly general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Political Theatrics

TSA

Our suspicions have been proved: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doesn’t secure much of anything; it is mere “security theater.”

After revelations that TSA screeners failed to find weapons and other deadly contraband in 96 percent of tests, David A. Graham, writing for The Atlantic, asked “what kind of theater this is.… A period drama, satirizing the 2000s? Vaudeville farce?”

Easy answer: the genre is “statism.”

Statism is the worship of government, or the reliance upon government to do many more than a few tasks. It is very old.

The ancient states arose from conquest, developing as a way to milk the masses for the benefit of the few. That’s what states traditionally do: use force to move wealth from one group to another.

Along the way, the states did do some good. Amidst all their horrors.

But mostly rulers just leveraged myth and bluster to cover crimes.

In more recent times, in this great country, the idea arose that the state should be limited to a few necessary jobs, tightly controlled by the people so that government might actually defend rights, not abridge them.

But this revolutionary democratic-​republican ideology did not alter the basic nature of reality, turning the sow’s purse of the conquerors’ art into the gold of the Public Interest.

Without our vigilance, government always reverts back to its roots.

The TSA is simply the latest myth-​and-​bluster-​backed scam aiding the ludicrous notion that government is all-​powerful … while providing only faux security. Get rid of it; let its people go. Then watch airlines come up with more effective, less intrusive, more passenger-​friendly security systems.

Want theater? Try “vigilance theater.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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TSA

 

Categories
too much government

TSA Follies Exposed

Jason Harrington is a former Transportation Security Administration agent who spent years doing stupid, degrading things to passengers because his superiors demanded it. He deserves credit for blogging about his experiences even before leaving TSA, and for eventually coming clean under a byline.

You can read Harrington’s lengthy account for Politico of how TSA agents routinely behave:

  • They target beautiful women for pat-downs.
  • They target passengers for “random” security checks not because they manifest themselves as security risks but merely for saying something that rubs them the wrong way.
  • They perform all kinds of often humiliating “security” measures that they know are pointless.

All this by routine.

When the multi-​million-​dollar, ineffectual body scanners were in regular use, agents laughed it up over bodily defects exposed by the scans that they review in a separate room. These scanners weren’t even good at detecting guns or plastic explosives. The problems with them were known even as they were being installed.

All history attests that when people are given petty power to abuse others as “part of the job,” they use that power (and virtually every ordinary use of power in such a context must also be an abuse of it). Employees who refrain are, obviously, “not doing their jobs,” and get fired. So who’s left?

Those who enjoy that sort of thing, or at least assent to it.

So let’s not give anybody this kind of power. We can start by shutting down the TSA.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability general freedom national politics & policies

Against Regimentation

On Monday, Senator Rand Paul got caught in a contretemps with the TSA. He was not in transit to or from his work in Congress, so he couldn’t enlist constitutional protection from being detained.

And detained he was.

Well, the TSA insists that he was not “at any point detained,” but what he says is this:

I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration … for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-​foot-​by-​10-​foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

Both Senator Paul and his father, Congressman Ron Paul, have criticized the TSA. They echo those 19th century classical liberals who had a word for the kind of treatment that modern security-​obsessed Rand Paul makes a statementgovernments inflict upon a (too willing) populace: “regimentation.” What’s more regimenting than being forced to wait in lines, holding shoes in hand, emptying the contents of pockets into institutional-​gray trays, submitting to a variety of scans and gropes?

There have got to be better ways of securing big ol’ jet airliners. Why not apply greater legal liability to airlines for safety, and let them figure out more customer-​friendly methods of keeping terrorists out of cockpits?

Any government security effort ought to focus on spotting and stopping terrorists … without sacrificing everyone’s freedom and dignity.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

Not Guilty as Charged

If software developer Phil Mocek is guilty of anything, it’s the conviction that he has a right to move about the country as if he were a free man. He’s guilty of defending his dignity. Guilty of believing he’s innocent.

That’s his crime, not “failing to obey an officer,” “concealing his identity,” “criminal trespass” or “disorderly conduct.” Fortunately, an Albuquerque jury has now found him innocent of these bogus charges.

During his trial, a TSA official and an Albuquerque police officer both testified, in Mocek’s words, that “you do not have to show ID in order to fly and that you can use cameras in public areas of the airport.” Yes, recording the unwarranted and outrageous harassment of him was proposed as proof of the man’s criminality. 

The normals among us, on the other hand, can only applaud Mocek’s nerve and presence of mind in standing up for himself.

Defense co-​counsel Molly Schmidt-​Nowara observes that TSA officials and police at the airport “became annoyed because he was filming.” But annoying the police or TSA officers is not in itself a crime.

Mocek says: “I wasn’t testing the system. I went in with a boarding pass. I had what I’m required to have to fly and by way of being a human I observed what happened.”

Has the tide started to turn against the noxious surveillance state and in favor of everyday freedom for human beings?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Perfect Safety?

Maybe the most interesting thing to come out, so far, from the “porno-scanner”/TSA-gropings controversy is this statement by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas: “You can’t provide perfect safety.”

Going on, Rep. Paul denied that it is “the government’s role … to provide safety.”

It isn’t; it’s to protect our rights. But here we’re being told that we go to the gate, we buy a ticket, and you’ve lost your right, you’ve sacrificed your right. Where did that come from? It’s about the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.

Rep. Paul has introduced legislation that would prohibit physical contact between TSA screeners and would-​be airline passengers, and would prohibit taking images of people’s bodies using X‑Rays, millimeter rays, etc..

Ron Paul sees all these new, invasive screening techniques as based on the idea that it is the government’s job to ensure airline invulnerability to terrorism, not the airlines’. He suggests putting the onus back on the airlines, who would likely be more respectful of their customers than the TSA is.

9/​11/​01 caught the airlines and the government with their pants down. Maybe the best solution to this security lapse isn’t to institute intrusions into our pants, or the kind of X‑Ray vision scanners that boys used to be enticed with in the back of comic books.

There must be better ways. 

Alas, government probably won’t find them. Which is why Ron Paul is on to something: It should be up to private enterprise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.