While the TSA continues to blindside itself by overlooking enormous vulnerabilities in airport and aviation security, and while it seeks to expand its role to stopping ordinary cars driving on ordinary highways for random searches (goodbye, Fourth Amendment rights), it hasn’t lost sight of its prime mission : The ludicrous hassling of ordinary Americans wishing to fly; people who are 100% obviously not any threat of any sort at all.
Look at these appalling examples of the TSA totally out of control and abusing US citizens with no underlying reason at all :
- TSA screeners allege a grandmother passed a handgun to a 4 yr old girl during an airport hug – details here
- TSA screeners detain and pat down 7 yr old girl with cerebral palsy causing her to miss her flight – details here
- TSA screeners repeatedly intimately search Congressman Canseco (R-TX) – details here
- TSA screeners pat down 95 yr old, force him to give up $300 which goes missing – details here
What is the point of obsessing over and terrifying a four year old when their own staff remain free to steal from or hide things inside passenger suitcases?
Although the TSA has repeatedly stated it will ‘modify’ its search procedures for the very young (and more recently for the very old, too) why is it harassing four and seven year olds, and also 85 and 95 year olds?
Is it really necessary to inflict intimate body searches on US Congressmen?
The TSA say they have a zero tolerance approach to allegations against their staff (in this article); where is that policy when it comes to a 95 year old vet saying the TSA screeners stole $300 from him?
The TSA say they might need to cut their airport staff by 41% next year due to claimed budget cuts (but in reality due to them preferring to expand their mission into harassing ordinary motorists and other new extensions of their self-claimed powers). This seems like a bad thing, but if it means they no longer have the time to harass travelers that no sane person would ever dream of viewing as potential terrorists, perhaps it is a good thing to see their airport staff cut back.
It is hard to think of five people more unlikely to be terrorists than the people in these four articles. Yes, we should have security, but this is not security. This is capricious subjugation and – to use a term applied elsewhere, it is nothing other than state sponsored terrorism – but it is sponsored by our state, and it is us who are being terrorized.
We are not made safer by such acts, we are simply made less free, and the misallocation of resources to terrorize innocent children and harmless retirees means that greater vulnerabilities are going unprotected.
Q: Is it really necessary to inflict intimate body searches on US Congressmen?
A: Only if they have a “wide stance”.