I’ve written about the TSA being a wasteful, stupid, and ineffective bureaucracy, and I’ve also shared some good anti-TSA humor (see the links in this post, which also contains an amazing visual).
Today, let’s focus on the wasteful and ineffective part. It seems that Keystone Cops of airport security have a new “pilot program” that is unpleasantly reminiscent of the old internal passport regime maintained by South Africa in the apartheid era.
Here is some of what one passenger wrote about his experience.
I came face-to-face with Big Brother the other day, and it was a frightening experience. He actually presented himself in the deceptive form of a young, attractive female officer, working for the Transportation Security Administration at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. At first she simply seemed chatty and friendly. She looked at my airline boarding pass and noted that I was coming from Denver. Then she mentioned that I was headed from Detroit to Grand Rapids. “That’s a pretty short flight,” she said. “Talk to my travel agent,” I grumbled. At that point she asked me what my business would be in Grand Rapids. “I’m headed home,” I replied. Then she wanted to know where home was. That’s when the mental alarms went off and I realized I was being interrogated by Big Brother in drag. I asked her why the federal government needed to know where I was going and what I would be doing. She explained that the questions were part of a new security “pilot program.” I then told her I am an American citizen, traveling within my own country, and I wasn’t breaking any laws. That’s all the federal government needed to know, and I wasn’t going to share any more. Not because I had anything to hide. It was because we live in a free country where innocent people are supposedly protected from unwarranted government intrusion and harassment.
Good for Mr. Gunn. Here’s more of his story.
At that point the agent yelled out, “We have another refusal.” One of my bags was seized and I was momentarily detained and given a hand-swab, which I believe was to test for residue from bomb-making materials. I passed the bomb test and was told I could move on, but I hung around a moment and told everyone within listening range what I thought about this terrifying experience. So, this is what we’ve come to. The federal government now has a need to know where citizens are going and what they are doing before they are allowed to peacefully pass. I’m starting to wonder what separates us from Russia or Cuba. …TSA officers, being the brilliant people they are, are given the responsibility of picking out airline passengers “whose facial expressions, body language or other behavior indicate a security risk.” They are then subjected to a “chat down,” where officers interrogate you and decide if you are indeed a terrorist.
I confess I’m not as brave as Mr. Gunn. I wouldn’t want to risk missing a flight because a peevish bureaucrat deliberately delayed me. But I fully agree with his conclusion.
This program is a bizarre and outlandish violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is supposed to protect us from “unreasonable search and seizure” by agents of the government, unless they have probable cause. I doubt any judge would have considered my droopy face as sufficient cause for harassment. I lived through 9/11 and I understand the need for tight security at airports. …The idea is to keep dangerous materials that could be used in a terrorist attack off commercial airliners. Fair enough. But stopping people because they look sort of funny to security agents, and probing into their personal business, is going too far. What’s next? Check lanes on city streets, where jackbooted thugs from Washington, D.C., will stop everyone every morning to ask them where they’re going and what they’re up to? And if our answers are not what the government wants to hear, perhaps we’ll be sent home and put under surveillance, to make sure we’re not involved in anything that Big Brother doesn’t approve of. Our freedom is severely compromised when government is allowed to do this sort of thing. We are supposed to be presumed innocent and able to come and go as we please, as long as we don’t break any laws or give authorities reason to believe we may have. The “chat down” program has been a failure, by the way, at least according to a recent editorial published in USA Today. TSA officials interviewed about 725,000 travelers at Logan International Airport in Boston over the course of one year, and none of them turned out to be terrorists. ..There is no justification for this type of unwarranted harassment in America. Even people who look a little different should be allowed to move about as they please, unless they give authorities a specific reason to stop them.
So what’s all this mean? What’s the answer. Simple. Put the private sector in charge, as Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz have argued. As Steve Chapman explains, there were lots of benefits to the pre-TSA system.
(h/t: J.D. Tuccille)
Sounds like the TSA was attempting a lame imitation of what Israeli Airport security officers do very well (because they go through proper training). At Ben Gurion airport in Tel-Aviv, travelling non-citizens go through a pointed questioning-security agents are well trained in recognizing liars, and phrase their questions so as to get these liars to contradict themselves within a few short minutes.
The private sector is entitled to do this all day long. The TSA is violating the Constitution every time they do this. The federal government also.
To privatize TSA is about as stupid of an idea as privatizing your local Police department or privatizing the US Military. There are agencies that need to be under the control of the government and especially those that are related to the safety of the general public, such as Police or the military. TSA is the line of defense for someone to get on a plane and use it again as a weapon. This is not something that we hand over to a pimpled 18 year old who is willing to work for $7.65/minimum wage, cutting corners because the owner of the privatized TSA wants to keep his million Dollar mansion.
We can, and should, change the way TSA performs and have to keep a close eye on our civil liberties. You should have done that when “W” enacted the Patriot Act, you should cry out to bring him to trial for the warcrimes he and Cheney committed. These are the true civil liberties we lost, where we can be bugged, interrogated at will, held prisoner indefinitely without being charged or due process and tortured.
What part of this program being illegal don’t Pistole and TSA understand? He and TSA think they can search passenger computers, phones and checkbooks when every other agency is required to have a search warrant in advance? This demonstrates that Pistole is unfit to head a dog pound, much less TSA.
There have been three TSA profiling scandals in this program in a year. The first was at Newark airport in June 2011 (AOL Travel – 6/15/11) and another that TSA covered up in Honolulu after employees there complained that BDO’s were deliberately harassing Latinos (Huffington Post – Jennifer Sinco Kelleher – 12/1/11). TSA excused itself finding no profiling (Fox News – 4/13/12) and even promoted one of those accused (KITV – Keoki Kerr – 12/2/11).
Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) called for TSA to suspend the program in November 2011 (Washington Post – Joe Davidson – 11/28/11) and now another incident identical to the one in Hawaii occurs in Boston.
How many incidents of flagrant illegal conduct does TSA have to commit before it is replaced? The agency has defied Congress and a court order to test the scanners (NY Daily News 8/12/12), they lied to Congress about owning $184 million of unused equipment stored in Dallas and caught trying to destroy it before GAO arrived (Bloomberg 5/9/12) and failed to report security breaches at Newark to conceal the failures from headquarters (CNN Aaron Cooper 5/15/12).
In the past two months 35 TSA workers fired or arrested and 66 more disciplined for misconduct. Two more were arrested in the past week for theft from passengers and assault with a handgun. A known pedophile, Thomas Harkins, was exposed two months ago but remains employed as a TSA Supervisor in Philadelphia (CBS 3 Philadelphia 5/24/12).
There were a total of 98 TSA workers arrested in the past 20 months including 12 arrested for child sex crimes, over 26 for theft, 12 for smuggling contraband through security and one for murder. This month two more screeners were indicted for drug smuggling through security.
TSA needs to be dismantled and replaced by an agency that understands airport security and the law.
The failure of elected officials to reform this agency permits these abuses to occur and ultimately puts the lives of passengers and crew at risk.
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This is what those who advocate the El Al approach to security have been asking for. An extremely intrusive probing by govt agents that sets off alarms if you don’t cooperate with the mental probing.
Is that really better than the physical indignities and meaningless security measures that have been prevalent over the last 10+ years? No. Indeed it’s just a further step toward the police state.