And yet every single day the TSA is searching Americans and confiscating some of their belongings. They have no warrants, and a "general warrant" is completely prohibited by the 4th amendment. The government, theoretically, cannot write a warrant that says "seach everyone" or that the persons to be searched are "the usual suspects". More importantly the constitution also requires that the warrant describes the "things to be seized".

hmmmm....

Interesting that one of the first efforts to soften the 4th amendment was due to that great destroyer of society, the automobile. The idea is that since a car could leave the jurisdiction the warrant was written in, the supreme court (Carroll v United States) decided that a warrant would be a burden, but the court did warn that the government couldn't just run around stopping anyone on a whim. Since then there has been plenty of back and forth as to when the police get to stop and search a car, with the trend that the constraints on them doing so are looser than in the past.

Seems like it would have been more reasonable to establish federal law to support those warrants and fix the problem, after all it's easy to describe the vehicle to be searched, the problem was really a jurisdictional issue.

The supreme court ruled as recently as 1990 that drunk driving checkpoints were legal (Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz)

The idea that you stop hundreds of innocent people to catch few guilty ones seemed to please the court's idea of giving up freedom for security, the idea being that drunk

driving poses a substantial hazard, which it does. The burden tha innocent you would be stopped and checked was considered minor.

Expediency often times seem to be the cause of getting started on that infamous slippery slope. It seems to me that this is precisely the rationale for the operation of the TSA.

The TSA was created in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to strengthen the security of the nation's transportation systems. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act, passed by the

107th Congress on November 19, 2001,...

The Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA), S. 1447, was sponsored by Sen Ernest Hollings (D-SC). It was introduced Sep 21 2001 and by Nov 19 2001 had been signed into law by George W Bush. Congress has always been able to act speedily when the goal was to curtail the rights of Americans, see also, for example, the Patriot

Act. ATSA passed both House and Senate with ridiculously lopsided votes. We're not so great at strategy, but excellent at overreaction, a generally human trait I think.

The famoust no-fly list was provided by the following verbage:

``(A) to use information from government agencies to

identify individuals on passenger lists who may be a threat

to civil aviation or national security; and

``(B) if such an individual is identified, notify appro-

priate law enforcement agencies, prevent the individual

from boarding an aircraft, or take other appropriate action

with respect to that individual; and

Not really sure how it is that they get to keep the list private or to require you to take them to court to get your name off the list but I suspect that it's due to the fact that the act didn't say that they couldn't. Remember it's always better to grab power and force others to take it away from you than to not exercise it in the first place.

The act also requires

``(4) AIRPORT PERIMETER SCREENING.--The Under

Secretary--

``(A) shall require, as soon as practicable after the

date of enactment of this subsection, screening or inspection

of all individuals, goods, property, vehicles, and other equip-

ment before entry into a secured area of an airport in

the United States described in section 44903(c);

``(B) shall prescribe specific requirements for such

screening and inspection that will assure at least the same

level of protection as will result from screening of pas-

sengers and their baggage;



Congress immediately put in writing provisions which would run counter to the very spirit of the 4th amendment, and instructed the TSA to implement such a policy.

Not satisfied with searching your possesions, making you take off belts, shoes, as a result of being given a blank slate by congress to search people, the TSA went for pornoscan:

From the TSAs very own web page

Since imaging technology has been deployed at airports, over 99 percent of passengers choose to be screened by this technology over alternative screening procedures.

So people prefer being x-rayed to being felt-up by a stranger. I'm stunned.

The body scanners use x-rays

You are now given a false choice, and the result of that choice is increased radiation exposure for you. Make no mistake about it, increased radiation exposure is an unnecessary risk. x-rays are firmly in the territory of ionizing radiation. The other scanner type employed by the TSA is a mm-Wave scanner which employs extremely high frequency radio waves (such that the wavelength is a few mm). This is still the same unreasonable search, but it's potentially less harmful in the long run to travellers.

Naturally these pictures will not be available, unless, of course, they are.

The TSA has not been caught releasing pictures, not yet anyway, and I'm certain they won't be saving their favorite pics on a memory stick. However watching a bureacracy grow to protect itself and expand it's reach is never pretty. This is true of any bureacracy, not just the TSA. Shouldn't be long before the pictures end up where they shouldn't. Interestingly, such a PR disaster might wake people up, but the fact they are being scanned in the first place, and being scanned with X-rays, does not seem to be creating any such initiative for the time being.

You can "refuse" to be photographed with x-rays, but then your friendly neighborhood TSA agent gets to

frisk you. They're just following orders.

Make no mistake about it, the TSA has this authority as a result of laws passed by congress and the president. The president, thinks the other alternative would be for you to travel by rail:

"Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail, which could allow you go places in half the time it takes to travel by car," Obama said. "For some trips, it will be faster than flying – without the pat-down."



Of course it shouldn't be long before security theater moves to rail, so the president is being optimistic about both the lack of pat downs on rail travelers as well as whether or not the rail will be built. They haven't started yet because, of course, a bomb going off on a train won't kill anybody. oh wait... Regardless don't bet against enhanced security techniques coming to a railway station near you. The powers that be will do anything to keep you safe, except provide medical care. Oddly the constitution, liberty loving Republicans, are no where to be found. Possibly due to the realization that having somebody like the TSA means having somebody to blame when things go wrong.

Strangely there has been little legal activity in terms of challenging the constitutionality of this concept of allowing general searches of the general population. I guess that's because you don't have to fly. It's perfectely reasonable to drive from Santa Clara to Cleveland to visit your relatives at Thanksgiving so that you can avoid TSA pat downs.

Eric Holder's justice department has decided that listening to the public is :

Forcing the government to accept and respond to public input would thwart its ability to respond to “ever-evolving threats,” Justice Department lawyer Beth Brinkmann told the judges.

Thanks to EPIC, a lawsuit has been

filed against the TSA.

EPIC has filed a lawsuit to suspend the deployment of body scanners at

US airports, pending an independent review. On January 6, 2011, EPIC filed its reply brief, stressing its core assertion that "the TSA has acted outside of its regulatory authority and with profound disregard for the statutory and constitutional rights of air travelers." EPIC asserts that the federal agency's controversial program violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, and the Fourth Amendment. The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument in the case on March 10, 2011.



The TSA was founded in fear, and it's fear that keeps it in place, and perhaps a healthy dose of corruption, and so it may be with us for a long time. People fear their miniscule chance of falling victim to a Hollywood terrorist plot, and politicians fear taking the blame.

Fear has always been an effective instrument of enacting policy - reptilian part of your brain and all that. You must not fear.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

from Dune by Frank Herbert

Since we're all very concerned abouth the deficit, it's time to look at what this security is costing us. First, some statistics regarding the number of Americans who died in 2001

direct casualties of 9/11 2977

unintentional injury 101,537

* Motor Vehicle Traffic Accidents (41% of all accidents)

* Poisoning (16% of all accidents)

* Fall (15% of all accidents)

pneumonia and influenza 62,034

The point of these statistics is not to diminish the murder of US citizens on 9/11. It's to point out that we are now spending 8.1 billion dollars a year and giving up privacy to prevent a another tragedy that could potentially have been prevented by locked, reinforced doors. Aircraft now have locked, reinforced doors.

You do not fear that someone is going to come and push you off your ladder, but really, you should fear that you may fall from it and break your neck. Mostly people don't, which is precisely why they die from falls, but they are still more afraid of the terrorists.

Meanwhile spending the 8.1 billion on public health would almost certainly save thousands of lives per year, but the talk of the town is now to cut medicaid, but not the TSA. Humorously the Republicans now despise the TSA since the employees are trying to unionize, but they probably don't want to cut their budget, other than by lowering the employees salary. Seems predictable that we'll be facing a move to "privatize" the security at airports.

The horror of 9/11 provided the never ending reason for more security and continued encroachment on the right to be secure in our ourselves and our possessions. More disturbing is the reality that the government is simply extending the lessons learned, that people will tolerate it, to implement the same strategy for the war on drugs. National Security Letters being a famous example of having far more use against drugs than terrorists. The purpose of endless war is endless war.

Security is essential, we have and desire a police force don't we ? The problem has always been the tension between security and liberty. As many have written about and explained at length, blanket security policies aren't effective and are maximally infringing. The TSA has

absolutely no reason to search me at the airport. The sad explanation that they don't know if an little old lady in a wheelchair just might be a terrorist is precisely the problem. The 8.1 billion TSA budget would be far more effective if spent on intelligence and law enforcement activities rather than x-raying my mother.

Do we have the power to change policy and re-assert the balance ? Not when our elected officials belittle and ignore our opinions and make jokes about pat downs. Not as long as they know that security theatre makes them look as if they are doing something. And really, if we can't, or won't, stop our own government from killing many Afghan and Iraqi civilans to keep us safe, why would get upset over a trivial thing like being searched and scanned ?

I haven't flown in several years and avoid it as much as possible. The next time I decide to fly I will simply, like most Americans, become part of the problem, because I'll tolerate it. One thing's for sure, if nobody showed up at the airports tomorrow, the conversation would shift radically. "They" do it because they can - we've being trained to put up with it.

Happy 4th of July.

