It's eight months now since the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) abandoned its last pretence of respect for America's constitutional principles, by mandating no traveller may fly in American airspace unless TSA agents first see and/or feel said traveller's genitalia. That's not hyperbole, just a straightforward description of American law playing out in airports every day. And given America's vast size, lack of mass transit and Americans' generally short vacations from work, flying is often the only feasible way US citizens can travel from points A to B. Yet our government has decreed every such flyer submit to search procedures previously associated with playground-haunting paedophiles and prison rapists.

Eight months of apologists insisting mandatory frottage is acceptable in a free country, and it's unpatriotic and downright mean for people like me to criticise poor working-stiff TSA agents, who, after all, are merely following orders. (Though the agency apparently considers some of those orders "fringe benefits"; as I type this, the department of homeland security is hiring part-time TSA staff at Logan International Airport in Boston. The online advert calls for "transportation security officers" over the subheading "A CAREER WHERE X-RAY VISION AND FEDERAL BENEFITS COME STANDARD.")

All along, the TSA and its cowardly supporters insist my freedoms be curtailed to assuage their thumbsucking fears: "If you don't like it, don't fly!" Only now, they'll have to expand their craven mantra: "If you don't like it don't fly, don't take a train or trolley, don't ride a bus, don't board a boat or ferry, and don't drive your own car. In fact, don't go anywhere; just stay home and be thankful you live in a free country."

"Don't fly" isn't enough now that the TSA's officially moved beyond airports, and even beyond the need to invent warm, patriotic names for its behaviour: the bus-train-auto segments of America's transportation infrastructure are overseen and occasionally raided by the TSA's VIPR agents – the "visible intermodal prevention and response" programme. The creepy acronym is the only surprise; last December, I predicted the TSA would spread beyond airports, since homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano had already said she wanted searches of all American mass transit passengers.

And so it keeps getting worse. New complaints about the TSA's behaviour come to light every day: the latest outrage involves a dying 95-year-old flying home to spend her last days with family, when her adult diaper apparently got in the TSA agent's way. There's disagreement on whether the agent ordered the old lady to remove it, but a TSA spokesman definitely assured the flying public that "We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure."

That's almost identical to the TSA's response after the videotaped fondling of six-year-old Anna Drexel last April, which "followed proper current screening procedures." It always does, no matter what invasions of privacy or dignity TSA agents inflict. And the outrage of the American people doesn't register at all. No matter how assiduously the ACLU and various anti-TSA groups keep track of outrages, no matter how many actual elected officials criticise the behaviours of unelected TSA bureaucrats, Napolitano and her underlings pay no attention at all.

Indeed, the agency all but brags about how useless its policies actually are. Two weeks ago, the Statesman ran a story about the Texas State Surplus Store, which sells items confiscated from airport travellers. ("We say wilfully surrendered," according to one cashier.) The story has the poetic title "Where have all the snow globes gone?" because the store sells so many of them, all taken on the grounds that the liquid inside them might be explosive or poisonous or something. Despite that, I'd bet my rent money the globes are sold without being tested to ensure their contents aren't explosive or poisonous or anything.

The surplus store, like the VIPR programme, is no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention; in 2006, when the liquid-and-gel bans first came into effect, there were feel-good media stories explaining how the toiletries the TSA confiscated were being donated to local homeless shelters. Then, as now, there were two possibilities to explain the TSA's thoughts in such cases:

1. "I know this stuff I'm confiscating from innocent travellers is 100% harmless, which is why I have no qualms about distributing it to homeless people and Texas bargain hunters," or;



2. "This might be explosive enough to take down an entire airliner! Bwa, ha, ha. Now I can solve our homeless problem, and clean out some rednecks too."

I still haven't figured out which option demonstrates the most contempt from the TSA towards America's constitution and the American people.