Ron Paul Responds to TSA: Introduces 'American Traveler Dignity Act'

I don't make fun of people because they look like they work at Wal-Mart. I make fun of them because they look like they shop at Wal-Mart.

 

I'm sure this isn't the case that establishes the concept, but here is a case that recognizes that airports are secure areas: United States v. Aukai. Right in the first paragraph, so there isn't even a lot of reading required to find it, the 9th circuit finds that the TSA "conducts airport screening searches of all passengers entering the secured area of the airport." (emphasis mine) Further, the court states, "We have previously held such airport screening searches are constitutionally reasonable administrative searches.   Today we clarify that the reasonableness of such searches does not depend, in whole or in part, upon the consent of the passenger being searched." A little bit deeper in the opinion we get this gem: "However, where the risk to public safety is substantial and real, blanket suspicionless searches calibrated to the risk may rank as ‘reasonable’-for example, searches now routine at airports and at entrances to courts and other official buildings.” (internal quotes omitted).

 

was this the first time you ever saw this word on the Internet to describe a slack jawed yokel who hasn't flown in 5 years?

well played

 

He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.- Benjamin Franklin

 

ProPublica has a great piece up detailing how the x-ray scanners made it into the airports. Lobbying, fear-mongering, and political interests overrode safety, effectiveness, and your civil liberties.

From slashdot:

 

if he did this inside an airport it would be totally legal.

http://www.wjla.com/articles/2011/11/harold-rodman-tsa-worker-arrested-for-sexual-assault-69420.html

Harold Rodman, TSA worker, arrested for sexual assault

A Transportation Security Administration employee is accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Manassas.

The suspect, Harold Glen Rodman, 52, allegedly was wearing his uniform and displayed a badge to the victim, a 37-year-old woman.

Police arrested Rodman on Nov. 20. He is charged with aggravated sexual battery, object sexual penetration, forcible sodomy and
abduction with intent to defile.

A TSA spokesperson confirmed that Rodman works for the agency but wouldn’t say in what capacity or where.

PHOTOS: A rundown on the region's arrested and incarcerated

Police said the victim reported that she and a friend were in the 10500 block of Winfield Loop in Manassas when the suspect approached them. The suspect flashed a badge and sexually assaulted the victim before fleeing on foot, police said.

Police responded and canvassed the area when Rodman stepped out of his residence. He matched the description given by the victim and was taken into custody, police said.

Those who live in the community says they were shocked to learn that a neighbor was facing sexual assault charges.

“He seems like a normal guy. I’m really shocked,” says one neighbor.

 

Are we still in search of our dignity? I doubt that we will find it here.

 

yep, just like how it happens in the airports. legally.

 

TSA defends confiscation of a cupcake...

 

An icing bomb. Now that'll be the day.

 

my friend flew over the weekend, refused the naked body scan and the TSA lady rubbed her vagina 4 separate times.

 

more TSA inappropriateness...

$8 billion a year for an agency full of incompetent morons, thieves and perverts.

 

The threat of terrorism has radically diminished. So why is Obama trying to expand the TSA’s reach?

Hassling the innocent is TSA's specialty
By: Gene Healy | 01/29/12 8:05 PM

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2012/01/hassling-innocent-tsas-specialty/2151061


"Rand Paul has got to be on the 'Top 10 People TSA Would Be Smart to Leave Alone' list," National Review's Jonah Goldberg tweeted when news broke of the senator's run-in with the Transportation Security Administration at Nashville International Airport last week.

Kentucky's junior senator missed his flight when he refused a pat-down after a body scanner showed an "anomaly" on his knee.

Someone with a conspiratorial mind-set might suspect a little payback for the grilling Paul gave TSA Administrator John Pistole last summer over the agency's policy of giving the "freedom fondle" to innocent 6-year-old girls. But that assumes the TSA has enough on the ball to carry out even a minor conspiracy.

What Paul experienced was just the routine, pointless indignity that is the agency's stock in trade. While the terrorist threat has diminished radically, the Obama administration is busy expanding the agency's reach onto highways, sporting events and train stations.

Much has been made of the bizarre martial metaphors President Obama employed in his State of the Union last week, where he urged Americans to adopt the spirit of "unit cohesion" animating SEAL Team 6: "All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves."

Yes, why can't America function as a highly trained military unit that obeys Obama's every command without questioning it?

What made the martial rhetoric even odder was that Obama's speech began with an admission that the country is, in fact, quite safe: "For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. Most of al Qaeda's top lieutenants have been defeated."

The safety we enjoy owes very little to TSA's competence and a great deal to our adversary's incompetence. Terrorism expert and Cato Institute senior fellow John Mueller notes "the rather impressive inability of the terrorists [in post-9/11 cases] to create and set off a bomb."

Indeed, "the only method by which Islamic terrorists have managed to kill anyone at all in the United States since 9/11 has been through the firing of guns -- in the Little Rock and Fort Hood cases."

Even as the threat recedes, Obama's Department of Homeland Security -- of which TSA is a part -- is expanding the use of paramilitary checkpoints at home. In Leesburg, Fla., earlier this month, federal agents armed with semiautomatic weapons checked IDs in a training exercise at a local Social Security Administration office.

TSA VIPR teams -- for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response -- conducted over 9,300 random searches in 2011, on cruise ships, at NASCAR races, on buses, and at train stations.

The Los Angeles Times described one such search at the Charlotte, N.C, Amtrak station in January, in which "three federal air marshals in bulletproof vests and two officers trained to spot suspicious behavior watched closely as Seiko, a German shepherd, nosed [a fiftysomething lawyer's] trousers for chemical traces of a bomb."

"TSA officials say they have no proof that the roving [VIPR] teams have foiled any terrorist plots or thwarted any major threat to public safety," the L.A. Times noted. Still, TSA wants funding for a dozen more VIPR teams.

Contemplating "mission creep" in Obama's TSA suggests a different martial metaphor than those employed by our newly militaristic president last Tuesday. In his book "Wartime," Paul Fussell, a veteran of the Pacific theater in World War II, devotes a whole chapter to "petty harassment" by those in power -- which soldiers summed up with a salty term: "chickens--t."

"Frequent, unnecessary inspections," "insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances" -- it "can be recognized instantly," Fussell writes, because it never has anything to do with winning the war."

 

WHere do all these Ron Paul people travel to by plane? Not exactly jetsetters in my experience.

 

Even if that weak attempt of an insult was true.... "TSA VIPR teams -- for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response -- conducted over 9,300 random searches in 2011, on cruise ships, at NASCAR races, on buses, and at train stations."

And Obama the Führer will keep expanding the reach further and further.

 

Train stations? Lol as if a paulista would be caught dead on publicly funded transit.

Maybe the V in Viper Team stands for "Van" since that is the Ron Paul supporter's typical mode of transport.

 

Van are great to run over dip**** bike-riding commie douchebags with.

 

Hightop posting in a rtsy thread.

Lol.

 

LOL - how do you plan on eluding the PoliceCops after you engage in hit&run?

Viper teams will blow up your stupid vans with predators.

Battleship = yours = sankadanked

 

Hightop did you see where Paul got 7% of the vote yesterday?

pretty good!