TSA: Time to Call "BS" on TSA's Illegal Activities

It's amazing what we subject ourselves to, with perfectly justifiable reasons, even when the ultimate result is illegal, embarrassing, and useless, all at once. TSA screening practices have evolved from odd to theatrical to downright offensive, with each evolution being justified as a reaction to some vague "threat," and this far the public has swallowed it. However, the latest iteration seems to have finally crossed a mental threshold with the public, and seems to finally be drawing attention to the entire sham that is our airport screening process.

The TSA has failed on three fronts. First, they have yet to demonstrate that their practices are actually legal. Second, they have never demonstrated that they are effective. And finally, the application of the rules is so laughable that if it were described to anyone not making TSA policy it would provoke howls of laughter.

The TSA fancies themselves a law enforcement organization. For the sake of discussion, let's pretend that they are, and compare their approach to law enforcement to the real police.
Following a series of violent attacks in a city, two agencies spring into action in search of the culprits and any copycats who would choose to reprise the crimes. We know that the culprits are white men, aged 30-50, who are bald and all at least six feet tall and usually wear a red hoodie sweatshirt, and following their attacks, they escape on foot.
The local police will begin by canvassing the areas where the crimes were committed, looking for witnesses, leads, tips, and forensics. Moreover, in their preventative mode, they may look for environmental patterns in the attacks - what time of day, what type of location, commercial or residential districts, etc - and try to focus on finding men who are operating within the pattern of the known suspects. They work in this fashion for several reasons: they know that in order to prosecute any crimes they have to gather evidence in a legal fashion and prove the guilt of the parties involved; they have to keep the public safe by preventing further crimes without infringing on the rights of the public; and they have very limited manpower with which to investigate, to they tend to focus rather quickly on the relevant details of the pattern.
The TSA, however, throws legitimate police work out the window. With full knowledge of the fact that the culprits - and most future suspects - are white men, aged 30-50, who are bald and all at least six feet tall and usually wearing a red hoodie sweatshirt, the TSA would instead focus their efforts on the means of transportation and set up random checkpoints throughout the city for anyone who wants to walk on the sidewalk. Want to move around by foot? Well, we've got intelligence that a group of ne'er-do-wells does, too, and we're going to keep you safe from them. How? By making you prove you're not one of them. Yep. Even when it's absolutely obvious to everyone except the TSA that you're a 17-year-old Asian teenage girl, you still have to prove to them that you have no 'dangerous' objects (the definition of which is arbitrary and ever-expanding) in order to walk on the sidewalks. Why? Because somewhere there's a 38-year-old bald white guy in a red hoodie who bears you ill will. And thus in an effort to show that we're some sort of egalitarian nation, we subject our 70-year-old grandmothers and our 4-year-old toddlers and our 26-year-old black men to an obscene level of scrutiny in the search for a our culprits who we know - we know - meet none of those criteria.

And thus we have an agency who completely turns 100 years of established legal practice on its head. The TSA does not treat you as innocent until proven guilty. They assume guilt until you can sufficiently demonstrate your innocence to them. Rather than start with a suspect pool of zero and add to it as they develop evidence (the standard practice for, well, pretty much any other US law enforcement agency), the TSA throws the entire flying populace, including the pilots and aircrew into the suspect pool, and then requires the suspects themselves to rule them out of the pool through a series of ever-intrusive physical inspections. Huh? When did we decide this is OK?

Moreover, the TSA has yet to demonstrate that any of their practices actually work. While they're busy patting down high school cheerleaders, Islamist terrorists are slipping bombs into toner cartridges they know are insufficiently screened because it's hard to screen cargo for the TV cameras and the TSA can't waste time on security measures that aren't in the public eye. Thanks to Richard Reid's shoe bomb, we now have passengers removing perfectly flat 1/8-inch thick bamboo flip-flops at airport checkpoints. Why? No really, TSA, why? Don't give me any half-hearted broadly-worded platitudes. Give me the serious, real, specific, and identifiable threat posed by flat 1/8-inch thick bamboo flip-flops.
The idiocy of their screening practices have been thoroughly documented by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. The ineffectiveness of it has been trumpeted for years by Bruce Schneier. And still we have yet to move away from a contraband-based security process to a behavior-based profiling process.

And thus we come to the third problem with the TSA: the absolute stupidity with which the 'rules' are applied. The TSA has clearly communicated to the American public that their threat assessment of a domestic lawsuit is much, much higher than the threat assessment of a terrorist attack. Fearing a crusading and headline-seeking legal fight more than a bomb exploding in mid-flight, the TSA attempts to apply their screening guidelines as 'fairly' as possible. They would rather be stupid and insulated from a lawsuit by someone who feels their 'rights' have been violated than be smart and effective and in court defending their practices. So with an eye not toward keeping America safe from terrorists, but keeping themselves safe from the ACLU, the TSA fondles and gropes and exposes and forces the disrobing or America.

Why? Why have we reached the point where it's acceptable to be sexually assaulted by someone in uniform under the guise of "security"? And if you don't believe it's sexual assault, here's a thought - next time you're in line at the bank, give the person in front of you a TSA-approved pat-down. Tell them you're concerned they might be harboring a weapon with which to rob the back. See how quickly the real police show up, and what charges are filed against you.
We're here for the same reason the TSA has created these procedures: cowardice. The TSA is afraid of crusading civil-rights lawyers. Politicians are afraid of re-election campaign ads being run by their opponents falsely claiming to have weakened America if they make any effort to rein in the TSA. And the American public is justifiably afraid of speaking up because of the likelihood of getting ejected from the airport.

The TSA has finally brought that to a head. This recent sexual molestation policy masquerading as security pat-downs has finally drawn a line in the sand where the American public has said "enough!" And we can hope that in rolling back this latest inanity from the TSA that we roll back the other stupidities as well: the arbitrary invasions of privacy without any probable cause, the refusal to appropriately target screens toward legitimate threats, the myth that somehow disrobing at security checkpoints will keep us safe from threats the TSA can't even define, and the idea that the TSA is in any way something that should be considered a law enforcement organization.



By: Brant