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They're TSA WORKERS, Not Officers
These are not trained law enforcement officers, these ball gropers and vagina pokers at the airport. They are TSA workers, and should be called "workers," and should wear outfits that reflect that.

Tennessee Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn is ~~arranging deck chairs on the Titanic~~ sponsoring the STRIP Act -- Stop TSA's Reach In Policy, that the LA Times says "would prevent Transportation Security Administration officers from wearing law enforcement uniforms and police-like badges and calling themselves officers unless they receive law enforcement training":

"Congress has sat idly by as the TSA strip searches 85-year-old grandmothers in New York, pats down 3-year-olds in Chattanooga, and checks colostomy bags for explosives in Orlando. Enough is enough!" said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) "The least we can do is end this impersonation, which is an insult to real cops."
The American Federation of Government Employees said the bill was insulting to the 44,000 TSA workers it represented and did "nothing to add to our national security."

Then again, neither do they. From an earlier version of my op-ed on the TSA and the erosion of our civil liberties (mostly cut out of the final version that ran in Pravda after no major mainstream American outlets would publish it), here are some details:

Although some believe the TSA's efforts keep air travel safe, security expert Bruce Schneier deems them "security theater" -- a massive show put on by the government to lead us to believe we're safer when we're just pointlessly delayed, harassed, and groped. On 9/10/2001, most of us would have guessed that a terrorist on a plane would want a bag of money and a trip to Bolivia. By the afternoon of 9/11, it became impossible for any terrorist to ever again bring down a plane with a box-cutter. Still, in 2010, at a Toronto airport TSA checkpoint, a supervisor told me I was "lucky" that he wasn't going to take away my dull little drugstore tweezers. Take away my tweezers? Why? Because I might use them to break into the cockpit and overpluck the pilot's eyebrows?
While the TSA is successful in separating many passengers from their small, semi-sharp objects, it's the scary items that slip past their checkpoints. In February of 2011, a TSA tester snuck a gun through the body scanners in Dallas. Not just once. Five times. A month before, it took only a $100 bribe by undercover TSA agents to get an unaccompanied package on a JetBlue flight. If a terrorist has a bomb that won't fit in the overhead, he can bribe an airport restaurant delivery guy to bring it in with the bread, and then bribe some baggage handler to load it onto a plane. The TSA has been too busy removing the diapers and dignity of grandmothers with leukemia or dementia to plug the gaping security holes in cargo and food service.

Anti-TSA activist Lisa Simeone reminded me via email that the TSA "hasn't thwarted one single attempted attack in their multi-billion-dollar history. (If they had, don't you think they'd be trumpeting it from now to kingdom come?)" As for the two acts of terror that have been prevented, Simeone noted that shoe bomber Richard Reid and pantybomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab were stopped by other passengers.

There's an excellent piece by Charles C. Mann in Vanity Fair on Schneier and his thoughts on the TSA. Some salient bits:

As we came by the checkpoint line, Schneier described one of these aspects: the ease with which people can pass through airport security with fake boarding passes. First, scan an old boarding pass, he said--more loudly than necessary, it seemed to me. Alter it with Photoshop, then print the result with a laser printer. In his hand was an example, complete with the little squiggle the T.S.A. agent had drawn on it to indicate that it had been checked. "Feeling safer?" he asked.
..."The only useful airport security measures since 9/11," he says, "were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can't break in, positive baggage matching"--ensuring that people can't put luggage on planes, and then not board them --"and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater."

...Remember the fake boarding pass that was in Schneier's hand? Actually, it was mine. I had flown to meet Schneier at Reagan National Airport because I wanted to view the security there through his eyes. He landed on a Delta flight in the next terminal over. To reach him, I would have to pass through security. The day before, I had downloaded an image of a boarding pass from the Delta Web site, copied and pasted the letters with Photoshop, and printed the results with a laser printer. I am not a photo-doctoring expert, so the work took me nearly an hour. The T.S.A. agent waved me through without a word. A few minutes later, Schneier deplaned, compact and lithe, in a purple shirt and with a floppy cap drooping over a graying ponytail.

The boarding-pass problem is hardly the only problem with the checkpoints. Taking off your shoes is next to useless. "It's like saying, Last time the terrorists wore red shirts, so now we're going to ban red shirts," Schneier says. If the T.S.A. focuses on shoes, terrorists will put their explosives elsewhere. "Focusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow-globe bombs simply induces the bad guys to do something else. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you haven't reduced the total threat."

As I waited at security with my fake boarding pass, a T.S.A. agent had darted out and swabbed my hands with a damp, chemically impregnated cloth: a test for explosives. Schneier said, "Apparently the idea is that al-Qaeda has never heard of latex gloves and wiping down with alcohol." The uselessness of the swab, in his view, exemplifies why Americans should dismiss the T.S.A.'s frequent claim that it relies on "multiple levels" of security. For the extra levels of protection to be useful, each would have to test some factor that is independent of the others. But anyone with the intelligence and savvy to use a laser printer to forge a boarding pass can also pick up a stash of latex gloves to wear while making a bomb.

...After a public outcry, T.S.A. officers began waving through medical supplies that happen to be liquid, including bottles of saline solution. "You fill one of them up with liquid explosive," Schneier said, "then get a shrink-wrap gun and seal it. The T.S.A. doesn't open shrink-wrapped packages." I asked Schneier if he thought terrorists would in fact try this approach. Not really, he said. Quite likely, they wouldn't go through the checkpoint at all. The security bottlenecks are regularly bypassed by large numbers of people--airport workers, concession-stand employees, airline personnel, and T.S.A. agents themselves (though in 2008 the T.S.A. launched an employee-screening pilot study at seven airports). "Almost all of those jobs are crappy, low-paid jobs," Schneier says. "They have high turnover. If you're a serious plotter, don't you think you could get one of those jobs?"

...To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer.

My op-ed, "Standing up for our eroding civil liberties," calling for Americans to stop being all "We the Sheeple" in the face of our Constitutional rights being violated, was finally published by Pravda, with this note.

Note: This piece was submitted to numerous mainstream news outlets in America, all of which refused to publish it.

An excerpt:

This country's Founding Fathers were a bunch of obnoxious jerks -- and I mean that in the most reverent way. These were men who were fiercely opposed to blind obedience to authority, and who laid their lives on the line to flip it the bird. Oh, how disappointingly -- and dangerously -- far we've fallen. Our Constitutional rights are increasingly being eroded -- at TSA checkpoints, at police stops where citizens are arrested for videotaping, and elsewhere -- and so many Americans are just sitting there blinking like livestock.
At the airport this past March, I wasn't one of those people, and that sometimes comes with a price. In my case, $500,000. That's what a TSA agent's lawyer is demanding from me for "defaming" her client by saying she sexually violated me during the pat-down, and then for "libeling" her when I blogged about it. Marc J. Randazza, the First Amendment lawyer defending me, called her case "meritless," but this woman's notion that I should fund her existence for the rest of her life because I stood up for my Constitutional rights is beyond disgusting.

On March 31, 2011, I was flying out of LAX to attend a psychology conference in New York. When I reached the TSA checkpoint in the United terminal, I found that I had no choice but to get the pat-down. Tears welled up in my eyes -- for how we've allowed the Constitution to be ripped up at the airport door and because I was powerless to stop a total stranger from running her hands over the most private parts of my body as a condition of normal, ordinary business travel.

I was open about where I was flying and why; noting in public comments that I was flying to Binghamton to interview anthropologists Sarah Hrdy and Dan Nettle -- not to have coffee with Al Qaeda operatives.

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Comments

> They are TSA workers, and should be called
> "workers," and should wear outfits that reflect
> that.

Not trying to quibble, but says who? Does "officer" carry some broad legal meaning?

Specifically– If the typical diabetes-ridden TSA functionary is a "worker" and not an "officer", what are we to make of Melendez' assurance that we needn't fear identification games?

Crid [CridComment at gmail] at December 23, 2011 12:21 AM

I have had a few unfriendings over my TSA posts on FB-many linked from you-but I am not stopping. One unfriended sheep was utterly agahst that I would be sad the Texas law against TSA screenings didn't pass. "They'll stop planes from landing or taking off in Texas! Think of the inconvenience to people!". That's right folks, all you have to do to get her to give up any right she ever had, is inconvenience her a little. Apparently the strip searches aren't inconvenient to her.

momof4 at December 23, 2011 6:03 AM

crid? I take it you've never heard of Orwell? Or that book he wrote about how language influences thinking?

And kind of off topic, but is anyone else fucking SICK AND TIRED of all the fucking acronyms on bill names?

lujlp at December 23, 2011 6:03 AM

As I'm blue in the face from saying, these searches were never intended to stop at the airport, and they haven't.

Not going to rewrite the dozens of posts I've done on VIPR (sorry, lujlp -- Visible Intermodal Prevention & Response) teams, which have and continue to infest thousands of locales around the country, or the FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology) initiative, which will supposedly assess your flushed cheeks and dilated pupils for nefarious intent, or the mobile units that will scan you without your knowledge.

Don't care how many people don't want to believe it, don't care how many sheeple want to keep their snouts stuck in the grass, don't care how many know-it-alls scream "conspiracy theorist!", don't care how many people think "it can't happen here."

It can and it is.

Here's a link from the last thing I ever wrote, last March, for a now defunct group blog where the ostensibly civil-liberties-loving crowd suddenly lost their taste for the fight once Obama got into office:

Documents Reveal TSA Research Proposal To Body-Scan Pedestrians, Train Passengers

http://www.cogitamusblog.com/2011/03/documents-reveal-tsa-research-proposal-to-body-scan-pedestrians-train-passengers.html

Lisa Simeone at December 23, 2011 6:47 AM

Amy Alkon

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2011/12/23/theyre_tsa_work.html#comment-2870901">comment from lujlp

anyone else fucking SICK AND TIRED of all the fucking acronyms on bill names?

Yes -- especially since this one doesn't stop anyone from stripping you -- and stripping away your Fourth Amendment rights.

Amy Alkon at December 23, 2011 7:35 AM

The government isn't doing enough to protect us from the real threat out there - lightning! We are all much more likely to get hit by lightning, then die in a terrorist attack! Why isn't the government doing anything about this horrible threat to personal safety and national security?

Assholio at December 23, 2011 7:40 AM

Check the recent Ask The Pilot. Apparently, a kid's lightsaber is a weapon. YHTBFKM.

But as long as an ignorant public doesn't recognize what weapons really are, and find rights too much of a bother, this will go on.

As Carlin said, "Why do they let a guy with two powerful hands on an airplane!?"

Radwaste at December 23, 2011 8:08 AM

Always remember the first principle of government, nicely expressed by Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former Chief of Staff. ( brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/rahmemanue409199.html )
========
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
========

Emanuel doesn't just like solving a problem. Problems handed to government are always an excuse to expand the power and prestige of government, and to increase the taxes collected to fund the government.

The TSA is over-defending against visible, political threats. They are not smart or motivated enough to do things more efficiently, or to guide the public to a rational evaluation of threats. So, the expense for security theater grows without limit, as real safety remains constant. They are always fighting the last threat.

A bureaucrat has only one fear, that he will seem to allow the same attack twice and be fired. He can suffer any number of different failures without penalty, provided each failure is "new". After all, he can't predict the future.

A common complaint is that even pilots are searched. The point is, the TSA doesn't know that the person in a pilot uniform is really a pilot. Front-facing TSA security looks for things, not to identify people. They consciously ignore any information such as country of birth. They explain that identification cards can be forged or stolen.

The approach in Israel is to examine each passenger for identiy and demeanor. That system has done a great job without strip-searching everyone in line.

Amazingly, the TSA relies on ID cards when it applies security to airfield workers.

11/22/10 - TSA's double standard
( salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/11/22/tsa_screening_of_pilots )

== quote ==
[edited] All airfield workers are fingerprinted, and checked for a criminal background and against terror watch lists. They are subject to random physical checks by TSA.

However, a Kennedy airport worker told me:
"All I need is to swipe my Port Authority ID through a turnstile. The 'sterile area' door is not watched by TSA or any hired security. I have not been randomly searched in three years. We only see TSA people when the blue-shirts get food at the cafeteria."
== ==

Andrew_M_Garland at December 23, 2011 8:41 AM

I've written it before and I'll write it again:

Enough already with this shibboleth about Israeli security. Though Israel has eliminated terrorism on planes, they've learned to accept it in other venues -- buses, cafes, marketplaces. Bombs still go off there.

The Israelis also rely heavily on racial and ethnic profiling. If you're with an American tour group, for example, you'll be ushered quickly through. If you're the "wrong" racial or ethnic type, you'll get a thorough going-over. And if you're a peace activist -- forget it; you'll be strip-searched in a back room. Just ask Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein.

There is no such thing as 100% security, anywhere. The belief of so many Americans that there is, is why they're willing to bend over and spread 'em every time an authority figure tells them to. They cherish the fantasy of security more than the reality of life. Life entails risk.

Lisa Simeone at December 23, 2011 9:12 AM

The other thing with Israeli security is scale. It is dealing with a much smaller volume of people and flights - Ben Gurion airport handles about the same number of travelers as Sacramento. Their security requires highly trained personnel, in numbers; it's simply not feasible to deploy similarly trained people all over the U.S. Nor does the threat here (generally negligible) merit it.

Amy Alkon

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