Doesn’t this make you feel safer? TSA is now digging into personal medical records to deny Canadians entrance to the United States.
Thugs: TSA lawyers argued yesterday they did nothing wrong in arresting a protester who removed his shirt and pants at a security checkpoint to reveal the fourth amendment of the Bill of Rights written on his chest.
And this fixes everything? TSA has apologized for confiscating diabetic pregnant woman’s insulin.
Note that in the very same breath the TSA also denied ever taking the woman’s insulin. Makes that apology somewhat pointless, doesn’t it?
Don’t you feel safer now? The TSA screener in Denver decided a pregnant woman’s insulin and ice packs were a threat and confiscated them.
She asked 7NEWS not to use her name for fear of retaliation for speaking out. “I got a bottle of nail polish. I got hair spray bottles. I got needles that are syringes. But yet I can’t take through my actual insulin?” she asked. [emphasis mine]
All felony charges dropped against the woman who groped a TSA agent.
Jerry Cobb, a spokesman for the Maricopa County attorney’s office, said county prosecutors concluded the facts of the case don’t rise to the level of a felony. The case against Yukari Miyamae, of Longmont, Colo., now goes to Phoenix’s city prosecutor’s office, which handles all misdemeanors in the city. That office said it hasn’t received the case and hasn’t decided whether to charge Miyamae.
Two wrongs don’t make a right: A Colorado woman who refused a TSA patdown has been accused of groping a TSA agent.
Though her behavior appears to have been an assault and therefore the arrest apparently justified, why is it that this woman gets charged with a crime while all around her TSA agents freely do exactly the same thing repeatedly to innocent Americans and are never charged as well?
The answer has to do with power, wielded by the government to dominate its citizens, and done so in a complete defiance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
“Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”
Now, thanks to TSA Chief John Pistole’s determination to “take the TSA to the next level,” there will soon be no place safe from the TSA’s groping searches. Only this time, the “ritualized humiliation” is being meted out by the serpentine-labeled Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams. At a cost of $30 million in 2009, VIPR relies on 25 teams of agents, in addition to assistance from local law enforcement agencies as well as immigration agents. And as a sign of where things are headed, Pistole, himself a former FBI agent, wants to turn the TSA into a “national-security, counterterrorism organization, fully integrated into U.S. government efforts.” To accomplish this, Pistole has requested funding for an additional 12 teams for fiscal year 2012, bringing VIPR’s operating budget close to $110 million.
TSA agents pat down 6-year-old twice.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? A TSA agent was arrested in Florida earlier this week for stealing from passengers.
Ron Paul (R-Texas) called for the abolition of the TSA yesterday.
The TSA hard at work: A man successfully boarded and disembarked from a flight, without a valid passport or ID.
The flight continued on to LA, where the man got off the plane and apparently spent several days in the area. On Wednesday, he returned to LAX and tried to get on a Delta flight bound for Atlanta, again trying to use an expired boarding pass and without valid identification. But this time, Delta would not let him on, and the FBI was alerted. [emphasis mine]
Chickening out: Texas lawmakers today passed a watered-down anti-TSA airport groping bill.
Freedom of Information documents show the TSA ignoring the radiation dangers of its body scanners.
The more states the merrier! Idaho could follow Texas in pushing for an anti-TSA groping bill.
Freedom on the march! A 95-year-old woman sick with leukemia was forced to remove her adult diaper during a TSA search last weekend.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? Another TSA worker has been arrested on suspicion of stealing.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? TSA airport screeners have picked the union they want to represent them.
Texas anti-groping bill against the TSA moves forward with changes. In related news, under pressure the head of the TSA agreed yesterday that it should modify its patdowns of children.
Unfortunately, the changes being introduced to the Texas bill will make it nothing more than a symbolic act. Similarly, the TSA’s so-called modification of its policy towards children really changes nothing, as they will continue to grope and violate the rights of everyone else.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? Theft by TSA employees of passenger valuables has become a nationwide problem.
According to TSA records, press reports, and court documents . . . some 500 TSA officers . . . have been fired or suspended for stealing from passenger luggage since the agency’s creation in November of 2001. The airports servicing New York City—John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark Liberty—harbor the most flagrant offenders, but virtually no city in the nation is safe from the TSA’s sticky fingers.
In 2009, a half dozen TSA agents at Miami International Airport were charged with grand theft after boosting an iPod, bottles of perfume, cameras, a GPS system, a Coach purse, and a Hewlett Packard Mini Notebook from passengers’ luggage. Travelers passing through the airport’s checkpoints reported as many as 1,500 items stolen, the majority of which were never recovered.
In May of this year alone, TSA agents were arrested on the suspicion of theft at airports in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
The legal store of stolen objects.
It’s all about power and control, not safety: The TSA has decided to block any further private companies from providing airport screening.
Don’t you feel safer? TSA agents confiscate toy hammer.
The TSA took away one toy hammer, but they were still able to take another toy hammer on board the airplane. How did that happen? Drew’s mother, always prepared, had another one in her backpack and that backpack passed through security with no problem.
A Newark TSA supervisor has been sentenced to prison for bribery and aiding the theft of passengers.
So how is his action any different than what Congress does?
What if every state did this? The Texas law to ban any TSA full body pat downs, shelved last week, may still be passed.
And in more TSA news, video of a woman screaming for help while accusing a TSA agent of molesting her. Her son meanwhile is threatened with arrest and the confiscation of his luggage for videotaping the event.
And this is good? The TSA is testing a sensor system for detecting terrorists before they act.
The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) security programme is designed to spot people who are planning to commit a terrorist act. The U.S. government system can ‘sense’ when you are planning and measures physiological factors such as heart rates and eye movements.
First Texas, now Alaska: Pressure from legislators there has forced TSA officials to consider the use of common sense profiling.
TSA does a security drill, and forgets to tell the police.
Napolitano: “Very, very, very few” people get TSA patdowns. NOT!
PolitiFact Georgia therefore took the TSA figures and did some math. The TSA’s Allen told us that “on an average day, about 2 million people are screened at TSA checkpoints.” Three percent of 2 million is 60,000 people. That means that over the course of a month, roughly 1.8 million people receive a pat-down. That’s more than four times the population of Atlanta.
The House budget for the TSA has deleted funding for more body scanners.
Though I think denying the TSA this money is a good thing, this paragraph from the article stood out to me:
The measure includes $7.8 billion for the TSA, which Republicans said was a $125 million increase from current levels but $293 million less than the administration’s budget request.
In 2008 the TSA’s budget was approximately $6.99 billion. Considering how the Republicans wanted to bring spending back to 2008 levels, how can we take them seriously about getting control of the deficit if they agree to an overall budget increase for the TSA?
