FliesWayTooMuch,
How? How can we avoid being sheep? Each time I pass a checkpoint I feel ashamed to be an American; I feel angry and violated beyond belief; I want to vomit on the T-SS-A agents who have somehow been deputized to touch all of my belongings and all of my body. We are treated like criminals when we fly, but how can we avoid being sheep? [True, we could take a bus from San Francisco to Boston, but I doubt our jobs would be waiting for us two or three weeks later when we arrived.]
I send my public comment to the appropriate Congressional and governmental forums when that opportunity is available, once every six months or so. The TSA hasn't even responded to or made available online, as it promised, the public comment it received on its CAPPS-II Privacy Act notice months and months ago. That Privacy Act notice got the largest response in history by a large margin, and nearly all of the public sentiment was negative. We have been given no opportunity at all to comment on the shoe police, the inappropriate touching, or the brutalization of our right to travel freely within the country. The regulations permitting this atrocity are secret. FOIA requests have been ignored or answered with almost completely redacted documents. The only hope we have is to keep up the public pressure and the legal pressure until the TSA is beaten.
Here's where to join the fight:
http://www.eff.org/
http://www.dontspyonus.com/
http://www.hasbrouck.org/blog/
Write letters to your Congressional delegations. Enter the public record at every opportunity and make your opposition known. You're right, FliesWayTooMuch. We shouldn't be sheep any longer.