Cartoon Peril

In other threads, it has been asserted, perhaps in jocularity, that TSA could search one coming out of one's home. This seemed to me to be conspiracy theory, but now I am not so sure, particularly after the Savannah train depot incident.

Have a look at this diagram, produced by TSA in May 2007. Notice how the purchase of a ticket in the home is included within the "infrastructure" protection range of security. There is even a silhouette of a house with an airplane symbol inside it.

So if TSA can (deliberately, as it appears) search passengers exiting a train station, it seems to me that there is at least some evidence that the day may come when we see "random" VIPR searches of persons leaving their home for the airport.

(P.S. Per the diagram, TSA will be engaged in "advanced medal detection, apparently looking for the Purple Hearts of all the WWII veterans they've groped.)

yknot

I imagine the day will come that the electronic purchase of a ticket will generate a warrant for search of your home, office, garage, storage units etc.

Caradoc

Or maybe they're just hoping to find another Congressional Medal of Honor recipient they can harass.

gojirasan

I admit it is scary that they would include a picture of a house under "infrastructure protection". I guess that is how they would justify it. Once you have purchased your ticket you have "consented" to roving mobile TSA units searching you maybe even before you leave home. Getting groped in the privacy of your own bedroom. Maybe they will allow your SO to watch. Maybe in 10-20 years that will seem normal to most Americans. Only the evul tewwowists will complain.

Good Guy

I'm starting a tin foil hat business. Early retirement, here I come.

RockyMtnScotsman

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you" - Joseph Heller, Catch-22

ElizabethConley

Wow. I'd never heard about this.

A normal person unexpectedly finding a medel of honor in his/her hands would respectfully hand it back to its rightful owner - pronto.

It continues to mystify me as to how the TSA finds their goons and thugs. Who are these people? How do they end up on the Federal teet?

ElizabethConley

I'm with you there. I thought the DNA business was so lunatic fringe I didn't even read it for days. I figured everyone involved in the story was a total crackpot. Then I found out there was more than a grain of truth to the thread.

We are cursed to live in interesting times.

Flaflyer

I've mentioned this with sarcasm smilies but just look at the "direction of travel" of the TSA efforts.

When it is pointed out that checkpoint bottlenecks and unsecured airport areas (like Moscow) create inviting targets for bombers, it gets suggested to move the check to the road at the airport perimeter, creating a huge traffic jam inviting a large truck bomb. Obviously the solution is to move the police state tactics further from the airport! The direction away from the airport only points one way: toward your front door.

TSA slithers their Vipers onto trains and at the bus station. They make muleskinners pulling barges get security credentials. They ask school bus drivers to become part of the "See Something, Be Good Comrade and Snitch" campaign. Then they ask everyone to be a snitch with billboards on highways.

TSA seems to want to make a "security tunnel" to enclose you from your front door to the airplane jet bridge. With scheduled and random searches, gropes, x-rays, and chemical tests of your coffee cup. Plus a few psychic readers to guess your intentions while they pilfer your luggage.

The ultimate evolution will be a police state that would make the STASI green with envy. Where you have to give them your location 48 hours before your flight so they can schedule a portable metal detector and four smurfs to send to your house or hotel door to screen you before you "transit" the public streets in the back of a "transportation system--thus it is TSA jurisdiction" taxi on your way to the airport.

They have to make sure you don't have a pocket knife or a 16 ounce cup of hot coffee with you to endanger the public. The $838 "Home Inspection Service" fee will be added to the price of your $200 ticket. The saddest part is the local TV station will still find some Kettles to put on camera and say "Well, anything for security is OK with me as long as TSA tells us they are stopping another 9/11™."

If DHS/TSA is going to burn the Constitution I wish they would just be up front about it and announce the bonfire location so I can go roast some marshmallows and get some good out of the event. Except they probably will not allow my pointed stick past the security checkpoint and the marshmallows will be confiscated as explosive 'gels'. Oh well, anything for security. . .

Caradoc

I think it's pretty obvious at this point that the TSA cannot be trusted to draw the line.

Someone (we) will have to draw it for them.

Boggie Dog

Or how about this?


http://allnurses-central.com/world-n...sa-115315.html

Cartoon Peril

TSA currently reasons that by getting in the security line at the airport, you place yourself irrevocably in the power of TSA for a warrantless and intrusive physical search of your person. If you attempt to terminate this procedure, you are treated as a terrorist attempting to test the system.

But why should there be anything magic about the security line? There isn't. Purchase of a ticket is an essential step towards air travel, and also of course an essential step towards air terrorism.

Caradoc

By scraping the bottom of the barrel - and in some cases, drilling a hole in the bottom of the barrel and sampling the scum underneath it.



(Yes, that's a pizza box.)

ElizabethConley

It's thuggery like that which causes even-tempered folks like me to contemplate dispatching the perp with a marshmallow or 3 oz of water, just to prove the obvious.

Weapons aren't dangerous. Making America angry is dangerous.

nachtnebel

I would have tended to agree with you in the past. But that was before we started using high tech to look at people naked, running our hands all over people's bodies including their nooks and crannies, children included, at transit locations. Before we started using tech to peer inside people's bodies in our great game of GOTCHA. And all this not in prisons, but against the general population going about their lives peacefully.

Before we started using thermal imaging on people's houses (gee, who's scr*wing tonight), mobile scanners on trucks and cars, doing dragnet frisks and strewing the contents of passengers luggage out in public at bus stations, train stations, and other mass transit. Not to mention monitoring their phone conversations and emails.
Before public officials wearing police or police-like uniforms used intimidation and fear to make people submit to them.

Joke all you want. The reality is not terribly funny. And there may come a time when it'll be a good idea to keep a set of civilian clothes around for a quick change.