Originally Posted by 2lazytothinkofname
You know fully well that if Gore had created the TSA you and the rest of the freedom fighters here would see the TSA as great protectors.
Uh, for the record, Sen. Tom Daschle (D, SD) was a major force in creating the TSA as we know it with statements along the lines of, "To professionalize you must federalize." Many in the other party wanted to avoid creating a new army of federal workers and just wanted stricter federal standards on private screeners. This debate continues...
You'll find an interesting mix of conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, not to mention Democrats and Republicans, speaking as "freedom fighters" on this issue. (I for one am in the conservative-libertarian-republican camp.)
Publishing regulations of any clandestine operations, be it the TSA, FBI or local police is idiotic. You might as well not have clandestine operations. Did you see the Steelers publishing their playbooks today?
People here don't seem to be asking the government to publicize all of its operations, just to publicize the aspects of their operations that restrict the legal actions of innocent citizens. There are enough of these no-fly cases that if you do a google-news search on "no-fly list" every few weeks you will see a few new cases. These are almost always entirely innocent Americans with no real means of redress or due process. How is that protecting anyone? Why can it not be fixed after 4.5 years?
I
encourage the government to throughly investigate every person on the no-fly list using all lawful law-enforcement and intelligence investigative techniques, and then issue arrest warrants for those that are criminals and leave alone those that are not. I don't want them to publicize the results of the investigations of the innocents, just
leave them alone. I do want the results of the investigations against those charged publicized in a public court of law as is required by the Constitution: "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Blocking innocent citizens from travel is depriving them of liberty, period. Claiming the airlines are private entities blocking travel and therefore legit is BS because the government forces them to do it and implements/maintains the secret blacklist.
I don't want TSA to publicize all their procedures. I do want them to present and follow a consistent SOP (or even range of SOPs as long as pax can know what the boundaries of the SOP are.), follow all relevant government rules without silly attempts at self-exemption (e.g., Privacy Act), and give passengers an effective means of complaining when such rules are not followed.
You have all the right to complain, I have the right to tell you that your complaints are without merit. Just because you think your rights are being cosntricted does not make it so no matter how loudly you scream.
Do you consider complaints about secret government blacklists that restrict the legal activities of innocent Americans with no effective means of redress to be without merit?
if this is too right wing for you please let me know, I would hate to bring in a differing point of view and ruin the echo chamber effect going on here.
Again, the issue is secret blacklists as above. You are as entitled to your opinion (whatever it is) as the rest of us are to ours. You have used quite a bit of hyperbole in your own posts (e.g. post 192), but I don't think anyone has called TSA employees fascist pigs in this thread.