Originally Posted by Bart
While probably making myself vulnerable to being accused as a TSA apologist, I have to agree that this article is nothing more than just inflammatory rhetoric and a bunch of scare tactics baloney.
However,
I think the bigger threat and more slippery slope is the virtually unquestionable authority we are giving our law enforcement. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for good law enforcement; however, I truly have a concern about laws designed for our "safety" that allow police officers an excuse to initiate a search. For instance, seat belt laws are passed without question; and the rationale is that police officers are checking up on us for our own good. However, this allows a police officer to stop us, initiate a search ostensibly for their own safety, all in the name of making sure we are complying with seat belt laws. To me, the wearing of seat belts is a matter of individual responsibility, including children. A person who neglected to properly secure a child with the appropriate safety harness/seat should be considered for a charge of criminal negligence. However, this shouldn't be used as an excuse for law enforcement to stop us on the road just to ensure that children are properly secured "for the sake of the children."
There are many other examples, but the trend of expanding police authority in the name of the war on terror clearly comes as the greatest example of how we are treading on the edge and perhaps beginning to slide down a slippery slope.
You always have the option to turn around and leave the checkpoint. However, once a police officer stops you, even if it's for questioning, you are vulnerable to all sorts of criminal charges, depending on how the police officer portrays/distorts/spins the incident. What may be a simple matter of asking a question could be turned into a charge of withholding evidence or being uncooperative.
No, I don't think we've become a police state nor do I think that the laws currently head us down that path. However, I do think we are at a crossroads where the potential of such abuse most certainly exists, and we have to be careful about the types of future legislation passed in our name ostensibly for our protection.
I happen to agree with you on the relative dangers of law enforcement versus the TSA, but this expansion of police powers comes from the same fount of public fear that allowed the creation of TSA. Expanded police powers found their greatest ally in the so-called "war on drugs" dating back to the late 70s/early 80s. A dimunition of the Fourth Amendment, greater police firepower, draconian sentencing laws and the like were enabled by political "leaders" who found that exploiting public fear and then pretending "to do someting" were pretty good ways to get reelected. We haven't won the war on drugs any more than we're winning the war on terror, but the approach is the same: fan the flames of fear and then pass draconian legislation that purports to deal with it.
What we have going on with airport security is an overreaction to a real threat that comes at the expense of notions of privacy, freedom from arbitrary search and common sense. Being forced to partially disrobe before boarding an aircraft is an affront to the personal dignity of everyone forced to endure it and the notion of personal privacy as that concept was once understood in this nation has been utterly abrogated in favor of warrantless searches without any veneer of probable cause. We have reached the point where, in order to board a commercial aircraft, one must essentially prove that one is not a criminal. This is a marked departure from American tradition and jurisprudence and represents, I think, a good indication of how far we as a people have allowed our traditional notions of freedom to be eroded in the name of security. I would note that the discovery of contraband at a TSA checkpoint gets reported to law enforcement, so in that regard TSA is an expansion of the police powers you yourself criticize.
While expanded police powers may represent the greater danger than the TSA checkpoint, they both stem from the same cause: a public willing to trade their liberty for a misguided sense of "security" at the behest of leaders who understand neither security nor liberty. In this regard, I am reminded of the maxim that the triumph of evil requires nothing more than for good men to do nothing. I think that we've seen a great deal of that over the last 5 years.
As for whether we're headed down the road toward being a police state, I woud submit that we're already almost there. The passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and its abandonment of the core concept of habeus corpus marked a true turning point in our law. Add to that an Executive Branch that maintains it has a right to spy on US citizens without a warrant and hold them indefinitely without judicial review and one has a nation that looks very different from the one we lived in at the dawn of the 21st Century.