cyklo

Hi

I'm George Donnelly of We Won't Fly and we're running a survey to collect ideas and priorities for an aggressive 6-month campaign in support of dignity and human rights in airports.

I'd like to invite you to participate. It's really quite short. You'd be helping shape what we work for at least the next 6 months. Thanks.

http://wewontfly.com/please-respond-...ld-we-be-doing

WillCAD

Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

Focus on bringing TSA to heel, making them accountable for their repeated violations of the Constitution, reducing the gargantuan size and budget, eliminating SSI (no rule or law that the public must follow should ever be secret!), and getting SCOTUS to hear cases against scope and grope, strip searching, and other abuses.

saulblum

This would go against the very foundation on which the TSA's culture's notion of "security" is based.

Bob himself said it best the other day.

In the DHS world view, transparency is an abettor of terrorism. Its corollary is that the more that can be kept secret and unpredictable, the harder it will be for someone to attack.

How do you go about changing that fundamental culture of the agency?

jkhuggins

Perhaps --- and this is totally uninformed speculation on my part --- by exposing more of the agency to the opposite point of view, from inside the Beltway.

NSA used to assert that the best cryptography in the world was built by NSA cryptographers, and that no-one should use publicly-available cryptographic algorithms for classified information. Now, NSA regularly solicits and certifies public algorithms for encryption, and uses them itself for all types of classified material. They've learned that openness regarding encryption techniques leads to stronger encryption techniques for everyone, including NSA itself.

Changing the culture of the agency requires that the advocate for change be someone (or some organization) that the agency will respect enough to listen to. That respect can be voluntary (a good "friend") or involuntary (the "boss"). Neither is incredibly likely in the current climate ... but either could happen.

cyklo

WillCAD, I have no clue how to do any of that stuff except by calling them to task for something as basic and understandable as simple human dignity, a concept that not only pierced the media's veil of cynicism but was also so convincing that Pistole and others integrated it into their vocabularies.

Thanks for the comments, guys.

WillCAD

George, I think you've mistaken the situation. The concepts of human dignity and Constitutional rights mean no more to the media than they do to TSA, and they certainly didn't pierce the media's "veil of cynicism." The media picked up on some of these stories solely because they were sensational and ratings-worthy. The more common the stories get, the less sensational they are, and the more the media will ignore them.

I think the only way these policies are going to change is the same way that the civil rights situation changed in the 1960s - through cases heard by the Supreme Court and subsequent laws passed by Congress to enforce the decisions. And the only way you're going to get to the Supreme Court is if you have massive civil rights organizations, with massive funding and legal resources, banding together to plow their way through the bureaucratic behemoth of the US legal system.

Until you can get the ACLU, NAACP, and a few other large, wealthy organizations to throw in whole-heartedly with us and see this thing through to SCOTUS, we're all going to be spitting in to the wind.

cyklo

ACLU, EPIC, CATO and other organizations are already working on this from a legal angle. It's a long, slow, frustrating slog.

I see we haven't pierced your veil of cynicism. ;D

WillCAD

My cynicism isn't a veil, it's a burqa.

And although those organizations may be working on getting scope and grope before SCOTUS, they are A) Not devoting the full measure of their attention to it, and B) not working together but are working separately, as disparate units.

cyklo

I'm afraid you're mistaken once again. They are working together. I'm on the conference calls so I've witnessed it.

IslandBased

Hiring people with a better skill set and more integrity would be a start. They really need to clean up their cast of characters, and basic culture. They should be allowed to do their job without looking like idiots.

mahohmei

I want to see discussions about the TSA _not_ include any of the following statements:

- In a post-9/11 world...
- It's a scary world...
- There are terrorists out there...
- You can never be too careful...
- We realize the need for security...

It seems that the majority of mainstream articles criticizing the TSA always start with some sort of praise for the "work" the TSA does in keeping us "safe" from terrorists, followed by constructive criticism about how children and the elderly can't possibly be terrorists. I want to see an article starting with: