It is quite possible to provide a very high level of security without resorting to guards behaving like thugs. In fact, such an attitude on the part of the guards is counterproductive to real security.

I spent several weeks working on the White House during the Reagan years; security was very tight- some days it took us up to a half hour to clear, while they did bomb checks on our vehicle. They were polite and professional the entire time.

The behaviors of the security personnel which the OP encountered did nothing to enhance the security of the site; all they accomplished was to show the power and stupidity of those "guards", and show their absolute lack of comprehension of the constitution and of what the Statue of Liberty represends.

It is quite appropriate that America should be held to a higher standard than the rest of the world; unfortunately we are letting ourselves descend to a much lower standard.

As none of you know my son better than I do, I assure you that he was taught a solid lesson in the need to stand up for your rights. This is a child that will sit down and read the newspaper or Newsweek magazine and asks me questions about current affairs on a regular basis.

Never did I become belligerent or obnoxious but simply questioned the actions being demanded of me. As my son continued to ask me questions about the need for security for another few minutes afterwards, I am sure he learned from the situation.

I am raising my child to be respectful of authority but at the same time, teach him about his civil liberties and rights as an American.

I hope your son learned how important it will be for him to grow up as an active defender of liberty, and not let irrational fear and peer pressure dissuade him from the noble task of upholding the foundation that was laid for us - and how we must take an active role in defending liberty, or like you experienced, watch it be looted in the shadow of one its great icons.

Sure, security isn't always convenient - but there are many ways to implement it without making the experience reminiscent of a gulag.

I bet it doesn't need to be raining for the Statute to shed a tear over what is occurring at her feet. How sad.

"Those who fight monsters should take care that they never become one. For when you stand and look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." Frederich Nietsche

As I mentioned in another current thread in this section, you are unlikely to effect change in a system like this by getting in the face of the worker bee, who is doing as he or she has been told. If said worker bee has any authority at all, the most likely reaction is that you are going to push his or her buttons and cause them to take that authority to the limits, and maybe beyond. Perhaps this will result in you being awarded some massive civil judgment at some future date. In the short haul, it holds up the line, gets everyone around you ready to throw you over a rail, and possibly keeps you from completing whatever activity you had planned for the day - or the week.

I have seen a lot of people who claim to practice civil disobedience when faced with a situation they object to, but the "civil" part is usually ignored. Instead, they are as un-civil as they can be, taunting the guard, cop, inspector, whoever to arrest them, and trying to incite whatever crowd they can draw. They are far less concerned with righting whatever wrongs they perceive than they are with denigrating whatever authority figures they are confronting.

I submit that you have no basis or expertise to make an intelligent assessment of what security measures are "bovine excrement." You do not have access to the intelligence reports, studies of the latest improvised, miniaturized and pieced-out weapons and destructive devices that can be purchased or improvised, where the people in charge of protecting these monuments do.

As I've said before, security is seldom convenient. I get annoyed at TSA checkpoints, too. However, I can count the number of TSA employees who have been discourteous to me on the fingers of one hand, and I figure they were either jerks to begin with, or were just having a bad day. I have bad days, too, but I try not to let my problems pull down the other guy. With the occasional exception, I have similar experience with security and police officers. If one of them does something I consider to be out of line, I politely ask for their name and/or ID number, and then make a phone call to their employer when our business is finished. I suppose the employers could be shining me on, but they usually seem grateful for the report.

If these security precautions are imposed on everyone, they are not arbitrary. They might be excessive from your perspective, but I tend to think about the guy who is going to get blamed if someone does manage to get an explosive, a weapon, or a spray can of paint inside the monument.

As to "What explosive device could possibly have been hidden in a wallet or a belt?", I don't know enough about explosives to give you an informed response. I do remember an Army experience where I was shown how to take a fingernail-size portion of C4 from a Claymore mine, and use it to heat a canteen cup of coffee. The amount of energy contained in this substance is impressive, and I expect that there are even more efficient explosives now, given that this was shown to me in 1973. A man's wallet is roughly the size of a pack of cards. Three or four bricks of this size would fill that same Claymore mine, a device that also has some impressive destructive power. People who don't think about anything else except causing havoc can be very creative.

There are very few places where I am compelled to go. Offhand, I can't think of any I have been in over the past few years that had security screening. As for the other places, I weigh the inconvenience of the security against my desire to go there. If I decide to go, their place, their rules. You can get all lathered up about how much you hate the security measures and how ridiculous they are, but if your invective is directed at the guy who is just doing the job he was hired to do, you accomplish nothing except to make yourself a pain in everyone's butt.

There's the rub; everyone does not get the same scrutiny. This and other boards are full of examples of screeners/guards/whoever indulging in patently capricious actions; aka "designed inconsistency", aka specious copout. I don't know what triggers this behavior in some security personnel, and I suspect they don't either - simply innate tendencies sanctioned by the Wah on Terrah paradigm.

While I take your point about tiny weapons and other super-secret threats which some of us do not know about, I submit that the overwhelming majority of those searching us don't know about them either and wouldn't recognize one if they saw it.

The cure is worse than the desease.

My solution:

Remove belt. And as pants fall to knees say "What, aren't you gonna search my sack? I got a weapon of mAss destruction in here."

When security droids (and I say droids because any intelligence they may have is very limited and artificial) act rude then it's carte blanche to be rude/disgusting back.

In my cop days, most habitual violators claimed that they had been singled out by the police for some illegal reason, and that they were in fact better-than-average drivers. This occurred throughout the country, wherever they went. I can only wish that police agencies could achieve a level of cooperation necessary to maintain this complex a conspiracy.

There might be a scientific rationale to the selection of people for special screening, and it might be random. I suggest that it's a mix of both. I've been pulled out at least three times now. It didn't bother me then, and I don't think it will bother me in the future.

I also don't know what kind of training screeners get in identifying weapons or other dangerous objects. I know it was a continuous effort when I was on the street. I don't now why that wouldn't be the case today.

As for "The cure is worse than the desease" {sic}, I'd like the take from people that have been hijacked, bombed, or otherwise attacked by terrorists on commercial aircraft before I'll accept that statement. That will be difficult, as most of them are dead.

There are far, FAR fewer of them, though, than are killed by drunk drivers, etc. yet look how much we are spending comparatively on the two problems. Despite the "be afraid, be very afraid" tactics of the folks in DC, there is not a terrorist hiding under every rock or behind every door. We've got far more important problems that are being ignored while we are fighting an endless war with no identifiable enemy in sight and none likely to ever be found.

And you must know this because you spent all your time tailing these lowlifes wherever they, throughout the country?

WHAT you expect the White House gift shop to be in the White House. It is in a highly secure location in the National Press Building at 529 14th Street NW.

http://www.whitehousegiftshop.com/html/map.html

I'm B.J. McCay, and This is My Best Friend, Bear
 

Just like Sheriff Lobo!

:rolleyes:

Ah yes, the usual leap that criticism of the way TSA does security means I/we want no security at all. I believe a couple of peripheral posters have advocated that position, but the rest of us simply want the screeners to cut out the BS, intimidation and general nastiness. Some of it may be mandated by the more ridiculous aspects of the SOP, but there is way too much arrogance and officiousness at checkpoints which is simply not called for.

Efficient, effective and vigilant. If only....

Now you're into an argument that can go on forever - that of "how can you spend all this money on X, when there is Y going on?" I occasionally use the same argument about long prison sentences. It costs around $24,000 to keep someone in prison for a year (this is a widely variable figure, and obtained by dividing the amount spent on prisons and jails by the number of people incarcerated), and I think you could release maybe 2/3 of them into closely supervised community corrections programs where they would be working and contributing to the economy and the cost of their supervision. The leftover money could be used for {insert your cause of choice here}.

I agree that the TSA has problems (much like every other bureaucracy), and there might be a better way of handling airline security. I don't know what that way would be, however, and I haven't seen anyone here make a convincing, informed argument for something that works better and doesn't cost as much. What I do see here is endless complaining about the inconvenience thrust on them by the TSA, with lots of demeaning epithets (goons, morons, idiots, storm troopers) thrown in. The latter tells me that most of the people complaining place themselves at a higher and more important station in life than some common TSO, cop, ID inspector, etc. As a cop encountering this kind of person, I found the temptation to put them in their place extremely strong. By belittling these people and refusing to cooperate with them at their job site, as the OP did, you bring much of your troubles on yourselves.

I don't fault you one bit for making efforts to change the system. That might even be the duty of a citizen who sees that something isn't right. It's where you're attempting that change that concerns me. Getting in the face of the line worker who is doing as he or she was told is arguably the worst possible time, place, and person for this. Maybe they're being petty and retaliatory, and maybe not, but you won't change a thing by being a PITA at that venue.

Actually, said lowlifes reported this to me when I was talking to them as a cop in one city, and later on as a criminal justice instructor in several others, all in different states. A common solution for these folks is to pick up and relocate to a new city for a fresh start. Oddly, the same things start to happen to them in the new place - getting stopped a lot, receiving tickets, being arrested, etc. This has nothing to do with their driving, adherence to regulatory laws like having insurance and registration, substance abuse, itinerant employment, or social activities - it's all because the cops have it out for them, and report their movements to the next city down the line, so that the targeted harassment can continue uninterrupted. Sometimes, even the highway patrols in between are in on it. It's an amazingly well-orchestrated conspiracy among the 800,000 or so cops in this country. Since I'm no longer in line law enforcement, I don't receive the Daily Dirtbag Report with the day's harassment targets, and it's probably distributed electronically now, anyway.
:rolleyes: