"Petty tyrants," "Fining for fun"
 

Future of Freedom Foundation.org

Absolutely outrageous! :td: :td:

From the article: "...James Madison observed in The Federalist Papers,

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be ... so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. "

See, your problem is that you are engaging in outdated, pre-9/11 thinking. We all know now that if the law is not whimsical and capricious, the ter'rists will be able to destroy Amer'ca.

From the article: "TSA agents can slap fines on Americans based on “attitude,” which TSA classifies as one of the “aggravating factors” in determining financial punishments. TSA has issued no guidance on the precise amount of obligatory groveling at airport checkpoints. People who question TSA commands are probably far more likely to be fined. "

:rolleyes:It's quite simple, really, you take off your shoes so that we are not sullied by your unwashed presence. You approach with your eyes lowered in respect, cheerfully and completely answer any question posed to you, and kiss the ring of the last TSO to "help" you before leaving the checkpoint.

(Oh, wait, sorry, I just remembered that sarcasm doesn't work when it reflects things that actually happen.)

From the article: "The BDOs will be surveilling passengers for “body language and facial cues ... for signs of bad intentions.” The TSA’s latest intrusion is based on an Israeli model. McClatchy Newspapers reported last August that

Jay M. Cohen, undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology, said in May that he wants to automate passenger screening by using videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions. "

And people complain about us(BDOs) now!

Seriously, great article. Well worth the read. Now, if only I had Mr. Hawley's email address....

I think the proper legalese term here would be "arbitrary and capricious". And yes, that is an actual legal term.

As for the heartbeat thing-I naturally have high blood pressure.

Nitpicking aside, I find that behavior from TSA absolutely disgusting.

Once again, a significant example of the abuses of the TSA.

Once again, outrage expressed.

Once again, no solution.

So what will it take to change things?

I've been reading Jeff Sharra's Rise to Rebellion. Several times I've been struck by the similarities in what so many of us see occurring in this country today and what happened between the Colonists and England prior to the Revolution.

Initially just a few voices speaking out against the King, but with each new insult, more people realizing the issues and the increasing losses to what freedoms they had, adding their voices to the chorus of dissenters.

Someday, in some way, the TSA will be gone and be just a very sad footnote to our history as a country.

BTW, Jeff Sharra writes almost as well as his father, Michael. Michael wrote The Killer Angels, a (an) historical novel of the Battle of Gettysburg and one of my all-time favorite books.

Unfortunately until the sheep, I mean the average Americans, are finally turned against the TSA and the mainstream media start villifying the TSA nothing will change. For every one of us and every one of these articles there will be someone on TV that will say "anything for security" or "it's all for our children." Sure there'll be spin, I mean the TSA blog, but nothing substantive in terms of actual aviation security instead of passenger harrassment.

As a TSO, I'm usually involved in these situations only long enough to find the item-in-question in the bag, and then later fill out a witness statement about having discovered it. Once the supervisor takes over the incident, we usually go back to the line and keep working until they come to us later with the statement form to fill out.

However, it does sound about in line with what very limited information I know about it. To wit:

Any knife with a blade larger than 3" nets a fine from the TSA after the report gets submitted to Washington, and the whole shebang is complete with witness statements from the TSOs who discovered it, as well as incident reports from the supervisor on the floor, photographs of the item next to their ID and a standard 12" ruler (for size reference; particularly important with a knife), saved images from the x-ray machine when they came through - the TSA is pretty efficient at gathering all of it's evidence right there at the checkpoint.

They didn't "punish Campbell's insolence," either :P Though the use of that language doesn't surprise me, given that the author of the article has some pretty clear bias. As I understand it, the usual fine for that is $300. If you pay it in the first month or three (the actual amount of time escapes me just at the present) or so after you receive the fine, you only have to pay half of it - i.e.; $150. Failure to pay the fine loses the half-off grace period (we'll call it, for lack of a better term) and you have to pay the full $300. This also was mentioned in a very old USA Today article some three, four years or so ago, where a woman had taken a cake knife from her wedding through the checkpoint, and was given the same fine. Much like Campbell, it too started at $150.

Post-Script: After I wrote everything, I decided to go find the article. Here's it is, dated 2-19-04: USA Today: Weapons in Luggage will now bring Hefty Fines - incidentally, it also seems to be the article that the author of the cited article gets his information from about Ms. Campbell.

Some things simply make the fines skyrocket. From how it's been described to me, which may or may not be true, every bullet (for instance) found in a passenger's bag is it's own fine. One incident involved a man with a gun found in his bag, which had a round in the chamber and three in the clip, which, if I recall correctly, would've ended up being about a $5500 fine ($2500 for the gun, $1000 for each bullet, if I remember the numbers right that were told to me - bear in mind this was, like, two years ago, and not in any kind of documentation that I have access to). Assuming the half-off thing works for that as well as knives, he'd only have had to pay $2750 at first.

Also described to me. There are aggravating factors and mitigating factors that the TSI's/management/supervisor (whoever's dealing with the incident before it ends up on the FSD's desk) can assign to particular incidents. If the passenger is, say, a 90 year old silverhaired woman traveling with grandchildren and the knife-over-3" is, say, an antique bayonet thing from her dead husband's days in WWII... that would probably be a mitigating factor. They might choose not to do the fine at all at that point. If the person is argumentative and loud and throwing stuff around and otherwise throwing a hissy-fit, then that'd be an aggravating factor and they're likely to get a larger fine, and would probably be getting told quickly to calm down by a uniformed LEO that'd be on the scene anyway (to my understanding, any time we take a passenger's information for the incident reporting, an LEO has to come make sure that they don't have any outstanding warrants).

At Huntsville, this particular event has only happened once, where the passenger threw his laptop bag onto the floor and sent pens and paper flying everywhere and started screaming at the top of his lungs. When one of the LEOs took a step forward - without even saying anything - it was truly amazing just how quickly he calmed down and regained his composure.

Technically accurate, but that'd be a big stretch of the language in the CFR. Like I said before, you have to start getting pretty belligerent before the fines get whipped out. I daresay it's easier to get a citation from the police on the side of the street for disturbing the peace than it is to get a fine from TSA where you didn't bring any threat-items (for lack of a better term; basically, it means any prohibited item that requires us to notify law enforcement officers) through the checkpoint.

Question for Dean
 

How is it that the TSA has the time and resources needed to impose and manage collection of fines, but it still cannot respond to either of the formal complaints I have filed (one in 2004 and the other in 2007)?

If you are short-handed, wouldn't it make more sense to drop the harassment of passengers part of your duties until you could catch up on the customer service part?

if someone does something which is fine worthy, do they recieve any immediate notice that they will be fined in such a manner as when someone is issued a traffic citation?

Do they instead merely recieve it via the mail? Is the half off grace period from the mailing date or the date of the incident itself?

But that is just it. You are not a customer. You are a suspected criminal terrorist. You deserve no response. You are evil.

Wow, I had no idea that the TSA even gave out fines for stuff like this. Learn something new every day I guess.

Ummmmm, why? Is carrying a 3.5" penknife highly correlated to having outstanding warrants? Or is the TSA just doing it for convenience because the passenger's progress has been halted and there's nothing better to do with them? In my mind, it's the old "probable cause" issue.

This fits perfectly with no new taxes
 

Leave it to the geniuses in DC to come up with another new way to raise taxes disguised as something else.

At the end of the day, there is no legal proceding, no jury of one's peers, there is simply the TSA sending you a notice of you being fined.

Tom Friedman had an interesting column in last Wednesday's NYT. He described what China has invested in the last 7 years - the Olympics, and what the U.S. has invested in - "fighting terrorist". The government claims it's stopped many potential terrorist acts, but of course, we don't know this because it's "national security."

Sorry guys, but not having any practical means to contest a fine levied by someone who may not have a IQ over 7 but who follows procedures may be more than I can deal with. Going thru the Coast Guard administrative system is merely window dressing; they know most people won't go down that road, or in this case, inlet.

Put a system in place that gives people a fair and reasonable recourse, and I'll go for it. Continue on this path, and I'll sell the business, collect the cash and get the F**k out of here. I can only hope that whoever gets elected in November brings something other than paranoid neo-con perspective and correct some of these gross injustices.
:mad:

In my prior career, I was the drafter of final agency action of all civil penalties assessed by my then-agency. Most all of the penalties assessed were reasonable, and required no action on my part. But a certain percentage were obviously retributive is nature, and I would always toss them, because the last thing I wanted is to reward the bad behavior of our front line employees. Every time I reduced or erased a penalty, I took heat for doing so.

The point of this, is of course, is that the average citizen is pretty much screwed if they run into a TSA operative with an attitude. The chance of getting someone higher in the chain to be objective is very slim.

LOL, do you really think anyone in TSA gives a flying F about customer service?