Standing Up For Our Eroding Civil Liberties
Our Founding Fathers were a bunch of obnoxious jerks — and I mean that in the most reverent way. They were fiercely opposed to blind obedience to authority and risked their lives to flip it the bird. Oh, how disappointingly — and dangerously — far we've fallen. Our constitutional rights are increasingly being eroded, and so many Americans are just standing around blinking like livestock.
This past March, I took a more civilly disobedient approach — which sometimes comes at a price. In my case, $500,000. That's what a Transportation Security Administration agent's lawyer demanded from me in a letter for "defaming" her client by saying she had sexually violated me while searching me, and then for "libeling" her by blogging about it.
On March 31, 2011, at the TSA checkpoint in LAX's terminal 6, I found that I had no choice but to get the pat-down. Tears welled in my eyes — for how we've allowed the Constitution to be torn up at the airport door and because I was powerless to stop a total stranger from groping my breasts and genitals as a condition of normal, ordinary business travel.
I can hold back the tears...hang tough...but as I was made to "assume the position" on a rubber mat like a criminal, I thought fast. I decided that these TSA "officers" violating our Fourth Amendment rights, searching us without reasonable suspicion we've committed a crime, do not deserve our quiet compliance. I let the tears come. In fact, I sobbed my guts out as the agent groped me. And then it happened: She jammed the side of her latex-gloved hand up into my genitals. Four times, with only the fabric of my pants as a barrier. I was shocked — utterly unprepared for how she got the side of her hand up there.
Powerless to stop her, but not to vigorously protest what she had done to me, I yelled afterward, "YOU RAPED ME." I later blogged about it, naming her and urging others to name the agents who grope them (a constitutional violation even when done according to TSA procedure, which the search of me was not). We need to make it as uncomfortable as possible to earn a living violating our rights.
Some believe I'm wrong to suggest this — particularly those who believe that the TSA is keeping us safer. Unfortunately, it is not. Security expert Bruce Schneier notes that during the agency's multibillion-dollar history, it has yet to thwart a single attempted terrorist attack. He calls the TSA's efforts "security theater," observing all the dangerous items it misses. For example, in Dallas last year, a TSA tester sneaked a gun through the body scanner. Not once. Five times! That happened just months after a TSA supervisor said I was "lucky" that he wasn't confiscating my dull little drugstore tweezers. Confiscating my tweezers? Why? Because I might use them to break in to the cockpit and over-pluck the pilot's eyebrows?
If the TSA's actual mission were its stated one — "protect(ing) the Nation's transportation systems" — checkpoints wouldn't be staffed by low-wage, unskilled workers, and they wouldn't be searching everyone. They certainly wouldn't be waiting until terrorists get to the airport to root them out. Meaningful measures to thwart terrorist acts require highly trained law enforcement officers using targeted intelligence to identify suspects long before they launch their plots.
The TSA's main accomplishment seems to be obedience training for the American public — priming us to be docile (and even polite) about giving up our civil liberties. The TSA not only violates our Fourth Amendment rights but also has posted signs effectively eradicating our First Amendment right to speak out about it. One such sign, in Denver International Airport, offers the vague warning that "verbal abuse" of agents will "not be tolerated." Travelers are left to wonder whether it's "verbal abuse" to inform the TSA agent probing their testicles that this isn't making us safer, or are they only in trouble if they throw in an obscenity? Not surprisingly, few seem willing to speak out and risk arrest.
I believe I've found a less risky, more impactful way to protest, and it's through sobbing. I'm calling on American women to follow my lead at TSA checkpoints: Opt for the pat-down, and sob your guts out.
Think about the power of it — in airports across America every day, mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters sobbing throughout their government-administered sexual molestation. As the 18th-century economist Adam Smith noted, sympathy for others is a potent human motivator. Because a bureaucracy's first duty is protecting itself, I believe our best chance of abolishing the TSA's pointless daily rights grab is evoking wide-scale sympathy through women's tears. Helpfully, there's plausible deniability for a sobbing woman. TSA supervisors can suspect she's manufacturing her tears, but they can't prove it.
Some find it an absurd contradiction that I write books on manners yet I'm encouraging people to sob at these checkpoints. The truth is, good manners don't always involve going quietly. Sometimes, like when our civil liberties are violated, the most civil thing a person can do is be as loud and uncivil as possible.
Still, I'm a realist. I know that most people will not follow my lead. But, maybe, every day, at every TSA checkpoint, a few will bust out in tears. And maybe, through the spectacle, we can claw back some of the rights we've so docilely handed over.
We cannot ensure our complete physical safety — not even by throwing away all of our civil liberties. Trading our rights for security (or, in this case, "security") is exceptionally dangerous. Every time we go all "We The Sheeple...", every time we allow one more civil liberty to be yanked from us, it's that much easier to take the next and the next...until we wake up one day wondering how we ended up living in a police state. Better that we do our sobbing now than then.
NOTE: Top First Amendment lawyer Marc J. Randazza called the TSA agent's case "meritless" on First Amendment grounds (and SLAPP grounds, as well). Other lawyers and legal scholars have concurred.
Accordingly, there's been no court filing and no contact since the initial letter in late July from the TSA agent's lawyer, Vicki Roberts, a publicity seeker who hopes to have her own reality show. See Roberts' site, RestMyCase.com, and press releases like this one Roberts sent out about herself: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/03/prweb786194.htm
The initial letter from Roberts and Randazza's beautiful response detailing why the TSA agent has no case are at TechDirt.com: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110906/11065015824/tsa-agent-threatens-woman-with-defamation-demands-500k-calling-intrusive-search-rape.shtml
Amy Alkon is the author of "I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle To Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society." She blogs daily at advicegoddess.com and has a weekly radio show at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon.
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Hearing stories like this one doesn't surprise me. It is the prime reason why I won't fly. I have heard recently that they are going to start doing the same thing on Amtrak. If that happens, Amtrak will lose even more passengers. Which is probably why they'd do it in the first place.
This should brighten everyones lives, 'they are doing this for your own good'!
Roving “VIPER” teams??
Roving "VIPR Teams?" Come on. Just another desensitizing, anesthetizing Americans. Feeling more like the Special Republican Guard of a dictator. Did they take the Oath? And in the process, did they find any illegal’s and send them packing home? This doesn't sound so good to me. And since when is a social security office part of transportation?
Residents of Leesburg, Florida were shocked to see their local Social Security office turned into a random Homeland Security checkpoint Tuesday morning, as DHS officers armed with semiautomatic rifles and accompanied by sniffer dogs checked identifications of locals.
“With their blue and white SUVs circled around the Main Street office, at least one official was posted on the door with a semiautomatic rifle, randomly checking identifications. And other officers, some with K-9s, sifted through the building,” reports the Daily Commercial.
The activity was part of Operation Shield, an unannounced drill conducted by the DHS’ Federal Protective Service centered around “detecting the presence of unauthorized persons and potentially disruptive or dangerous activities.”
Thomas Milligan, district manager for the Social Security Administration office, said staff were not informed their offices were about to be stormed by armed FPS officers. DHS officials refused to answer questions asked by local media and left with no explanation at noon.
“Part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, FPS is the federal law enforcement agency that provides integrated security and law enforcement services to over 9,000 federally-owned and leased buildings, facilities, properties and other assets,” states the report.
Indeed, the FPS is used for a variety of roles, not just limited to setting up unannounced ID checkpoints.
As part of the reinvention of the Department of Homeland Security to serve as a tool of political repression, the Federal Protective Service is used by the DHS to track the political activities of peaceful advocacy groups. The FPS was seen arresting photographers in Portland last November during an OWS rally.
In 2004, the FPS arrested a veteran for the crime of complaining to his local VA office in Des Moines.
A separate component of Homeland Security, VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response), recently received an expansion in funding from Congress that will see 2011′s figure of around 9,300 checkpoints increased with the addition of 12 new VIPR teams, who will be used to carry out security checks at bus depots, train stations, ferry ports and highways.
The extra money is being demanded despite the fact that there is “no proof that the roving viper teams have foiled any terrorist plots or thwarted any major threat to public safety,” according to an L.A. Times report. Source: http://www.infowars.com/dhs-officers...id-checkpoint/
It was previously posted that an AMTRAK engineer said TSA boarded and searched the train with semi-auto rifles? Their credentials were questioned because they are not licensed law enforement officers. That was a mistake! TSA = Homeland Security = VIPR This is a very bad development. TSA federal workers who used to be under the FAA now under HS with semis and limitless power ... how scary is that? Are you understanding what is going on?