Civil Rights / Liberties

The best thing is, after he was turned away for a lack of ID and boarding pass, they watched him slip through the airport’s secure area with his badge (he’s a Delta employee) yet waited 45 minutes to call Port Authority Cops.

This isn’t to say I think we’re necessarily in danger from behavior like this or that the TSA’s job is anything more than a security puppet show.

Blogger Bob has become a magician!

The TSA recently announced that its Pre-Check program has expanded to five additional airports, bringing the total participation locations to 40 airports.While the TSA is celebrati

He didn’t want to be identified by name. He says he’s just a guy who travels who reads my site.

I saw that you care about privacy and probably want to know that this happens. I travel a lot and it is boring to just wait at the gate.

In February, we wrote about a young man named Sai who was bullied, harassed, and unlawfully detained by the TSA at Boston Logan Airport. Well, Sai is back.

And the TSA is still harassing him.

Read the rest at TSA News.

Very important case challenging the TSA's strip-search scanners and gropes coming up in Boston tomorrow. Read about it at TSA News.

By John Grant

“The elite always has a Plan B, while people have no escape.”
            - Ahmad Saadawi

You may have already read about the $50 million set-aside for new TSA uniforms. Some people, including on Capitol Hill, are objecting to this expense a time when the nation is facing budget cuts through the sequester.

To placate lawmakers, the agency has just announced that it will not use that money on TSA uniforms, but rather on passenger uniforms.

Lisa Simeone, in a comment at NJ.com:

Ah, yes, our old friend Newark Liberty Airport, site of so many colorful TSA hijinks.

As we’ve reported many times, while you’re being separated from your belongings and getting your private parts groped, because you’re obviously too dangerous to be let onto a plane otherwise, much of the luggage and cargo are still going into the hold unscreened.

Read the rest at TSA News.

By Dave Lindorff

Willie James Sauls is unlikely to see the outside of a prison. Last fall a court in the state of Texas sentenced this 37-year-old man to 45 years in jail. His crime: he snatched the purse from an old woman. 

Ah, yes, the Brain Trust in Blue, as our writer Deborah Newell Tornello calls them — every time you think they’ve topped themselves, they prove you wrong.

In the latest episode of The Adventures of Darwin Award Candidates, a TSA agent at JFK (source of so many shenanigans) was “playing around” with a canister of pepper spray he found on the floor. Oops!

Wanna insult a reporter? There’s no easier way than accusing him or her of being a shill for the other side, of churning out propaganda instead of covering a subject.

And that’s especially true when it comes to the TSA.

Read the rest at TSA News.

As you’ve probably read by now, a man apparently trying to impersonate a pilot on a US Airways flight in Philadelphia now faces federal and state charges.

A full five years after the TSA began installing airport scanners and forcing people through them, and almost two years after it was ordered by Congress and the courts to hold a public comment period on them, the agency is finally complying.

Never mind that logic and common sense dictate that an agency would take public comments before implementing a new, invasive procedure.

If they scanned and groped the unskilled workers (hired with cursory vetting by the TSA) before they left the airports, think of all the crimes they’d discover. In yet another of so many TSA-worker-perpetrated crimes, an Orlando TSA agent was arrested after he took home the computer that some honest traveler turned in to him.

Read the rest at TSA News.

As we reported here the other day, a wounded Marine wrote to his Congressman after being humiliated by the TSA at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport.

Another kick-ass post by our resident mathematician, Sommer Gentry.

Read the rest at TSA News.

Phoenix’s Sky Harbor has had its fair share of TSA complaints.

The TSA's VIPR teams, about which we’ve written countless times, have been at it again — this time in Chicago.

According to this CBS report (presented in an embarrassingly credulous, golly-gee-whiz fashion), a VIPR team slithered onto the Metra system and started manhandling bags and questioning people. Why? Because they had detected a nuclear isotope.

A former TSA screener at Newark International Airport concurs with other screeners and with rational observers and actual security experts: “A lot of what we do is make-believe.”

Read the rest at TSA News.

In a post today by the normally clear-eyed Jonathan Capehart — and in The Washington Post, no less — you will see plenty of admiration for the way the TSA handles children and the elderly (they get to keep their shoes and jackets on!) as well as cheery support for the some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others 

Lynne Stewart has devoted her life to the oppressed – a constant advocate for the countless many deprived in the United States of their freedom and their rights.

Indeed, bombs are too hard to detect by the TSA’s force of unskilled workers who take money for violating American’s dignity, genitals, and Fourth Amendment rights.

The LAX Millennium Bomber plot was discovered, over the phone, by a guy in Seattle — a highly trained FBI agent who heard a guy who had a passport saying he was born in Montreal but speaking with a French-Algerian accent.

Perhaps this would be better titled "Poetic Justice."

In another case of whistleblowing, a TSA administrator in Syracuse, New York has accused his supervisor of creating a hostile work environment.

Read the rest at TSA News.

Obama Wants Lynne Stewart Dead

by Stephen Lendman

Lynne's 73. She's gravely ill.

Obama killed Chavez. He wants Lynne dead. Unjustifiable longterm imprisonment assures it. 

She's a breast cancer survivor. It reemerged. It's spreading.

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill has finally gotten a taste of the medicine she and her fellow Congresspeople have shoved down the throats of the rest of us.

Read the rest at TSA News.