Tag: tsa

#rsrh QotD, Did He Stamp His Foot? edition.

James Clyburn (via Instapundit), speaking in full awareness that he is a long-haul Congressman who is secure in the knowledge that his party will frame any attempt to make his seat competitive as being an assault against civil rights:

“We’ve had some incidents where TSA authorities think that congresspeople should be treated like everybody else…”

Which, if true, is something to be marked in the TSA’s favor.  Still, I doubt anything of the sort has happened.  Unless you define “treated like everybody else” as “not literally kowtowing,” which I believe is not yet formally required procedure for dealing with Members of Congress.  Oh, wait: I forgot.  We threw out a lot of idiots last November who thought that it was.

Still: must be nice to be able to say whatever fool things come into your head without worrying about the consequences or context.  Bad for your long-term cognitive abilities, of course – but still, it must be nice.

Moe Lane

#rsrh The perfect holiday gift.

Via Chequer-Board (RS alumnus Pejman’s new site; check it out) comes a great concept for presents: underwear with metallic-ink lettering so that the message shows up on a TSA pornoscanner.  Right now all they’ve got is the Fourth Amendment, but this is an idea whose time has come, methinks.

Oh, and read the rest of Pej’s article.  Wonder why Opt-Out Day was reported as a bust?  Well read, and wonder no more.

Pornoscan Congress!

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Ann Coulter is not precisely on my Christmas list – and, in the highly unlikely possibility she knows my name, I would not be on hers – but she makes a darn good suggestion here: if we’re going to randomly pornoscan and/or strip-search fliers then we should blipping well do the same to Members of Congress and their staff when they try to enter Federal buildings.  What’s that you say? They’re not likely to be suicide terrorists?

Funny about that: NEITHER AM I.  And these people work for me.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Pornoscan Congress!

#rsrh The TSA is probably doomed at this point.

Completely subjective opinion on my part, but it feels like just about everybody woke up over the course of the last week and realized that not only they hated the current, ineffectual system; so did everybody else.  And after the yelling came the name-calling; and after the name-calling came the sarcastic mockery; and once that starts the perceived support for a group or policy can erode like a sand castle at high tide.  Pretty quickly, too.

Guess we’ll see if the Thanksgiving holiday confirms my opinion or not.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh The TSA is probably doomed at this point.

#rsrh Interesting thought re TSA.

Glenn Reynolds, on the news that the TSA is probably contributing to more accidents on the road:

“Of course, a few thousand extra highway deaths don’t produce the national trauma of a 9/11, and that’s a reasonable thing to factor in somehow.”

It’s the qualitative difference between ‘tragedy’ and ‘atrocity,’ Glenn.  There is no organized conspiracy to kill American citizens via car crashes, so each death is an separate tragedy, and even in the rare cases where actual malice is involved in the crash it’s an individual malice.  But 9/11 was the result of an organized conspiracy; and a failed one, at that.  They were trying to kill 50,000 people, after all.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Michael Chertoff behind TSA pornoscanners?

‘Pornoscanners’ is what Boing Boing (courtesy of AoSHQ Headlines) calls them, and that name works for me.   Anyway, it would seem that Michael Chertoff had his hand in the cookie jar on this one: while Secretary of Homeland Security he ordered the pornoscanners from Rapiscan (a company that was one of his clients), and he’s been a busy little advocate bee on that company’s behalf ever since. When asked about it on the Anderson Cooper show, the response (skip ahead to about 4:55) was largely content-free on spokesflack TSA John Pistole’s part, and by ‘content-free’ I mean ‘Pistole claims to know nothing on the subject’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4lyQFwCzTI

Credit where credit is due: Jane Hamsher has a good timeline of this ongoing mess over at Firedoglake, once you compensate for Lieberman*.  Any other year, this would have been a scandal eight months ago; but this was a midterm election coupled with a horrible economy, so we’re only getting to it now.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Michael Chertoff behind TSA pornoscanners?

TSA appointee violated privacy, lied to Congress about it.

(H/T AoSHQ Headlines) Well, at least Erroll Souther’s not a tax cheat, right? Puts him ahead of the pack for this administration, it does.

The White House nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration gave Congress misleading information about incidents in which he inappropriately accessed a federal database, possibly in violation of privacy laws, documents obtained by The Washington Post show.

[snip]

Southers first described the episode in his October affidavit, telling the Senate panel that two decades ago he asked a San Diego Police Department employee to access confidential criminal records about the boyfriend. Southers said he had been censured by superiors at the FBI. He described the incident as isolated and expressed regrets about it.

The committee approved his nomination Nov. 19. One day later, Southers wrote to Lieberman and Collins saying his first account was incorrect. After reviewing documents, he wrote, he recalled that he had twice conducted the database searches himself, downloaded confidential law enforcement records about his wife’s boyfriend and passed information on to the police department employee, the letter said.

‘Incorrect.’

Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.

Word of advice for 2012 convention planners?

Pick somewhere easily accessible via train.

In the wake of the terrorism attempt Friday on a Northwest Airlines flight, federal officials on Saturday imposed new restrictions on travelers that could lengthen lines at airports and limit the ability of international passengers to move about an airplane.

The government was vague about the steps it was taking, saying that it wanted the security experience to be “unpredictable” and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport — a prospect that may upset airlines and travelers alike.

But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

Ooh, ooh, I can answer this one! The answer is “A lot!” After all, the people making the rules here don’t actually have to suffer under them, so there’s no negative feedback loop to keep them from saddling us with onerous travel restrictions designed to hide the fact that the system did not, in fact, work.  So expect the geniuses currently running the government to make sure that that the rules are blindly applied across the board; it beats thinking, right?

For more, see The Agitator, via RS McCain; and Hot Air.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.