Your government doesn’t like you very much
News from San Diego — the government doesn’t much like uppity citizens:
The Transportation Security Administration has opened an investigation targeting John Tyner, the Oceanside man who left Lindbergh Field under duress on Saturday morning after refusing to undertake a full body scan. Tyner recorded the half-hour long encounter on his cell phone and later posted it to his personal blog, along with an extensive account of the incident. The blog went viral, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of comments.
Michael J. Aguilar, chief of the TSA office in San Diego, called a news conference at the airport Monday afternoon to announce the probe. He said the investigation could lead to prosecution and civil penalties of up to $11,000. TSA agents had told Tyner on Saturday that he could be fined up to $10,000. “That’s the old fine,” Aguilar said. “It has been increased.”
Tyner has a point, as the hundreds of saved body scans (grossout alert!) testify. Screening for weapons originated in the US in around 1969, the year that apparently 82 airplanes were hijacked, many of them to Cuba. But now, at long last, things have gone too far.
It’s time to stop harassing three year old girls and the Sisters of Mercy. It’s time for TSA agents to be carted off to someplace not nice if they have comics about giving cavity searches to kids on their computers (is that last one real?).
It is long past time for profiling, or at least anti-profiling of airline passengers. (Is there a reason a flight attendant needs to get naked before she can go to work, or that a guy with 9 million miles on American Airlines needs to be groped, or that an octogenarian grandma needs any inspection at all?) But that would require common sense. What are the chances of that when even the AP understands more about our adversaries than does the administration?