And remember, the TSA is led by a guy who thinks singing & dancing are sins!

A flight attendant is being investigated for spiking a crying baby's apple juice with Xanax. I guess this means all flight crews are now trying to drug loud and annoying passengers.

You are too quick to judge. Then, you make the mistake of assigning the behavior to all "Feds." If the person who placed the note in the suitcase is also the person who wrote the comment, then their behavior shouldn't be linked to all Feds. I'm willing to bet this is an isolated incident carried out by a single individual.

The truly appaling aspect is the knee-jerk reaction this incident has received.

Oh yes, surely indignation over an abuse of authority by a member of a new federal agency that is not subject to public oversight, equipped with sweeping powers in great excess of those afforded by the Constitution and charged with maintaining the security of millions of fliers from terrorist attack is FAR MORE APPALING than the actual abuse itself. Jesus.

The person who was hired to screen our luggage was put there BY THE TSA and granted incredible amounts of authority -- we effectively suspended the Search and Seizure restrictions of the Constitution so that this person could do her/his job. And we discover that rather than devoting her/his time to keeping bombs and boxcutters out of the sky, s/he is off on a one-person crusade to intimidate the public into embracing a political position s/he feels is representative of rightthink.

Every time I hear that the new aircops have overstepped their authority, behaved irrationally or abusively, and failed to treat their office with the gravitas and responsibility it deserves, it makes me scared to be a frequent air-traveller. These people have been afforded billions and had their path cleared of legal hurdles in order to getone with one very specific and vital task, and instead of engaging themselves in the pursuit of that task, they are confiscating nail-clippers, harassing political opponents, and barring people whose taste in literature they dislike from flying.

An isolated incident? What rock have you been living under? Have you flown lately? Have you missed the litany -- the fucking OCEAN -- of complaints of irrational, abusive, often inexcusable behaviour engaged in by our soi-disant Guardians of the Sky?

The Constitution presumes that human beings are subject to human folly and foibles, and so it restricts the authority of the government such that the risks of this folly is mitigated by hard limits on power. We have removed those checks and balances and unsurprisingly, we find ourselves living in a world where imperfect humans in positions of unparalleled authority with unprecedented absence of accountability are behaving as badly as can be expected.

Isolated incident? It's the tip of the iceberg.

Edited by author 03-15-2003 05:05 PM
"A flight attendant is being investigated for spiking a crying baby's apple juice with Xanax. I guess this means all flight crews are now trying to drug loud and annoying passengers."

Well, since we're engaging in absurd slippery slope arguments, I guess that means the baby drugger shouldn't be investigated? Cause otherwise we have to suspect everybody, and since that's wrong, we should just let this one go.

The rest of your argument is up to that level as well. This is a very serious thing here (the baggage incident). I saw this on the news last night, and I was appalled. People in these positions have been given special powers, and you saw Spiderman, right? There was a case a few years back where a police officer stopped a couple, and finding they were on their way to an abortion clinic, held them and harangued them for 45 minutes about abortion -- they complained and he was punished for his gross abuse of the powers given him. These people are not our parents, there to help instruct us in the "proper" way to act and think. When they do this kind of thing, it should be treated incredibly seriously.

Edited by author 03-15-2003 05:14 PM
(l)user wrote:
"And remember, the TSA is led by a guy who thinks singing & dancing are sins!"

Who is this leader? The TSA is headed by James M. Loy. Norman Minetta (sec of transportation) is Loy's boss. Neither person holds such views.

Perhaps you're thinking of John Ashcroft-- but Ashcroft evidentally doesn't believe that singing is sinful. (Dancing, maybe, but not singing)
http://www.cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ash...sings.wbtv.med.html

I think its fair to judge the entire TSA on this. Nico Melendez's first public act was telling people they're looking into it and, unbelievably, he said something to the effect of : its a jump to think it was a TSA employee. Oh man, cut the bullshit already. This pro-GOP letter writing is the kind of thing federal employees should be afraid to do for fear of being fired, not something that will be protected and possibly covered up by some embarassed TSA officers.

Off-topic:

"Perhaps you're thinking of John Ashcroft-- but Ashcroft evidentally doesn't believe that singing is sinful. (Dancing, maybe, but not singing)"

I don't know, his singing is pretty sinful...

What also amazes me to no end is that with the defense that it wasn't an TSA agent, but rather somebody else at the airport who did it, they have just shot down their entire reasoning for searching the luggage in the first place.

If it's that easy to tamper with luggage AFTER it has been inspected, what's the inspection worth?

Edited by author 03-15-2003 09:26 PM
Cory--

The TSA is responsible for the security of each one of the 762 million passengers that the FAA has estimated will travel via airliner in the United States during 2003.

What constitutes your "litany"--your "fucking OCEAN"--of complaints? Is it 10,000? No, wait--that percentage was so small my calculator couldn't display it. Let's say your "fucking OCEAN" is 100,000 complaints this year. Nope. Still too small. OK--let's say your "fucking OCEAN" is one million complaints.

That equals a whole, whopping, oppressive, fascistic .13% of all air travellers. That's not even one percent. That's one tenth of one percent. You'd have to have a little under 10 million complaints to equal just one, single percent of all passengers that will travel via airliner in the U.S. this year.

An "iceberg"? Prove it. You can't, because your ceaseless spouting about the jackbooted government has its foundation in a fantasy world wherein all authority is always Bad. Your repeated objections to the any mistake on the part of any representative of any government authority at any time in any place is dogmatic at best.

The point of the American system of governance is not that humans need to be controlled by checks and balances. It is that humans make mistakes, and that there needs to be a mechanism in place to correct those mistakes. They often need several tries to get it right. The system allows for the correction of imperfections over time. Your emphasis on the continual need to control imperfect humans, rather than acceptance of them as they are and the need to make allowances for their growth, betrays a political philosophy that is of the same root as every totalitarian experiment in history.

The TSA will be sixteen months old this coming Wednesday. Clearly, you expect every employee of the TSA to immediately meet the same exacting standards of human perfection to which all representatives of governmental authority should stringently adhere.

However, if you would focus on the realities of human imperfection, rather than the ephemerally perfect ideals of which you are so passionately enamored, you might see the way that leads to the offering of effective, constructive criticism, instead of the repetitive mouthing of predictable objections.

Ian, your argument might have a small leg to stand on if the TSA hadn't taken the tack they did. Instead of accepting responsibility for the actions of their employees, they try to weasel their way through. What the employee did was wrong, really wrong. The TSA response was so wrong it's off the scale -- as others have pointed out, for it to be a valid defense means that they are completely ineffective at their job.

Of course, your response also tries to make the claim that 10,000, 100,000, or even nearly a million complaints a year would be no big deal. That's just weird.

No, the TSA response was typically bureaucratic, one example among countless others found throughout our government's history since its inception. That's the nature of bureaucracies, and people have been complaining about it since the invention of written records that required filing. To insinuate that this example is an indicator of some new effort to oppress people--as happens so often here--is overreaching.

And no, my response tries to make no such claim: I contend only that Cory's hyperbolic "fucking OCEAN" of complaints is no such thing.

Cory-

It is obvious from your post that you've decided to lump this particualr incident with every other TSA incident you have knowledge of. And, it is an isolated incident. How many other reports are there of inspection tags being marked up with personal commentary? To my knowledge, this is the only one.

If you want to rant and lump everything together to somehow paint a picture of an agency gone mad with power, then be sure to point out everything they get right. This tag incident is not reflective of an agency abusing power. It's more likely about one person who thought they would deliver a childish message.

On the other hand, the comments by the TSA official who felt it couldn't be one of their own is troubling. It makes you pause and wonder how well the investigation will be carried out., which remains to be seen.

This got me thinking of ways to make messages or signs that would ONLY show up in a x-ray machine or scanner. Imagine a very clear NO WAR sign that would show up on the screens of your hand luggage. The best kind would be a sign that showed nothing special in visible light. Of course, you could say anything; GO WAR, for instance.

Come on - this is obviously an isolated incident by an inspector with a degraded sense of responsibility.

Get. Over. It.

Get over it? Shouldn't that be directed at the guy stuffing his personal political opinions into other people's luggage?

Get over it? Fuck off and die. Twice.

What this is is simple. It's anonymous intimidation by a federal officer -- a federal officer with almost unlimited authority during the time you are airside in airports.

It is deeply, deeply, wrong. The inspector should be fired and charged with abuse of authority. The supervisor should be fired, for allowing such things to happen. No doubt the inspector showed his handiwork to others back in the luggage area, they should be fired for allowing the threat to be conveyed.

What next?

"We don't appreciate your support of the Democratic Party"

"We don't appreciate your support of the 5th Amendment."

"We don't appreciate you."

Or even, "We don't appreciate being told to fuck off and die. Twice."

Edited by author 03-15-2003 11:13 PM
Indeed, if a federal officer with almost unlimited authority in airports said that or even just gutlessly and anonymously stuffed it inside your suitcase.

It was wrong for the federal officer to write that remark on the card, but you've got to give him credit for having good penmanship.

If this were an episode of CSI, that's how they'd nail the guy.

They should make more white space on those cards so they can write little essays. Then we could grade them. Or trade them with your friends.

Edited by author 03-16-2003 10:37 AM
There is no reason to get over it. This is the latest in a series of "individual incidents" of authority/position abuse since the TSA started operations. "How much are you flying" is a perfectly valid question to those who are soft-pedaling this incident.

Anybody remember the Breast Milk incident a few months ago?
How many of you have sat there and watched them destroy your ordinary personal property(shoes, luggage, etc) in the course of an inspection or sat there waiting for a traveling companion to show up on board, wondering if they were going to make it or had been sent off to the gulag for some reason.

It looks a lot different from my seat where I've clocked over 40K miles over the past 4 months. We had a whole set of nutdrivers confiscated because they were "weapons" on my trip to Laos last month, which it turns out we couldn't replace once we got there(but really needed). I've had to listen to friends fume over hiking boots that were practically destroyed because the TSA goon insisted on bending out each eye hook for no apparent reason, carry-on bags that zipped or clasped shut until the TSA got hold of them and on and on.
It's almost a game to guess what mood and condition your friends/co-workers are going to show up in on board.
Each of these is an "individual incident".
Cory is absolutely right. This is the tip of the iceberg and we're heading for it top speed.

They're coming for the frequent flyers, but don't let that bother you since you're not a frequent flyer.

I've flown that much or more since 9-11. The security varies from airport to airport. I've taken off my shoes in most. Had all the extra searches. Recently left a knife in one carry-on. Security guy watched my bags while I went out, mailed it home and came back. That was cool. Before 9-11, whenever I had stuff broken or screwed up, I got pissed, got make-goods from the airline and chalked it up to some moke in the back who wasn't careful with my stuff. That same moke and mokes like him or her are obviously still there - in this case, making stupid political comments. I don't see these incidents as part of a greater insidious government conspiracy - just business as usual, only a lot tenser. I think Ian's perspective is on the money.

Your "moke in the back" has been handed his "double-naught spy" credentials now, and that makes it something that should not be ignored or "gotten over".

One thing:

To me, "not the work of a TSA employee" doesn't imply someone was intercepting baggage and defacing TSA forms; it implies that Mr. Goldberg himself wrote the message on the card in order to make the agency look bad.

Could be, Spooge, but if that were indeed the case, I think the feds would have the proof by now. Having the proof when it's not the case takes longer.

Hey, usually when I find my bags have been opened it's after 3 months and the bags have been to Mexico City (not MY destination, but apparently my bags wanted to go there) where all the valuable contents have been removed. I'll take a note from the inspectors over the usual plundering any time.