Free Republic

It looks like the powers that be at the TSA might have finally gotten something right. In 2011, the TSA began what would be close to a year long investigation into lax luggage screening procedures at New York’s Newark Liberty International Airport. Hidden cameras at the airport showed dozens of TSA agents doing a half-assed job screening checked baggage and failing to physically search flagged luggage altogether. This same investigation, which originally began as a probe to investigate numerous allegations of items being stolen from checked baggage inside one of the screening room, also found incidents of TSA agents sleeping...

As I was reading an email string about tactics to get mainstream Americans aware of what the TSA is actually doing, it occurred to me that I have never told my entire story. So here goes. My saga starts when I was four years old and had my right leg amputated at the knee. Fast-forward to 2004, when I had a spate of business trips to Washington, DC and Texas. 12/1/2004: I walked up to a DTW (Detroit) security checkpoint and announced I had an artificial leg. Without being wanded I was taken aside by two women to Concourse A,...

VIPR Searches and the American Citizen: 'Dominate. Intimidate. Control.' By John W. Whitehead 7/5/2011 "They're trying to scare the pants off the American people that we need these things... Fear is a commodity and they're selling it. The more they can sell it, the more we buy into it. When American people are afraid, they will accept anything."--Kate Hanni, passengers' rights advocate "Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government...Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and...

Napolitano’s V.I.P.R. Vows to “Dominate,Intimidate and Control”the American People BY COACH COLLINS,ON JULY 15TH,2011 By Doug Book,staff writer Since its inception in 2002,the Department of Homeland Security has grown increasingly contemptuous of the rights of the American people. Indeed,the Gestapo-like tactics of one of the Department’s better known masters of overreach–the TSA–are responsible for countless examples of the organizations daily assault on the Constitution. But recently,another of Janet Napolitano’s handmaidens of harassment has begun to make news…albeit only on the web,of course. It is the TSA’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response task force–or VIPR. Organized into mobile swat teams,VIPR has...