Our society allows police to subject individuals even to abusive intrusions when such actions are deemed reasonable responses to actions. They stop a speeding car. They search with reasonable suspicion based on specific and demonstrable facts. They subdue and even kill a citizen in response to escalating levels of violence.
However, TSA bureaucrats are allowed intimate, primal domination of people when they have done nothing to elicit the behavior. The massive, random and warrantless program of body scanners and pat downs creates an environment for institutionalizing the worst demons of the human condition.
This country has before and should not again, suffer the consequences of allowing one group of people dominion over another, when submission was not provoked by the other party’s uncivil behavior. In The Life and Times of Fredrick Douglas, he believed that slavery perpetrated as much emotional and psychological damage on the owner as the slave.
The Homeland Security approach contrasts sharply to the disparaged NSA program for warrantless intrusion into private communications, where analysts sought a handful of useful leads from the 60 to 100 billion calls per day. Their standards first passed a Fourth Amendment test, and then focused on much narrower parameters to find signals of interest.
For the NSA probability and statistics enabled approaches, which are otherwise condemned as profiling. TSA should be allowed enhanced surveillance methods, when their rules focus on actions and characteristics denoting responses with a higher probability for terrorist actions.
hate to point this out to all you MADD supporters out there...we started down the slippery slope the day SCOTUS said it was OK to have random DUI highway checkpoints.