To be fair, the scenes were from the Bush administration as well.
The argument is that if you want to fly, you must endure this. I fly around twice a month. What part of the 4th Amendment was suspended while I was elsewhere?
In late October, I flew from Charleston to Portland, Maine. It was right after the printer cartridge debacle. I flew home a week after the election. Fully a month after the Yemen printer cartridges threat was known, I had cleared the first leg of security and was standing in the line waiting to shed my shoes when I was approached by an attractive well-dressed man with no ID outside the ribbon.
He smiled and asked, “Are you carrying any printer cartridges?”
I live like a cartoon character where the devil resides on one shoulder and an angel on the other. The devil would have me stare at the man; shrug my shoulders and say, “You got me. Man, if you hadn’t asked me, all of these people…”
My response? “Not that I know of.”
Reasonable question, I guess. Little late outta the gate. These people – the TSA and HS – are just doing their jobs.
We could do this cheaply with dogs and profiling (when’s the last time a terrorist attack originated from Israel?), but we had to get the government involved with unions, un-legislated suspension of rights and political correctness.
There are better ways to handle this. Be that as it may, I go Maine in early December and return not long before Christmas. I will tolerate the humiliation (we don’t have scanners) because I have an overriding reason to head to Maine in early winter.
Still. Am I wrong? Aren’t the TSA personnel agents of the government? What part of “probable cause” did I miss? All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.
