Ask me why I won't fly these days...

* Forwarded (from: FIDOGUNS) by Roy J. Tellason using timEd 1.10.y2k.
* Originally from Paul Nixon (1:270/615.77) to All.
* Original dated: Tue Jan 07, 23:48

From: Paul Nixon 
Subject: [fidoguns] TSA and bureaucrats

THE WORLD WE ARE LOSING

North's law of bureaucracy is as follows:

"There is no government regulation, no matter how plausible it
initially appears, that will not eventually be applied by some bureaucrat
in a way
that defies common sense."

For a regulation that makes considerable sense, it may take months or even
years for the right bureaucrat to come along. But not always.

Last Friday evening, my wife returned from a trip to California. On
Saturday, she began to unpack her bag. Not bags -- just one relatively
small one. It actually fits in an overhead bin. For the sake of this
report, I'm glad
that she didn't do that with this bag. She noticed that the edge of the bag
was torn. I thought this might have been the work of the famous gorilla
in the old American Tourister luggage TV ad. But then she said, "the
lock is broken." I told her: "It's probably the new flight
security rules that went into effect on January 1. The inspectors broke the
lock and got into the bag."
She opened it. Sure enough, she found a slip of paper. I reprint it here.

Transportation Security Administration Notification of Baggage Inspection

To protect you and your fellow passengers, the Transpiration Security
Administration (TSA) is required by law to inspect all checked baggage.
As part of this process, some bags are opened and physically inspected.
Your bag was among those selected for physical inspection.

During the inspection, your bag and its contents may have been searched for
prohibited items. At the completion of the inspection, the contents were
returned to your bag, which was resealed with a temper-evident seal.

If the TSA screener was unable to open your bag for inspection because it
was locked, the screener may have been forced to break the locks on your
bag. TSA sincerely regrets having to do this, and has taken care to reseal
your bag upon
completion of inspection. However, TSA is not liable for damage to your
locks resulting from this necessary security precaution. As for the slash
in the bag, who knows? The gorilla left no note of explanation.

You had better calculate this travel expense into the budgets of your
flights from now on.

Upstairs in the terminal gates, the security people make searches of
passengers. Searches are required to be random, for to go after some of Ann
Coulter's famous "swarthy men" would be to violate people's
rights on a racial basis, which is not allowed, rather than violating
people's rights on a non-racial basis, which is required by law. So, to
maintain the illusion of randomness in a world of surveillance cameras,
government data bases, and other
profiling technologies, they have to conduct random searches.

During World War II, the British cracked the Germans' military code. The
Brits knew the times and routes of the oil tankers that were to supply
Rommel's forces in Africa. To keep the Germans from figuring out that their
code had
been broken, the British would send a reconnaissance plane, which would
make itself visible to the men on the tankers, and then run for cover. The
plane would send a message announcing the whereabouts of the tanker. The
Germans on
the tanker would conclude that they had been spotted from the air. What bad
luck! If they radioed home, they would tell the command that they had been
spotted. Then a British submarine would sink the tanker. The Germans never
did alter the code.

The reconnaissance plane was part of the deception. So are the random
searches of passengers and bags. They are to provide camouflage: (1) from
voters who demand action; (2) from lawyers who might otherwise get their
swarthy clients released on the basis of racial profiling. Anyone who
really expects searches like these to protect airliners is so abysmally
dense that he might as be a
Congressman.

The other purposes of the new surveillance system relate more to
controlling average people than catching terrorists.

Chuck Harvey

http://chuckharvey.shorturl.com
 
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