I was sitting across from a Marine tonight and the subject of the TSA came up.  He had this to say.

Nothing confused me or pissed me off more when flying home and we switched to a commercial charter flight off of a military transport.  They went through and made all of us throw away our lighters.  We still had our M16’s and bayonets, but those lighters were mighty dangerous, especially since we could use them to take over the plane.

The saddest thing was, he was dead serious.  Flying back they made everyone toss their lighters for “security reasons”.

So many of you saw my last rant about the TSA.  Well more information keeps coming out, and it just keeps getting better and better.  I’m going all Kevin Baker on this now cause I’m going from simply annoyed and pissed, to all out furious.  I have a feeling that I’m going to end up in all out JayG Hate-Rage here soon.

Organized State Sponsored Corruption

First up, a nice hustle:

Suddenly, a small middle-aged woman wearing a TSA (Transportation Security Administration) uniform moved along that line, pushing a wheelchair while asking, in a thick non-English accent, if anyone was in need of her help.

…

Zoom. Off we went, the four of us, circumventing roughly an hour’s shuffle line, until we reached the screening stations. Along the way, the woman in the TSA uniform said in her broken English, “I take care of you; you take care of me.”

The TSA has nothing to do with security and everything to do with providing a sandbox where criminals, thieves, and hustlers can attack their victims while they are held at gun point by their own government.  Don’t believe me that it’s government sponsored?

I reached into my pocket, selected a $5 bill from a fold, and conspicuously handed it to her. No moderately alert TSA or NTSB uniformed personnel in the vicinity could have missed it. It was clear: I was paying off a uniformed TSA worker officer for privileged access.

Every last person there working for the government was complicit in the behavior.  I have heard some say that if they were paid better they wouldn’t risk it by stealing or committing crimes.  I call bull shit and here’s why.

• Anything they steal is extra income under the table.  Tax free, no snooping about, free to do with it what they wish.
• They are immune even when they are caught.  Sometimes they’re fired, but that’s usually someone who I find probably should have won a Darwin award as a small child.  Instead due to all parents being so risk adverse their kid made it through childhood to steal and molest us, such wonderful parents wishing the pain of their offspring upon the world.
• Why should they be paid more than the people actually paying their salaries?  I work my ass off, went to school, and most of those illiterate tree dwellers never even graduated high school.  Why should they be paid more just so they wont steal from me?  That argument sounds like the Barbary Pirates asking for tribute.

I could start to list all the other instances of state sponsored criminals but I have a series dedicated to that.  Here are some of the other incidents I have talked about previously that the TSA is responsible for. 

A Black Hole Consuming Money at Ever Increasing Rates

First we will look at the costs of training up workers.

It cost $1 billion just to train workers, which now number more than 62,000, and “they actually trained more workers than they have on the job,” Mica said.

Wait, they’re training more workers than they currently have jobs for?  Why in the Sam hell would they do something like that?

“As part of TSA’s ongoing efforts to ensure staffing efficiency, TSA requested a new authority to be able to continue to utilize early retirement as needed through 2013,” the agency said in a statement provided to The Hill.

”By lowering the age and service requirements, and increasing the number of employees eligible for retirement, TSA will be able to efficiently manage its resources as the agency stays ahead of evolving threats,” the statement continued.

Oh now it makes sense.  Get some people to work for you, then offer them early retirement on the taxpayer dime.  Lets not forget either about how the TSA has been allowed to unionize.  They are already robbing the private sector blind by over hiring, and then offering the excess hires early retirement.

This must be Obama’s job stimulus right? Hire people using the stimulus bill and retire the others currently working here?  Think about that, if a business ran their books and hiring practices like that they would be broke.  Oh wait, what’s the current debt clock count again?

They Create Even Further Security Problems

The TSA through their hiring practices have actually added problems to the one’s they’re supposedly attempting to solve.  For instance take the ability for unverified personnel to be able to access secure area’s in airports.  The TSA solved this problem right?  If you said yes, you’re wrong.

This month a federal audit reveals that, after nearly a decade, the TSA still can’t guarantee that agents working in “secure” areas of airports don’t pose a risk. That’s because the agency doesn’t always verify the identity of job applicants or even their legal status against a government immigration database.

This means that the TSA can’t account for agency employees with access to secure areas of airports, according to a Homeland Security Inspector General report made public a few days ago.

Wait, the TSA has provided a path to allow unsecured personnel access to secured areas!?  I thought these guys were big into security and understood the importance of validating people are who they say they are.

Couple issues like this along with lost uniforms and other identification materials.  And it further illustrates how the TSA is really just A Security Theater.  If anything they have increased the attack area for airports.

Not to mention the fact that the backups caused by their “security” actually provide an even better point of attack that taking down an airplane itself.  Instead of getting just a single plane, imagine getting a whole terminal?  That’s what happens when you create choke points where a lot of people are congregated at.  Moving forward from that though, how would you effectively defend against that?  You really can’t apart from screening before everyone gets stuck at that single choke point.  For example as you enter the airport, but honestly that isn’t entirely effective now is it? 

TSA Violating Common Health Practices Concerning Radiation

The TSA body scanners emit ionizing radiation in some instances.  What is disturbing is that the TSA will not allow employees to wear proper safety equipment that is normally required when working around radioactive material.  Not to mention the fact that the machines weren’t even certified by NIST like Napolitano claimed, but NIST doesn’t even do equipment safety checks like that.

It gets better though because many claim repeatedly how safe those machines are.  Yet there was an incident of the machines giving higher doses.  Not to mention the fact they detected a woman’s IUD.  While they may test the machine on a lower setting, it is obviously capable of a larger dose.  Remember that ionizing radiation is cumulative, the exposure meter doesn’t reset to 0 after you’ve been away for a while.  The more you fly, or are exposed to other sources through your work, the more your risk goes up.

So it is completely unsurprising I would see something like this in the news then:

After Union representatives in Boston discovered a “cancer cluster” amongst TSA workers linked with radiation from the body scanners, the TSA sought to downplay the matter and refused to issue employees with dosimeters to measure levels of exposure.

Unsurprisingly the TSA promptly began the game of cover your ass, trying to downplay the issue and suppress the significance of the situation.  They needed to continue the belief that the government could do no wrong and is as infallible as god herself.

The Parents Are Noticing 

It gets better though since the person responsible for the creation of the TSA stated the following:

“The whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats,” said Rep. John Mica (R. -Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

“It mushroomed into an army,” Mica said.  “It’s gone from a couple-billion-dollar enterprise to close to $9 billion.”

As for keeping the American public safe, Mica says, “They’ve failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.”

There are many that believe that the government can solve our problems, and if it can’t immediately the solution is a bigger government.  That’s like saying your house is on fire and you’re going to put it out by setting fired to the other side.  Government just creates new issues, they don’t solve them.  Even more importantly they cannot solve a problem such as terrorism.

Previously it was mentioned how A Security Theater is doing nothing more than being reactionary and operating like a defensible position, I’m not alone in that connection since even Mica noticed.

One of the most important rules in the world is to never bite the hand that feeds you.  Well the TSA has a knack for doing exactly that.

The people who have been hired to do these jobs have the mental brain pan of a cockroach and the moral compass of a New Orleans pimp.  It appears that this was a government program that started with “noble intent” claiming necessity but in reality was nothing more than a wealth redistribution plan.  In the end that’s all government does.  It takes wealth from one group of individuals and gives it to another, whether or not that wealth was actually earned is irrelevant.  It has been the role of our political system to elect people to steal from others by the force of government.  While not everyone is this way, it has become the goal of the simple majority of the electorate.  It is wrong, it is immoral, it is despicable, and it has to stop.  How we actually stop it though I am unsure.

10 Years ago today I woke up in the morning astonished as to what I was seeing on the news.  I woke up that morning to head to class, it was my senior year of high school.  As always I watched the news while getting ready and at first I thought it was an ad for some new movie.  Then I watched the second plane crash into Tower 2 live.  I collapsed on my bed and yelled to my mom to turn on the TV down stairs.

We knew that nothing would be the same, sadly as my dad seemed to be able to do, he called what would happen.

A friend of mine nailed the correct response to the question, “Where were you 10 years ago today?”

His response, “A more free America.”

He’s right, everything has been done in the vain of security but the result has done nothing but destroy the freedoms and liberties we have.  My dad was right in his call because after that morning, we have done more damage to ourselves than they ever possibly could.  If they hated us for our way of life and freedoms prior to that day, they needed to do nothing more than watch us destroy ourselves.

Not even a month before the 9/11 attacks I walked on to a plane carrying my pocket knife.  While I was a scout in uniform, I can tell you that A Security Theater would molest me and steal my property today.  With DHS deeming us Scouts nothing more than terrorists that are intent on a suicide mission.  Sadly though I think that’s the point, none of this has been for security, but instead to destroy the freedoms we had.  If the TSA was about security, explain this, this, or this.  (I could keep going but you probably get the point.)

My dad actually called me to make sure I wasn’t going to run and enlist, he knew exactly what I was feeling. In the end I felt that it would do nothing to help, and it would be far better for me to continue the existing plan of going to the Academy or doing NROTC.  I received an appointment to Rice University the following February. 

I have not forgotten, nor will I ever forget. 

I have not forgotten what happened that fateful day, nor will I ever forget what America once was and what it should be.  This is no longer America.

Like JayG I’m still angry.  I however am not just angry at the people who perpetrated this attack, but also pissed at my elected representatives who seized on the opportunity to squander away my freedoms and that of my children.  Those freedoms are NOT yours to take.

Seriously every time I think the TSA couldn’t stoop to a new level of stupidity they prove me wrong.

First up is an incident involving an 85 year old grandmother for refusing to receive an unnecessary dose of radiation provided by the local high school drop outs.  The results:

An 85-year-old woman said Saturday that she was injured and humiliated when she was strip searched at an airport after she asked to be patted down instead of going through a body scanner, allegations that transportation security officials denied.

Of course as usual the TSA claims that this never happened and that it violates their policies and procedures.  There’s one problem though, we regularly hear about incidents like this and the TSA always claims it never happened.  They only admit they screw up when it’s caught on tape.  Just because policy says you don’t do that, doesn’t mean one of your agents demanded it because she wasn’t a compliant sheep.  The can verify before and after but not during the screening as it wasn’t recorded. Why not record it if there’s not strip search involved and it’s just a pat down?

Then as if the TSA needed to further display their stupidity and show exactly why none of them were able to graduate high school we hear about this incident.

Vanessa Gibbs, 17, claims the Transportation Security Administration stopped her at the security gate because of the design of a gun on her handbag.

Well, maybe it was a really realistic gun design and they had good cause.

See what happens when you try and justify the idiocy of the TSA, they just show you how much of a bunch of morons they really are.  Then the TSA agents babble on as amateur lawyers to intimidate passengers.

“She was like, ‘This is a federal offense because it’s in the shape of a gun,'” Gibbs said.

So the agents delayed her long enough to ensure this girl missed her flight and for what!?  A lesson to her about how she should just be a good little sheep.  

The list of problems with the TSA is long and distinguished.  Anyone who says the TSA is necessary to prevent the next terrorist attack is lying.  The score board currently says otherwise because it’s been the people the TSA has been violating that stop the terrorist attacks.  The TSA is a security theater and needs to be done away with.  Even a congressman that called for their creation thinks they are bloated and need to go.

h/t to Disavowed with Honor