This was around the same time as Senator Rand Paul’s Run in with the TSA.
Category Archives: TSA
TSA molests mom, brings her to tears
After a woman was allegedly sexually harassed by TSA agents at Sky Harbor International in Phoenix, AZ, her son documented the aftermath as the TSA, Southwest Airlines and Phoenix Police threaten him with arrest for filming the ordeal. Officials seem more concerned with the video than with the woman brought to tears at the security checkpoint.
TSA Wants to Touch Your Kids, To Hell With Parents’ rights!
Adam VS The Santorum Sweater Vest
Infowars: Man Sues TSA For $5 Million Following Peanut Butter Arrest
24 hours in a cell for joking about sandwich spread
An Arizona man who was arrested at the behest of the TSA, following a wisecrack over a jar of peanut butter is suing the federal agency for $5 million.
Frank Hannibal, 50, was detained and dragged from LaGuardia Airport recently by police after a run-in with TSA agents over the jar of gourmet sandwich spread.
“The liquid oil that separated from the peanut butter had them baffled,” Hannibal told the New York Daily News.
Hannibal then commented to his wife and children that “They’re looking to confiscate my explosives,” as TSA agents inspected the 16-ounce jar of “Crazy Richards” chunky peanut butter.
TSA screener Edwin Sanchez, overheard Hannibal’s remark, did not see the funny side, and immediately called the cops, according to the court complaint.
Hannibal spent the next 24 hours in a cell, during which time he was fed a peanut butter sandwich by cops who later charged him with the felony of “falsely reporting an incident”.
“It sounds laughable now but at the time to be led out of there like a terrorist was unbelievable,” Hannibal tells the Daily News. “My whole life was up in the air. It was a nightmare. My children were overwhelmed. It was crazy.”
Hannibal has brought a $5-million-dollar lawsuit against the TSA worker and the Port Authority officer who arrested him, all over a $7 confectionary which was returned to him upon his release from jail.
“It’s a sorry state of affairs in this country when sarcasm is considered a felony,” his attorney, Alan D. Levine of Queens, noted, adding that TSA agents need to act with common sense in such situations.
This is not an isolated incident. The TSA has a history of concentrating on looking out for cakes and pies, as well as sauces, oils and vinegars.
The Homeland Security agency has also instituted a crack down on candy and cupcakes.
At the same time, people are routinely waltzing through security lines with swords, knives, explosives and guns. Many agents are too busy groping women and searching old people’s diapers to bother checking passports and flight passes.
Still, it’s good to know that the government is keeping Americans safe from sandwich wielding jokers.
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Click below to read Steve Watson’s article on infowars.
http://www.infowars.com/man-sues-tsa-for-5-million-following-peanut-butter-arrest/
Huffington Post: TSA Delaying Knives On Planes Policy
Airline passengers will have to leave their knives at home after all. And their bats and golf clubs.A policy change scheduled to go into effect this week that would have allowed passengers to carry small knives, bats and other sports equipment onto airliners will be delayed, federal officials said Monday.The delay is necessary to accommodate feedback from an advisory committee made up of aviation industry, consumer, and law enforcement officials, the Transportation Security Administration said in a brief statement. The statement said the delay is temporary, but gave no indication how long it might be.
TSA Administrator John Pistole proposed the policy change last month, saying it would free up the agency to concentrate on protecting against greater threats. TSA screeners confiscate about 2,000 small folding knives from passengers every day.
The proposal immediately drew fierce opposition from flight attendant unions and federal air marshals, who said the knives can be dangerous in the hands of the wrong passengers. Some airlines and members of Congress also urged TSA to reconsider its position.
The delay announced by TSA doesn’t go far enough, a coalition of unions representing 90,000 flight attendants nationwide said Monday.
“All knives should be banned from planes permanently,” the group said in a statement.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who opposed the policy, said TSA’s decision is an admission “that permitting knives on planes is a bad idea.” He also called for a permanent ban.
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Click below for the full article.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/tsa-knives-planes-_n_3135491.html?utm_hp_ref=tsa
Los Angeles Times: Response to TSA Lawsuit, Public gets chance to comment on TSA’s full-body scanners
Airline passengers have been walking through full-body scanners for nearly five years, but only now are fliers getting a chance to officially tell the federal government what they think about the screening machines.
In response to a lawsuit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit ruled that the Transportation Security Administration could continue to use the scanners as a primary method of screening passengers. But the court ordered the TSA to give the public a 90-day comment period, which the agency did not do when it launched the scanning program.
The TSA began the comment period online in March, and so far it has been getting an average of 26 comments a day — nearly all of which blast the TSA and the scanners for a variety of reasons.
The most common objection is that the scanners violate the Constitution’s 4th Amendment, which guards against unreasonable search and seizure.
“Screening without probable cause is a violation of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” wrote Russell Yates of Los Angeles.
But in the 2011 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected that argument, saying that “screening passengers at an airport is an ‘administrative search’ because the primary goal is not to determine whether any passenger has committed a crime but rather to protect the public from a terrorist attack.”
Other common objections to the scanners say they expose passengers to unsafe levels of radiation and are not effective at stopping terrorists.
“It is scientifically indefensible to irradiate the vast majority of passengers,” wrote Richard Layton of Terre Haute, Ind. The TSA says several studies show the scans pose no significant hazard to passengers.
Finally, several dozen critics said the government doesn’t have the right to take “naked” or “nude” pictures of them to look for hidden weapons.
That may be a moot point. In response to a new federal law, the TSA is expected to remove all scanners that generate what look like naked images of passengers from airports by summer.
Most of those scanners will be replaced by a type of scanner that shows hidden objects projected onto a generic avatar image on a screen — not on a nude-like image of a passenger.
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Click below for the full article.
Huffington Post: On the TSA, Could Your Son be Next?
It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. You arrive at the airport to fly home from your family vacation, and something goes wrong — terribly wrong — at the TSA screening area.
It happened to Susan Bruce recently when she flew from Phoenix to Dallas with her husband, teenage son and daughter.
“When we got to security, my son went first in line through the X-ray machine and TSA flagged him for the hand swab test,” she remembers. “While the rest of the family was stuck on the other side of the X-ray machine, my son was pulled aside for supposedly having a positive result for explosives.”
Bruce, who lives in Dallas and is a mathematician by training and a homemaker, is certain it was a misunderstanding. Her son is no terrorist, she says. He’s a clean-cut honor student.
“The air in Phoenix is very dry and we all had put some lotion on our hands that morning — maybe the cause of the result,” she speculates. “Or it may have been fertilizer from the grass he touched. After all, he’s 15.”
But the TSA treated him like Richard Reid’s son.
“All eyes were focused on my son as the rude agents threw accusations at him,” she recalls. “One agent asked him if there was anything sharp in the luggage. His response was, ‘What?’ Keep in mind he is 15, so his Mom packed the luggage. He had no idea what was in each bag.”
The agents were impolite and accusatory. They ordered him to stay away from the luggage while they tested it. He felt as if he’d failed some kind of test.
“He just stood there in shock,” says Bruce.
And that wasn’t the worst of it.
The TSA’s teen problem
The TSA may have figured out what to do with kids under 12 and passengers over 75, allowing those low-risk passengers to go through the screening area without removing their jackets or shoes. But something happens when that 12-year-old turns 13. He or she becomes a high-risk air traveler who’s scanned, prodded and interrogated at the checkpoint. His only crime is coming of age, and from one day to the next becoming part of the feared “terrorist” demographic.
Bruce’s incident is hardly an isolated one. The TSA reportedly botched the pat-down of a 17-year-old girl in 2010, who also happened to be the niece of a U.S. congressman. During the exam, the girl’s sundress slipped, revealing her breasts in public. An internal investigation released late last year concluded the whole thing was an “unfortunate” accident.
Agents also recently gave another girl such a rigorous once-over that they broke her insulin pump. Savannah Barry claims TSA agents in Salt Lake City were rude and abrupt, even though she tried to warn them that she was wearing the pump. Clearly, the agents thought she was up to no good. Diabetics are such a menace.
Some of the worst stories are the ones that don’t make the news. One concerned mother contacted me a few weeks ago after the entire family flew out of Washington’s Dulles airport. The rest of her family walked through the metal detectors and full-body scanners without incident, but when it was her teenage daughter’s turn, the male screener asked her to back up and walk through again. He said the scanner “needed to get a better look” at her.
Yeah, I bet it did.
Is my son a terrorist?
While most of the incidents that capture the public’s attention involve teenage girls, probably because the cliche of the lecherous male screener preying on an innocent virgin is just too irresistible, the boys may have it worse. Bear in mind that young men do indeed fit the terrorist profile; all of the 9/11 bombers were young men, which means any TSA agent worth his training will be extra vigilant when it comes to anything young and male.
“It took every fiber in my son not to burst into tears,” remembers Bruce. “The agent continued to badger him until they whisked him away for a private pat-down, where they brought my husband to witness them groping him, including his genitals.”
Nearly half an hour after they approached the security screening area in Phoenix, it was all over. The Bruce family had been cleared for takeoff.
“We led our shaken son and sobbing daughter to the gate where boarding was already under way,” she says.
Bruce blames herself for allowing this to happen.
“I’m so upset,” she says. “I’m mad at myself because I feel like I failed my son by not protecting him. But I was totally unprepared for this.”
We are all unprepared for this. My oldest son turns 11 this year, but he’s taller than many 13-year-olds. What will the TSA do to him the next time we go through security? What will they do to your son or daughter?
Do we really have to trade our dignity for security? I don’t think so. The agents who barked orders at the Bruce family, who disrobed the congressman’s niece and broke Barry’s insulin pump would have benefitted from some basic customer-service training. Instead, they’re traumatizing an entire generation of air travelers.
We deserve better.
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Is it acceptable to compromise your freedom and liberty for the sake of security? Click below for a link to the article by Christopher Elliot on the Huffington Post.
http://www.thelibertyreport.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=397&action=edit&message=6
Ron Paul – Rise For Liberty – Stop CISPA, NDAA, Patriot Act, TSA
The man that the GOP Establishment, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of MSM tried to silence gives us his take on the CISPA issue as well as the NDAA, Patriot Act, and the TSA.
Ron Paul: Why Can’t We All Travel To Cuba?
Ron Paul addresses JayZ and Beyonce’s trip and how it could impact our civil liberties. Do you think the government should be able to block citizens from going to another country?