“Airport Security is Coming to a Highway Near You”

Any conversation with a proponent of the TSA and their intrusive airport searches inevitably ends with them telling you, “If you don’t like it, don’t fly.”  What will be their argument now that the TSA is inserting themselves to all other modes of transportation.

As with many policies that now intrude deeply into everyday life, VIPR’s authority comes from an arcanely numbered statute in the voluminous United States Code: Title 6, Section 1112. The program’s mission is “to augment the security of any mode of transportation at any location within the United States.” In its broadest interpretation, the modes of transportation could include children’s school buses, sailboats, and bicycles. Although the foregoing seems to be a reductio ad absurdum in which only the paranoid would engage, the TSA seems willing or eager to follow its power into absurdity. For example, in May 2011, a federal court ruled that TSA was gong to supervise searches at high-school prom in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What a high-school prom has to do with transportation security is yet to be answered. But it does make accusing TSA critics of absurdity difficult to sustain. (According to Infowars.com, the court later allowed the high school to use the state police, rather than the TSA, to conduct the searches.)…

In the face of the fear that is constantly stirred up by officials and the media, Americans seem willing to submit to almost any invasion of rights and privacy. When people are afraid, they submit. The unafraid and indignant used to be able to avoid the rape of their rights by refusing to enter an airport. This is no longer possible. The TSA agents are coming to you.

Read the rest of Wendy McElroy’s piece on VIPR here.