More likely a few studies and policy papers by a security consulting firm who will then get to travel the country providing lectures on new SOPs to TSA offices everywhere.
There is no consistency from TSA agents on stuff like this. I get so many calls every month from people complaining about things the agents wouldn’t allow them to take that the actual written guidelines say are fine
Kind of a non-story on a slow Monday about Senator Rand Paul refusing an additional patdown today. The porno scanner had detected an anomaly near his knee. (Wait for it…)
He didn’t want to be fondled, but he offered to go through the scanner again. They wouldn’t allow it. So they had to escort him out of the airport. Here’s the punchline:
TSA said in a statement that “the passenger,” Rand Paul, “has since rebooked on another flight and was rescreened without incident.”
But, what… why not just… didn’t he…
Oh, bureaucracy. Your security theater never fails to amuse.
Obviously we can’t trust our elected officials to not be secret terrorists.
I had a different opinion on the story.
“I’m Senator Rand Paul you assholes, don’t you know who i am!”
(ok, he never actually said this to my knowledge, but that seemed to be his attitude during the interviews following the… incident)
The guy was being an asshole and taking advantage of his position. Any normal person would have just did the pat down, but nope, Rand Paul the senator would have none of it and knew they wouldn’t do anything to him because he was a senator. I’d also be surprised if a desire to create publicity didn’t enter in to his decision to act like this as well.
Well I’m not going to begin to try to break down that prejudice, but he did say elsewhere he didn’t want special treatment:
I told them that I was a frequent flier and that just days ago I was allowed to be rescanned when the scanner made an error. At no time did I ask for special treatment, but I did insist that all travelers be awarded some decency and leniency in accommodating the screening process.
Also, lawl at the bolded part. What the fuck?
On the other hand, there’s this:
The U.S. Constitution actually protects federal lawmakers from detention while they’re on the way to the capital.
“The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same….” according to Article I, Section 6.
That’s probably why the TSA is careful to say he was never precisely “detained.”
Anyway, like I said: a little spat. The goofy thing is the stodgy process that allowed him to rebook and get rescanned (or get rescanned in a previous flight, according to his account) but not this time. It’s fun and proper to mock that. We already know they have a tin pot dictator problem, but we should also root out inconsistent and superfluous process.
Yes and sometimes you will be going 5 miles over the speed limit, get pulled over by a cop and be let off with warning, while other times you will get a ticket.
When he loudly denies their request to pat him down, that to me is wanting special treatment.
The guy comes off as an ass. He was talking a lot about how he thought the supervisor should have magically known he was not a terrorist (white) and let him through, but in the event the supervisor did that to someone who later turned out to be a terrorist, he would be among the first to call for the supervisor’s head.
Paul has long been a critic of the TSA. I can definitely seen him playing this up to bring attention to what he considers to be a real problem. That’s politics, not special treatment. He’s being very consistent with his prior positions here.
There’s lots and lots of stuff to be critical of Rand Paul about. I don’t think this is one of those things.
This.
If people don’t question what is happening and just accept the crap TSA does nothing will ever change.
I agree. He did it because he thinks its an injustice and that no one should have to deal with it, not because he thought he was special.
People are complicated and often have mixed motivations. It’s perfectly possible that Rand Paul’s behavior was a complex mix of (1) righteous indignation of any citizen being subjected to pointless and insulting security theater, (2) continuation of his advocacy against unreasonable searches and seizures, (3) entitlement and self-promotion common to all politicians, and (4) Aqua-Budha inspired nuttiness.
It isn’t illegal to refuse a patdown, nor is it illegal to speak disrespectfully to TSA agents. There isn’t anything they (legally) “could have done to him” regardless of who he is, and lots of people, most of whom are not famous, have refused various TSA demands (e.g., “don’t touch my junk” guy).
If Paul did this in part as a publicity stunt, I applaud. The more people who draw attention to the horrific farce that is domestic “security” in the United States, the better.
There’s lots and lots of stuff to be critical of Rand Paul about. I don’t think this is one of those things.
++
TSA agents are not law enforcement and have no power to detain anyone.
Yeah it’s a good sidebar topic. I know they have no arrest powers, but there was that shit a while back about how you “must” complete the security process once you start it. And they frequently “hold” troublemakers until police arrive. I put that in quotes because maybe it’s like dealing with the police when you’re not under arrest: you might be able to keep pestering them with “am I free to go?” until they admit they have no way to detain you.
This is only objectionable if you ignore the absurdity of the entire exercise to begin with. Why are they patting down a US Senator?
Why do you play the race card? He is a US Senator with ID to prove that I would imagine. That should have been enough.
The race angle is semi-relevant because Sen Paul himself is an advocate of focusing security screening more stringently on people who look foreign.
Here’s a quote from a transcript of the Fox interview with him after the TSA incident.
Anybody who’s for racial profiling (or, as I suspect someone’ll object to Tortilla’s skipping a step, racial profiling with flimsy alibi, as in Paul’s Yemen quote) can kindly STFU about security theatre. However stupid it is, and whatever useful they might otherwise have said, their being against civil liberties for particular classes of people puts them squarely with the bad guys.
While I do hope the TSA is screening everyone, I also hope our intelligence agencies are spending more time investigating Middle Eastern groups than the Knights of Columbus.
I think we should move past the point where we say civil liberties can only be upheld if we stick to a mandate of “annoy one person, annoy all people.” There are certainly classifications of people for whom the likelihood of being a terrorist is so minimal as to be negligible. Is it impugning civil liberties to reduce their likelihood of being subjected to enhanced screening techniques? Not unless we force ourselves to pretend it is.
That’s just another way of parsing away the idea of hierarchies of screening on the basis of origin categories and arriving at racial profiling by the back door. “Not unless we force ourselves to pretend?” What is that, the “c’monnn” defence?
I have no problem whatsoever with not patting down little old white ladies because they’re incredibly unlikely to blow up the plane. I do have a huge problem with then turning around and patting down an Arab (or, given the realities of transportation screening, a Turk or Filipino or some other random ethnic minority) who also is incredibly unlikely to blow up the plane.
I’m against security theatre, but even more opposed to “security theatre for some, tiny American flags for others.” It’s like proposing to fix stupidity, inconvenience and waste using loathsome political pragmatism and a poor understanding of probability.