From WFAA:
Police suspect Clayton Keith Dovel, a Transportation Security Administration baggage inspector at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport Terminal E, of stealing iPads from checked luggage.
Here’s a tip folks, don’t put electronics in checked luggage. The TSA workers cannot be trusted.
In seasons past, Grandma only had to worry about getting run over by a reindeer. With “Grandma Got Run Over by TSA,” web sensation Remy gets us in the holiday mood with a song about Christmas, Homeland Security, and the joys of civil rights abuses.
Lyrics:
Grandma got indefinitely detained now
coming home to visit Christmas Eve
You could say she had a right to counsel
but some folks in the Congress disagree
she was flying home to our house
when she got checked by TSA
thought she might be Abdulmutallab
when they looked at her X-ray
Her hair had recently been colored
she paid cash for her Christmas gifts
two things apparently the Congress
says just might make you a terrorist
Grandma got indefinitely detained now
coming home to visit Christmas Eve
you could claim there’s no right to due process
but check the 5th amendment and you’ll see
they say they need to have these powers
to help protect this free country
but if it takes these steps to do so
what is it we are protecting?
Now she’s an enemy combatant
as if that makes any sense
the only thing that she’s combating
is her unpredictable incontinence
Grandma got indefinitely detained now
trying to come visit Christmas Eve
they took her rights in order to…protect rights..
the most genius plan ever in history
Grandma got indefinitely detained now
never made it home on Christmas day
she always wanted to live in Miami
at least now she’s 90 miles away
10 years after its creation, the TSA has drawn the ire of just about everyone who has been forced to endure their ever-changing rules and regulations while observing the fact that the TSA has never succeeded in its objective of stopping terrorism. What it has done is anger innocent Americans unjustly assumed to be guilty of something, simply because they desire to travel.
Today, there are numerous calls to end the TSA.
“Americans have spent nearly $60 billion, and they are no safer today than they were before 9/11,” Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) announced when releasing the report. In other words, the TSA has squandered as much money as has been “lost to contract waste and fraud in America’s contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan…,” according to NPR and the “independent and bipartisan” Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pres. George W. Bush signed the bill establishing the TSA on November 19, 2001. The agency took about a year to nationalize aviation’s security; in 2002, it spent $1.3 billion – a whopping increase over the $725 million “private” screening annually cost. (But was that industry really “private”? The FAA mandated and minutely supervised everything it did. Which is exactly why terrorists succeeded on 9/11: incompetent bureaucrats controlled security at airports and fined any airline that didn’t obey their silly whims.)
By 2003, that budget was rocketing upward: $4.8 billion. It’s continued climbing stratospherically ever since, frittering away $8.1 billion this year.
What do we have to show for it? Not a single terrorist caught anywhere at any time by anyone in the TSA’s employ.
The TSA is beyond a useless organization. It continues to harass and demean the very citizens it was trusted to protect while costs continue to spiral out of control. It has never made anyone safer and, after reading Congressional reports [pdf], it is clear that it probably makes things easier for anyone with nefarious purposes at the airport. Among the government’s findings are
Since 2001, TSA staff has grown from 16,500 to over 65,000, a near-400% increase. In the same amount of time, total passenger enplanements in the U.S. have increased less than 12%
Over the past ten years, TSA has spent nearly $57 billion to secure the U.S. transportation network, and TSA‘s classified performance results do not reflect a good return on this taxpayer investment.
TSA‘s primary mission, transportation security, has been neglected due to the agency‘s constant focus on managing its enormous and unwieldy bureaucracy.
Some critics have gone further. Rep. Ron Paul in October called for the elimination of the TSA, as part of his budget-reduction plan.
And this week, he was joined by former U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who demanded that not only the TSA, but the Department of Homeland Security be dismantled.
The TSA is incompetent on its best days, but, until more people stand up and demand change, their behavior and its skyrocketing budget will continue until everyone is on the no-fly list and the airports are empty save for a few select “trustworthy” citizens.
Members of the military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan might be redeployed on American soil for use in surveillance and border patrol. These newly created positions would attempt to fill the expected unemployment problem of returning soldiers by employing them to operate satellite communications and blimps as well as other emerging technologies such as drone deployment.
With the drawdown of troops overseas, the Pentagon will have excess equipment and extra personnel to offer the nation, just as DHS Customs and Border Protection takes another stab at building a virtual fence across the southwest border. This turn of events prompted a House subcommittee Wednesday to invite Defense and Homeland Security department officials to share their plans on adapting military systems for domestic use. Curbing illegal immigration, drug smuggling and other criminal activity along U.S. boundaries is a key campaign issue.
The idea behind the plan is that these soldiers already know how to use this equipment, which would save thousands, if not millions in training.
Paul Stockton, assistant secretary of Defense for homeland defense and Americas’ security affairs, told the panel, “We have a historic opportunity with the drawdown operations outside the United States to continue to press forward to find ways of supporting the Department of Homeland Security — so the military technology that the taxpayer has already paid to develop, that we find ways of transferring that technology.”
If there isn’t a need to support the Department of Homeland Security, why not disband it and save the country billions of dollars in the process? Looking for ways to legitimize its existence is only going to further the waste of taxpayer dollars.
While some disagree with military personnel being deployed on US borders, it appears that the only feasible recourse at this point in time is to employ honorably discharged soldiers who already know how to use this equipment. The United States is determined to create their virtual fence along its northern and southern borders. If this policy continues, then, not only is it financially feasible, but common sense to hire men and women who are already equipped with the knowledge of handling such machines.
