The bomb attacks in Belgium today -- three of them, two at different locations in the airport and one in the subway -- present in high relief yet more proof  of what some us have been pointing out for years: the TSA is a charade. The TSA does not and cannot and will never prevent terror attacks. All the pre-boarding bullying, harassing, scanning, and groping doesn't make a damn bit of difference, because -- duh -- people can set off bombs anywhere, not just on a plane.  

On the righthand side of this blog, you’ll see this paragraph:

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In the never-ending saga of TSA theft and stupidity — and did I say theft? — we have the latest episode (that we know of): at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, the goons saw yet another tasty treat they wanted to sample. So they pretended that said items were dangerous and confiscated them — er, sorry, encouraged the passenger to give them up. (As we know, since they tell us all the time, especially at their main propaganda organ, they don’t confiscate anything.) From the story in the Baltimore Sun:

by Lisa Simeone

Great American orator, scholar, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass was born sometime in February of 1818 and died on this date, February 20th, in 1895. Among the many brilliant, fiery speeches he gave and essays he wrote, none have been more often excerpted and quoted than these lines, which apply today every bit as much as they did in his time. I’ve quoted them often, but never enough. So it’s fitting that I take this opportunity to commemorate him and do it again:

Read the rest at TSA News.

As TSA News readers know, the Transportation Security Administration has a nifty new “training academy” in Glynco, Georgia. Supposedly all new TSA hires from across the country, including Hawaii and Alaska, will attend this academy for two weeks of training (replacing the current four weeks of in-house local airport training), and all current TSA employees will be sent for additional training.

Chris Bray wrote about it

Read the rest at TSA News.

A few weeks ago fellow TSA crusader Jim Bovard told me that there were all these TSA reviews on Yelp. I was surprised, given that I think of Yelp only in terms of hotel, restaurant, and other business reviews. He gave me a link to reviews of the TSA at Chicago O'Hare (ORD), but I  soon discovered that there are several different pages of Yelp TSA reviews.

So I posted one, under the name “Lisa S.”

In Portland, Oregon, at the same airport where John Brennan was arrested, the TSA has abused yet another elderly woman. Harriette Charney, age 90, was “asked” to go into a private room with the blue shirts, where they then “asked” her to take off her blouse and her bra. She complied. According to her son Alan Charney as quoted in this report by KATU:

Everyone keeps sending me links to this story, but I saw it when it first came out last week and decided not to write about it because it isn’t news. It’s the same old same old. I can’t see how it means anything significant in our fight against the TSA.  

Come on, folks, let’s get this up to at least 150 signatures. If we do, it’ll go live on the main White House petition site. It was written by our perennially creative contributor Chris Bray.

From the Washington Post comes this story of not only another instance of TSA abuse, but the TSA's bragging about said abuse.

The fundraising drive at TSA Watch has been stuck at $6,921 for weeks. The TSA is sexually assaulting people at airports in this country every day. We and many other organizations have been documenting it for years. I don’t know what else people need to know in order to care.

Last August I wrote a post reporting that the non-profit civil liberties organization Judicial Watch was suing the TSA to gain access to documents outlining the sexual abuse of travelers at the hands of TSA workers. I said that Judicial Watch was joining a long line of of other organizations and individual people who had also tried to sue the TSA to get information, and that the TSA, predictably, had stonewalled.

From KCNC, the CBS affiliate in Denver, comes this completely unsurprising “news”: TSA clerks at Denver International Airport deliberately messed with the strip-search scanners to alarm on attractive male passengers so one of the blue-shirted goons could grope them.

No, Virginia, say it ain’t so!

From a thread started at Reddit by someone who is just now discovering that the TSA is abusive. Duh. Sorry, patience is admittedly not one of my virtues, but I really can’t take it anymore — not only the surprise exhibited by people who seem to have been living under a rock for the past, oh, years and years, but worse, those who deny, deny, deny what’s right in front of their faces. Read the whole Reddit thread to see what I’m talking about. The ignorance on display is breathtaking.

Read the rest at TSA News.

Everyone's been sending me the article from First Look/The Intercept about the latest "confidential" TSA document.

The article in question is titled "Exclusive: TSA's Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot Terrorists." Okay, yes, it's exclusive in that the reporters actually got their hands on a document that outlines the TSA's so-called behavior detection procedures. But we've been writing about these procedures for years now, calling attention to their inanity, fraud, and complete lack of scientific support.

Today we have news of yet another TSA agent arrested for child sexual abuse. 

Well, why not? So many of his colleagues are in the same boat, at least the ones who have been caught.

Another friend of the blog, a man named Sai, is routinely harassed by the TSA. He’s not only an ally in the fight against TSA abuse but a sharp and dogged crusader. We’ve written about him several times. Now Sai needs our help again, so if you can offer it, please do. Here’s the email he recently sent me, which I have his permission to publish:

Expired respirators? Unsanitary hand sanitizer? Antivirals unaccounted for? No problem! As long as the TSA keeps putting its hands down people's pants, we're safe!

Read the rest at TSA News.

Regular readers will remember the two times we’ve written about this young man, one of thousands of people who’ve been abused by the TSA. 

His name is Sai. He is disabled and requires medication. The TSA detained him, taunted him, and denied him his medication . . .

Sai isn’t taking his mistreatment lying down. He’s fighting. And he’s asking for your help. Following is the email Sai sent to me explaining his next steps. I have his permission to publish it:

I realize this might seem like small potatoes, what with our Hawk-in-Chief doing what he does best -- bomb people to smithereens -- but as activists should know, these issues are all related. Quoting Hanna Arendt, "Empire abroad entails tyranny at home."

The U.S. is eviscerating civil liberties left and right. And every time you go to the airport and acquiese to the abusive practices of the TSA, you're going along with the evisceration of these civil liberties. Anyway, here's how one man handled himself recently at an American airport.

Several stories have been circulating recently about people’s medications being confiscated by the TSA. In some cases, these are potentially lifesaving medications, such as nitroglycerin for heart patients or insulin for diabetics.  

Remember the guy who dressed up in a blue shirt, khaki pants, and blue gloves and impersonated a TSA agent in San Francisco last month? He succeeded in leading two victims into a curtained booth and groped at least one of them. Well, we don't know exactly what he did, since he was hidden. We only know that he got away with it, and that if he had been an actual TSA clerk, whatever he did, including sexual molestation, would've been legal.  

This is what it takes to get answers from the TSA and DHS: you have to sue them. And even then you'll be stonewalled.  

We’ve written about Shoshana Hebshi twice and about the hideous, Kafka-esque injustice she suffered at the hands of the United States government, via our friendly abusers at the TSA, Frontier Airlines, and law enforcement, aka the police.

Read the rest at ABombazine.

It doesn’t take many brain cells to figure out that the TSA, institutionally and individually, holds us in contempt. In their eyes, we’re all potential terrorists. Also peons who have to be put in their place. Never mind that we pay their salaries, every penny of their $8-billion-a-year budget, and that they are supposed to facilitate flying, not impede it. 

Ah, I love waking up to stories like this! It's like living in absurdist theater, only the people running the theater are too stupid to see it for what it is. 

The case of a woman who was raped -- repeatedly -- by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and by medical personnel at the University Medical Center of El Paso has been partially settled.

I first wrote about the case here. Though this kind of thing goes on all the time at borders (and in prisons and detention centers), this particular case was so egregious that even the mainstream media reported on it.

Well, I'm finally back from three weeks away. Judging by the lack of posts at TSA News, the civil liberties watchdog site I run, I guess it was a quiet time on the TSA front. 

Though not anymore.

Anybody who thinks the Supreme Court will protect us from the TSA is dreaming. More accurately, he has his head somewhere other than above his shoulders. People keep claiming in comments here at TSA News that (paraphrasing): "We just need a case to make it all the way to the Supreme Court. Then the 4th Amendment can be upheld."