from The Greenroom by Howard PortnoyAnother Pilot Blasts TSA as Agency Goes After Whistle-blowing Pilot: "
If the Transportation and Security Administration plans on going after every airline pilot who believes the agency is mismanaged, it won’t have time to do its job. Which may just be a good thing.
Another pilot, this one an occasional journalist, has spoken out against the TSA and on behalf of Chris Liu, aka the YouTube pilot. Liu, who outed himself yesterday, was stripped of the federal license allowing him to carry a handgun while aboard an aircraft following his posting of six videos highlighting flaws in the TSA’s methodology.
Patrick Smith, a contributor to Salon.com, has written an article blasting the TSA and defending Liu. Speaking of the irrational TSA mandate that pilots and flight attendants pass through the same checkpoints as passengers while ground workers are exempt from these checks, Smith writes:
This has been TSA policy from the beginning. It is also something I’ve been writing about in my columns, on and off, for the past eight years. Finally the issue is getting some attention….
Noting that Chris Liu’s actions are now “under review” by the TSA who claims the pilot may have released “sensitive security information,” Smith writes:
That’s a head-spinner if you ask me. The screening rules are public knowledge. It’s not the pilot’s fault that the rest of the country has been ignoring them.
Smith goes on the condemn the TSA for choosing “not to review, revise or even acknowledge its foolish rules, but to harass and bully and threaten the person who drew attention to them.”
He warns that “[t]his is what happens when, in the throes of fear, you bestow a bureaucracy with lots of power and little accountability.”
He notes, moreover, that the industry’s largest trade organization, the Air Transport Association, has called for a shift away from the current, one-size-fits-all screening paradigm to a multi-tiered, profiling-based approach. This proposal, if adopted, Smith adds:
would soften or make redundant many of TSA’s protocols. No doubt TSA sees this as a threat, and will fight it tooth and nail.
Which raises a trenchant question: Whose side is the TSA on? Volumes on the inadequacy of the current bureaucracy have been written in this space alone. And yet, despite the criticisms that the full-body scanners are not foolproof or that the TSA is violating the fourth amendment rights of Americans, the agency has dug in of late.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s most recent advice to Americans has been to love it or leave it. The Advanced Imaging Technology scanners, she insists, “are safe, efficient, and protect passenger privacy,” this despite ample evidence to the contrary. Pat downs, she further claims, are essential to making “air travel as secure as possible,” adding that “all passengers have the right to request private screening.” Someone should tell that the rape victim from Austin who was dragged 25 yards across the floor of the terminal for requesting that she be wanded instead of being prodded in places on her body that summoned up personal demons.
As Patrick Smith concludes:
It [the TSA] will not relinquish power until forced to do so by our leaders, under a critical mass of outrage. As a nation we are still a long, long way from that. And the next terrorist attack, or even a close call, is liable to wipe out our resolve and re-set the clock.
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Cross-posted at the Examiner. Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.
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