T.S.A. - Totally Safe in America

As I mentioned in my previous post, in my humble opinion, the folks over at the T.S.A. are not making me feel safer. In fact, I get the feeling my tax dollars are being squandered with the cheery side-effect of inconveniencing me. Here is the letter I sent to Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for TSA Kenneth Kasprisin. I also copied Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Senators Wayne Allard and Ken Salazar, Representative Mark Udall, and President Bush.

Dear Mr. Kasprisin:

My family and I recently returned from a vacation and as one of your constituents, I wanted to voice my displeasure regarding the tactics currently employed under the auspices of ensuring homeland security and express my deep concerns about the state of security in our country in general.
As this was our second consecutive trip where I noticed questionable behavior by Transportation Security Administration staff, I felt compelled to write. I feel that the security instituted by the federal government (in the form of the T.S.A.) is ineffective and therefore merely inconvenient. I cite the following two incidents below as evidence:

At Oakland (CA) International Airport on 4/10/2005 my wife and 1 year old son were singled out for “random”, thorough screening. I have been told this likely occurred because we were traveling on one-way tickets (due to a detour as a result of the blizzard that shut down Denver International Airport). I can sort of understand that a one-way ticket, purchased the same day as travel might trigger some sort of flag (though what would stop a terrorist from buying a round trip ticket and only using half of it?), but then why wasn’t I subjected to additional screening as well? Aren’t the screeners empowered to adjust for situations, like realizing that faced with a family consisting of a man, a woman, and a baby, if the woman and the baby’s boarding passes indicate additional search is required, they should either search the man instead of the baby or search the whole group?
Instead, they physically separated both my wife and I from our son. She had been holding him so naturally he began to cry when he was herded over to the other side of the area and both patted down and wanded.
The part that made my wife and I feel so wronged about the whole process is that this only occurred because we had tried to do the courteous thing in the first place and buy him his own seat so that we wouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone sitting next to us on the plane. Had we taken the cheap way out and booked him as a lap child this wouldn’t have happened.
Once the screeners were convinced that neither my wife nor my son had anything questionable on their persons, it was time to hand search all of our carry-on luggage. I was under the impression that a large chunk of the money allocated by Congress in the wake of September 11th was to be used for new, higher-tech screening equipment and training for the screening personnel. That is why I was surprised that they had to resort to rifling through everything in each of our bags by hand. But if, for whatever reason, it is absolutely necessary to do this, would it be too much to ask to mandate that a fresh pair of gloves are used for each search? If there is no budget for this, perhaps cutting down on the number of screeners per security line from 10 to 8 might provide the necessary funding.

On our most recent trip, we arrived at Ontario International Airport on the morning of 7/14/2005. My wife asked the T.S.A. agent at the metal detector if she had to take off her shoes before going through. The woman responded that if she didn’t she’d be subject to a more thorough search on the other side. My wife, who is pregnant and suffering from morning sickness, did not feel like bending over to remove her shoes, figuring that the “thorough search” would consist of being wanded. So she walked through the metal detector and on the other side was promptly not only wanded and patted down BUT also made to take her shoes off so they could be run through the screening machine. Needless to say, my wife was not amused. If she had been told she would have to take off her shoes either before OR after, she obviously would have done it before, sparing her the more intensive search.
After that episode we collected our things and made our way to the gate and boarded our plane a short time later. It was at this point that it dawned on me that we had not been asked for nor shown our IDs to anyone except at curbside check-in. Had we been traveling with only carry-on baggage, we wouldn’t have shown our IDs to anyone!

These two events, coming just three months apart, have compelled me to write this letter. I am a tax-paying United States citizen. I consider myself a patriot and fairly middle-of-the-road politically. I am really upset with the state of homeland security, at least from my perspective. I think that some hard choices need to be made by those of you in government, who represent all of us. Do you really want to make us all safer? Or is appearing politically correct really so much more important to you that all we can muster is window dressing? Because I really feel like there are a lot of smoke and mirrors being employed here. What does random screening at the airport really accomplish? Either profile aggressively (with apologies to young men of Middle Eastern descent, some of whom I consider my friends) or if that is too hard to sell to your constituents do the fair thing and screen everyone thoroughly. Yes, people will grumble about how much longer it takes to get through security but we will actually be safer. The security being applied currently reeks of a feel-good tactic at the taxpayers’ expense. At a minimum, please standardize the screening process so that a traveler from Denver knows what to expect in L.A. Unfortunately, these ineffective policies are not limited to just the airports.

My family and I relocated to Colorado from California at the end of last year. In my nearly 30 years in California, most of it in southern California, the steady flow of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border was readily apparent. It directly affected the quality of life for legal residents of all ethnicities, as public schools, hospitals, and prisons were overrun with other countries’ citizens. All the while, the state’s taxpayers footed the bill.

I am proud of our country’s history as a land of immigrants and one that takes in the tired, hungry, and poor, but there has to be some structure applied at some point. We have immigration laws and policies and they need to be enforced. If the laws need revision, so be it. But they must be enforced. Do you really think the next batch of foreign terrorists attempting to come to America will do so by air, train, or bus? Why would they risk that when they could instead walk right in from Mexico? For all the talk the Bush administration, and many in Congress, do about national security, I see some gaping holes and conflicting actions. Specifically, what I’ve mentioned about airport security practices, the horrifically porous U.S.-Mexican border, and talk on both sides of the aisle about asylum and worker visa programs for people who are here in our country illegally.

I urge you all to remind yourselves that you are charged with representing the best interests of your fellow American citizens and that the safety of this great country is literally in your hands.

Thank you for your time.

Do you think I'm a little bent about this?! What a fucking mess.. Don't worry - I'll be a little gentler on Disney.