The Transportation Security Administration might as well be a four-letter word for people who have ever made a trip through the airport.
Recently, the TSA has groped a 6-year-old girl, required a 95-year-old woman with leukemia to remove her adult diaper for a pat down, told a 17-year-old girl that the design of a pistol on her purse was a federal offense and harassed a young man with special needs holding a plastic toy hammer on his way to Disney World.
But what the TSA did on Monday takes the cake for stupidity, incompetence and plain absurdity.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the son of the Republican presidential candidate, was passing through a Nashville airport on his way to give a speech at the Right to Life March in Washington, D.C. When he went through a TSA scanner, an alarm sounded and the Senator was told he would need to receive a full-body pat down.
According to Paul, when he refused to continue with the screening process, he was taken to a cubicle where he said he was detained by the TSA.
TSA officials say he was not detained but escorted out of the area by law enforcement. But Paul said when he tried to leave the cubicle, a TSA official yelled, "Do not leave the cubicle!" He was also told that he could not use his cellphone when he tried to make a call, presumably to his staff, letting them know he would be late to his speech.
Paul did not want to have a full-body pat down, asking officials if he could, instead, walk through the machine again. After almost two hours of back-and-forth with officials, Paul said he was allowed to walk through the machine again without any problem.
Paul believes the machine does not just go off when it detects something, but is also being used as a mechanism to randomly pick customers for more in-depth screenings.
If that is the case, what do these random screenings do but create a long, arduous security process that results in more violations of privacy than security risks averted? This is not to say that we advocate any sort of discrimination in the screening process, but surely there must be a more effective way to highlight possible security risks than groping senators and grandmothers.
Also, if Paul's story about being detained by the TSA is correct, are we seriously not allowed to use a cellphone to call our attorneys or families? This seems like an extreme overreach of the TSA's power and a dangerous attack on our rights.
Chances are grandmothers, little children, senators and people with mental disabilities are not going to hijack an airplane. Why does the TSA need to waste resources on searching anyone and everyone?
Airports or individual airlines know more about their security needs than a bureaucracy run out of Washington. Perhaps we should look at creating a more decentralized transportation security system that creates innovative but less intrusive ways to police our skies.
