About damn time someone did

 

Sean Duffy daughter calls out TSA as 'unconstitutional' after pat-down...

USA fascist police state to expand facial recognition to over 400 US airports

 TSA has deployed identity verification tools at more than 80 airports thus far, with the ultimate goal of expanding the technologies to over 400 airports in the coming years. These new units, known at CAT-2 systems, take real-time pictures of travelers — the “face capture” aspect of the tools — and then compare the images against their scanned photo identifications — in this case, in a process known as “one-to-one” facial recognition. ...

“On average, the TSA CAT-2 identity verification process took 23 seconds per person,” the analysis said. “It took well under 30 seconds for all demographic groups, and all demographic groups were within a few seconds of the average.”

More.

Never fly.

Swim.

 

 

 

The slide into the surveillance state picks up the pace as TSA to expand facial recognition scanners from 30 to over 400 US airports

 TSA Expands Facial Recognition Scanners to 400+ Airports...

 “The CAT-2 units are currently deployed at nearly 30 airports nationwide, and will expand to more than 400 federalized airports over the coming years,” the TSA official said, noting that it is currently optional for travelers to participate in facial recognition screenings. Those that decline to do so can notify a TSA agent and go through the standard ID verification process instead. ... During a discussion at the South by Southwest festival in March 2023, TSA Administrator David Pekoske said “eventually we will get to the point where we will require biometrics across the board because it is much more effective and much more efficient.”

Currently optional, eventually required.

TSA: Taking Stuff Actually

 Miami TSA officers seen stealing from passengers in released footage...

The stock market didn't give a flying fig about the Fed's quarter-point interest rate increase today: Powell was way too timid, should have just gone with one full point

 The insanity of easy money is liked most by the stock market, which is why Powell is going slow on his way to two percent after he completes the six more increases he's promising over the next year.

If he thinks the rate ought to be 2% to curb inflation, well then get on with it, boy, and show us what you've got! Nip it in the bud if it's that big a FD.

Truth is they've got nothing, and intend to do nothing about inflation.

Inflation this high needs a bigger gun than 2% one year down the road. That's not how it was done in the 1980s, and 2% even if done right now won't do a damn thing.

This is just inflation theatre, just like the TSA war on terror security theatre, the this government theatre, the that government theatre, and lately the vaccine theatre.

Meanwhile the first in line to all this easy money keep getting richer, and richer, and richer.

Gotta keep that going while appearing to DO SOMETHING!

What a crock.

 

Americans are just fine with fascism, line up like cattle for TSA

The TSA screened 2.15 million people on Thursday, up nearly 3% from July 1, 2019.

 

Trump signed paid family medical leave for federal workers, continues to fund TSA, and stopped publishing deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in 2017

Freedom means no TSA and no CNN in US airports and David Bentley Hart permanently relocated to socialist Europe

"a fat Don Quixote"

Two kinds of security theatre, not actual security: $8 billion a year for TSA to feel up grandma at the airport, $5 billion for part of a wall around which sex offenders will still get in

Maybe it would just be cheaper to bring them straight in and let them loose in the airports.

I wonder how many illegals get the full-frisk TSA treatment while flying free on United

Federal Air Marshalls go from armed on-board cops to spying on US citizens under new Trump TSA "Quiet Skies" program

From The Boston Globe story here:

Quiet Skies represents a major departure for TSA. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency has traditionally placed armed air marshals on routes it considered potentially higher risk, or on flights with a passenger on a terrorist watch list. Deploying air marshals to gather intelligence on civilians not on a terrorist watch list is a new assignment, one that some air marshals say goes beyond the mandate of the US Federal Air Marshal Service. Some also worry that such domestic surveillance might be illegal. Between 2,000 and 3,000 men and women, so-called flying FAMs, work the skies.

Since this initiative launched in March, dozens of air marshals have raised concerns about the Quiet Skies program with senior officials and colleagues, sought legal counsel, and expressed misgivings about the surveillance program, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the Globe. ...

Agency documents show there are about 40 to 50 Quiet Skies passengers on domestic flights each day. On average, air marshals follow and surveil about 35 of them.

Security Theatre: TSA failure rate to detect weapons and explosives improves from 95% to 80%!

Way to go, Brownie! Or somebody.

From the story here:

When ABC News asked the source familiar with the report if the failure rate was 80 percent, the response was, “You are in the ballpark.” ... The news of the failure comes two years after ABC News reported that secret teams from DHS found that TSA failed 95 percent of the time to stop inspectors from covertly smuggling weapons or explosive materials through screening.

Like TSA security "theatre", ICE plans deportation theatre: "Hundreds of families" or maybe just "hundreds" to be deported

WaPo reports here:

"The Department of Homeland Security has begun preparing for a series of raids that would target for deportation hundreds of families who have flocked to the United States since the start of last year, according to people familiar with the operation. ... The ICE operation would target only adults and children who have already been ordered removed from the United States by an immigration judge, according to officials familiar with the undertaking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because planning is ongoing and the operation has not been given final approval by DHS. The adults and children would be detained wherever they can be found and immediately deported. The number targeted is expected to be in the hundreds and possibly greater."

----------------------------------------------

As with the TSA, which routinely shakes down your granny before she gets on the plane while missing guns and knives on others, ICE will focus on the many harmless easy marks and miss the criminals who are already safely embedded in gangland.

The incompetent serving the fools.

Security Theatre still the rule at airports: DHS punks the TSA 95% of the time

Sneaking through explosives and weapons.

And forget about baggage screening.

From the story here:

"In addition, the review determined that despite spending $540 million for checked baggage screening equipment and another $11 million for training since a previous review in 2009, the TSA failed to make any noticeable improvements in that time."

Mark Levin Only Just Discovers TSA VIPR Program Tonight

Mark Levin's recent discovery of TSA VIPR operations reinforces his interpretation of the developing police state, but it's just old news to us.

Welcome anyway, Mark.

TSA Claims All Nude Scanners Now Gone

Nice belt!

Story here:

"[A]s of May 16, all US airports scanners equipped with the ability to produce the penetrating images will now only show a generic outline of a passenger to the operator."

TSA Feels Up Claire McCaskill, Senator Upset

Story here.

Airports, where even the senators get treated like criminals by the TSA. But in that case the TSA would be right.

The Invasion Of The Body Scanners: Nude X-Ray Scanners To Be Out By June

TSA is getting rid of the invasive nude x-ray technology by June to comply with a Congressional directive.

But you're still being searched, and whether you get felt up or not is beside the point, because the generic image scanners will stay.

The Fourth Amendment means nothing in an airport, and I predict this "compromise" will speed the way for the invasion of the body scanners into every sphere of public transportation, including busses, subways, commuter trains and even tollways and interstates.

Story here.

Threat From "Regionalism" Mirrors Why Your Rep. Doesn't Know Your Name

If you haven't yet heard of it, the threat from "regionalism" is the attempt to overturn the dominant organizing principle of physical space in America today: the suburbs and the governments formed to serve them. In my most recent local primary election, the Republican candidate favoring the regionalist philosophy not so narrowly won against a challenger who ran opposing it. 

Americans overwhelmingly live in the suburbs not in the least because they like it. There they have four walls of their very own, some green grass to enjoy and a little peace and quiet away from the bustle of life and the crime associated with large cities. Love of country-like living also happens to be an important inheritance from our English past, from which we get the ideal of the country gentleman, the garden and the hunt. Our estates are often less impressive and the ideal not so self-conscious, but few of us can imagine a better way to live.

The war against this way of life has taken many forms in recent times, the war against the SUV and now against the gasoline engine itself being prominent examples. What better way to deprive us of our dream than to compromise our access to and enjoyment of it? Another is to force us back into trains, where TSA VIPR units will soon be frisking us as frequently as they do now at airports. Yet another is to take away the tax deduction for mortgage interest, to make home ownership in the suburbs itself less appealing economically. So many forces are arrayed against the way of life of millions of normal Americans that one might be forgiven for thinking it is all some vast conspiracy.

Lately the war against our preferred way of life has taken shape in the drive toward "regionalism", a dreary subject to most Americans which is really a sleeper threatening to deprive citizens of representation and extend a trend which has been at work since at least the 1920s. At that time in America the US House of Representatives, chiefly controlled by Republicans, voted to circumvent the constitution and fix the number of representatives at the then current number of 435, when on the constitution's principle we should have by now at least 10,267 members in the US House. That's the reason your congressman doesn't know your name, and why you probably don't know his.

Today Democrats and Republicans in various places are uniting to extend this trend by forming alliances on behalf of "tax sharing" districts and "amalgamated" governments at the local level in the name of squeezing "efficiencies" out of larger scaled units. In fact the real motivation often turns out to be finding new sources of revenue to pay the exorbitant salaries, pensions and health care benefits of unionized government employees who have been promised the moon by big cities but which can no longer afford it, if they ever could.

There is a new book on the subject by Stanley Kurtz, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, and an important article here by Wendell Cox, REGIONALISM: SPREADING THE FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY, a short and helpful introduction to the subject, from which this excerpt:

"[S]pecial interests have more power in larger jurisdictions, not least because they are needed to finance the election campaigns of elected officials, who always want to win the next election. They are also far more able to attend meetings – sending paid representatives – than local groups. This is particularly true the larger the metropolitan area covered, since meeting[s] are usually held in the core of urban area[s] not in areas further on the periphery. This [gives] greater influence to organized and well-funded special interests – such as big real estate developers, environmental groups, public employee unions – and drains the influence of the local grassroots. The result is that voters have less influence and that they can lose financial control of larger local governments. The only economies of scale in larger local government benefit lobbyists and special interests, not taxpayers or residents."

TSA Goon Spills Cremated Remains At Checkpoint, Laughs At Relative

Story here:

"She didn't apologize. She started laughing. I was on my hands and knees picking up bone fragments. I couldn't pick up all, everything that was lost. I mean, there was a long line behind me."

Of such things are retribution made.