If you thought the
"Transportation Security Administration" would limit itself to
conducting unconstitutional searches at airports, think again. The agency intends
to assert jurisdiction over our nation's highways, waterways, and railroads
as well. TSA launched a new campaign of random checkpoints on Tennessee
highways last week, complete with a sinister military-style
acronym--VIP(E)R--as a name for the program.
As with TSA's random searches
at airports, these roadside searches are not based on any actual suspicion of
criminal activity or any factual evidence of wrongdoing whatsoever by those
detained. They are, in effect, completely random. So first we are told by the
U.S. Supreme Court that American citizens have no 4th amendment protections
at border crossings, even when standing on U.S. soil. Now TSA takes the next
logical step and simply detains and searches U.S. citizens at wholly internal
checkpoints.
The slippery slope is here.
When does it end? How many more infringements on our liberties, our property,
and our basic human rights to travel freely will it take before people become
fed up enough to demand respect from their government? When will we demand
that the government heed obvious constitutional limitations, and stop
treating ordinary Americans as criminal suspects in the absence of probable
cause?
The real tragedy occurs when
Americans incrementally become accustomed to this treatment on the roads just
as they have become accustomed to it in the airports. We already accept
arriving at the airport 2 or more hours before a flight to get through
security; will we soon have to build in an extra 2 or 3 hours into our road
trips to allow for checkpoint traffic?
Worse, some people are lulled
into a false sense of security and are actually grateful for this added
police presence! Should we really hail the expansion of the police state as
an enhancement to safety? I submit that an attitude of acquiescence to TSA
authority is thoroughly dangerous, un-American, and insulting to earlier
freedom-loving generations who built this country.
I am certain people will
complain about this, once they have to sit in stopped traffic for a few extra
hours to allow for random searches of cars. However, I am also certain it
merely will take another "foiled" plot to silence many people into
gladly accepting more government mismanagement of safety.
Vigilant, observant,
law-abiding, gun-owning citizens defend themselves and stop crimes every day
before police can respond. That is the source of real security in America:
the 2nd Amendment right to defend oneself. The answer is for people to be
empowered to protect themselves. Yet how many weapons might these checkpoints
confiscate? Even when individual go through all the legal hoops of licensing
and permits, the chances of harassment or outright confiscation of weapons
and detention of citizens when those weapons are found at a TSA checkpoint is
extremely high.
Disarming the highways and
filling them full of jack-booted thugs demanding to see our papers is no way
to make them safer. Instead, it is a great way to expand government
surveillance powers and tighten the noose around our liberties.
