I appreciate Trollkiller's valiant battle against a bureaucracy's forcing supposedly free people to show ID. But let me suggest that we should be equally opposed to the TSA's warrantless, mass searches. They may be legal, but they are grossly anti-constitutional. They interfere with and restrict travel; the Feds also use them to ferret out all sorts of things besides weapons: fake ID, drugs, illegal aliens, folks carrying more cash than the govt thinks we shd (obviously, you're a drug dealer if you like a full wad in your pocket when you travel), even sportsmen shipping trophies home who've exceeded fish and game regulations. Our friends and neighbors are being "detained" and some have even gone to jail thanks to the TSA. Chillingly, the TSA has also quelled political protest---and not just the famous "Kip Hawley is an idiot" episode, either. It has "detained" several critics of the Administration, forcing them to miss flights to anti-war protests or hassling them for books or articles they've written.
The only answer is to abolish the TSA. No free country should allow government agents to bully, harrass, spy on, and detain people as the TSA has done for six years now. Remember that we're paying these cretins to pester us, too, to the tune of $6 billion annually. Let the airlines provide their own security, as they see fit---security that would actually protect their passengers and inventory rather than merely give that illusion, security as invisible as that at malls, supermarkets, and other businesses that consider us customers, not criminals.

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