The Transportation Security Administration - Email to Congress

The following was sent to my Congressman and Senator through their online contact sites.


Dear Senator Warner/ Congressman Moran

I would hope by now you have received hundreds of letters and emails from constituents who are enraged with the non-professional swine who make up the Transportation Security Agency. Creation of that agency was a good idea back in the post-9/11 days. However with the passage of time and with no Congressional oversight since its creation, the thugs who are TSA have taken on a life of their own. I would appreciate it a great deal if TSA and their excesses could be brought under some control

Stories abound of people who have had their personal property confiscated by these jackals. Just recently there was a news story about how, after the "no liquids on a plane" scare, TSA was auctioning off peoples personal property they had confiscated (and confiscated for an issue that later was shown to have NO basis in fact from England). Apparently TSA has forgotten about the Constitutional guarantee against "unreasonable search and seizure."

However confiscation of my tube of toothpaste isn't the reason I am writing to you.

Each and every time I go through a TSA screening post in any airport in America, I see red when I look at the usually grossly overweight TSA employees in their uniforms that each possess what appears to the uninformed eye as a badge. A badge, as anyone in this country knows, connotes someone with the authority to arrest you for a misdeed.

Transportation Security Administration goons have no arrest authority. That is why sheriff's deputies or city police or in the case of large airports, airport police, stand watch over the screening process. They are there because they can arrest people who have broken the law. TSA employees who are nothing more than GS-7 baggage handlers have ZERO legal authority yet they are allowed to carry a badge or a replica of a badge on their uniforms.

Professionally I am a wildlife biologist with an agency of the US Government. My agency has a rather large and effective law enforcement component. If me, as a biologist who has never taken Federal law enforcement training started walking around with a badge on my shirt (or uniform if I was in a field station) I could very likely be in super serious trouble for impersonating a Federal law enforcement official.

The same thing holds for the dolt's at TSA. By wearing a uniform that carries a badge or a replica of a badge on their uniform they are sending the message that "I can arrest you."

They can't.

I am writing to request that you take some sort of investigative action into TSA and why their employees with no law enforcement authority are allowed to portray themselves as being a part of law enforcement.

I want to know where you stand and what you are able to do about this issue. Its unfortunate that in post-9/11 America we are made to feel like we live in a police state because of the way the president views things. Allowing TSA employees to wrongfully wear a badge on their uniform only adds to that feeling of being in a police state.