Oct 7, 2013
Nazis of the
TSA
Office of
the [ha ha] "Civil Rights and Liberties"
External
Compliance Division
601 S 12th
St
Arlington
VA 20598
Dear
External Compliance Nazis:
I picked up
a complaint form yesterday from your Ft Meyers airport gestapo desk, and used
it - plus the backs of three pages of your official "Civil Rights for
Travelers" website that I had printed a few years ago and which I carry
with me whenever I fly ... just in case I need it - to write out the complaint
I had against your gestapo agents at the Ft Meyers airport. But the pen I had didn't want to work
correctly, we had a bouncy flight over the remnants of a failed tropical storm,
and my one-year-old son was kicking me as I was writing. Even I can barely read what I wrote, so I am
typing this up from those notes.
Copies of
this are going to be sent also to my US Senators and my Congressman, at least
one of whom has made statements on the floor of Congress critical of the nature
and efficacy of the job TSA does, though nowhere near as pointedly as those
criticisms need to be stated. A copy
will also be going out to a public and fairly popular internet blog site, as
well as facebook and where ever else I can think of. In fairness, I shall append any official
response this complaint gets to the blog site and facebook ... so make sure
it's something you'd want made public!
In other words, don't make yourselves look like more of the same type of
imperious jackasses you usually advertise yourselves to be.
Before I get
into a description of what happened yesterday, I should probably say - not that
you can't guess by now - that I find absolutely nothing you do, ever, anywhere,
to be a "service" for anyone other than those whose purpose is to
amass excessive and non-Constitutional power for the government, in the guise
of making Americans feel safe without
actually making them be safe. As you know, TSA during their entire
existence, has not caught, interdicted, or even identified a single person
whose aim or intention was even remotely to commit air piracy or air
sabotage. Not one. Not even with the huge number of guns and
knives and cups of coffee and snow globes and cupcakes-in-a-can you've found,
nor with the colostomy bags you've ruptured, nor the millions of people you've
humiliated and tens of millions you've simply outraged.
None.
You do not
add safety to any transportation; you simply use that as an excuse to compel
people - mostly American citizens, free people in a supposedly free country -
to justify themselves to the US government, and make them prove themselves
innocent in the face of your self-satisfied presumption of their guilt. This massive compulsion of the general public
to justify themselves in the face of presumed guilt, or risk detention and
arrest, is exactly what the nazis did to the German people, as well ... and for
the exact same reason: declarative public safety. ...this point will come up in the
narrative. In fact, my father-in-law - a
child at the time - spent much of the first six years of his life in a nazi
prison camp, along with his mother, my grandmother-in-law.
I will also
point out that during the years of TSA's existence, American citizens have -
not once, but twice - interdicted individuals who were attempting air sabotage
.... not that their attempts were going to amount to much. Shoe bombs and crotch bombs were - as you know very very very well - not
going to accomplish much more than a frat house accomplishes during a
fart-lighting contest. Smoke and stink
and not much else. At least, that is the
results of the post-incident threat assessment made by those who do not have a vested interest in
exaggerating the risks posed and therefore justifying the need for nosier and
nosier tools by which TSA can violate everyone's 4th Amendment.
In short,
nazis, the general public can do your stated
job better than you do, and I've got to believe at this point that you know it,
which leaves you with just one apparent function left: harassing and annoying
that general public and removing their civil rights and confiscating trillions
of items of their personal property.
Sadly, this fools many Americans into believing you're actually doing
anything.
I, though,
am an American citizen with a 1st Amendment, and I will use my 1st Amendment when I see fit - I don't care who you are
or claim to be. Further, no agent of the
US government will tell me I cannot
use my 1st Amendment, nor will any agent of the US government take any action
against me, nor treat me any differently from anyone else, because I do
use my 1st Amendment; when TSA's actions are predicated on obliterating the 4th
Amendment, the 1st Amendment is about all we have left.
So ... we
have arrived at the narrative of yesterday's encounter with your local gestapo:
My wife and
I and one year old child arrived at Southwest Florida International Airport -
the Ft Meyers airport - around 8 AM on October 6 2013 for a scheduled 9:30 AM
departure on Southwest Airlines flight 3696 at Concourse B. We had just finished visiting my
grandmother-in-law, who is 90-something, and who hadn't met her youngest
great-grandchild yet. This is the same
grandmother-in-law who lived for several years in a nazi prison camp, for what
it's worth.
When we
arrived there were as many as a dozen people in line, and - I counted - 16
blue-shirted brownshirts. A touch of
overkill, frankly. We were soon next in
line so we went up as a family to your agent checking boarding passes and
IDs. My wife and son went through and I
handed my boarding pass and passport to your female agent ... who insisted on
engaging me in conversation. I will try
to never talk to TSA; it's simply not worth it.
I cannot be polite to those who obliterate my constitutional rights and
believe they are entitled to do so, and most people - particularly those with
small egos and large powers - don't like my direct honesty if and when they do get a conversation started. The conversation here went as follows:
"Good
morning sir, how are you today?"
[This was a question]
... I said
nothing.
"Sir
... good morning. How are you
today?" [This was also a question,
although imperious in tone]
...
"Sir,
why aren't you answering me." [This,
however, was not a question; it was a boorish demand]
"Because
I don't like talking to nazis."
"WHAT
IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN!!"
...
"I
SAID, WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN!!"
I waved at
her attempting to indicate that I was not going to say anything else to her, that
the only reason I said that much was because she couldn't leave me alone, and
to not bother even trying to start up another conversation. I don't want to talk to you. It's not difficult to understand. She shoved my passport [removed from its
cover and folded backwards] and my boarding pass [now bent and wrinkled] back
at me. I took them and went to the get into
the shoeless magnetometer line for the next pointless exercise.
...only the
magnetometer was closed and everyone was being funneled through the
pornoscanner. I didn't notice this,
though, until I was already inside the thing.
I was trying to see how far ahead of me my wife and son had gotten; the
useless and one-sided fake-polite "conversation" the ID-checker
insisted on having with me allowed several other people to get between my wife
and I.
The nazi at
the pornoscanner told me to turn to my right, place my feet on the marks and
raise my arms. Bullshit! I'm not getting into a pornonscanner, and I
told the nazi this:
"I'm
not going through the pornoscanner."
He tried
rationalizing: "But it doesn't penetrate ..."
"I
don't give a shit. I'm not going through
a pornoscanner." And I went out the
way I came in.
"SIR, YOU HAVE TO BE SCREENED!!"
"Not in
a pornoscanner, I don't."
Another
[male] nazi stepped up, told me to stand right where I was and not move. I shifted around to see where the bins of my
belongings were - they had long gone through the x-ray conveyor and I could no
longer see my property, which included my passport, and he yelled, "I
SAID, DO NOT MOVE!"
"I
don't see my stuff, nazi."
As we both
know, I'm supposed to be kept in contact with my stuff, at least to the point
where I can see it if it isn't actually in the machine. This reduces the chance that other passengers
will accidentally or deliberately walk off with it, or that one of your
upstanding nazis will keep it for themselves, which happens frequently enough
that it's no longer a surprising news story.
"We
need to get a male agent here to do a pat-down," he squawked into his
cutesy rent-a-cop shoulder microphone.
"You're
a male nazi," I told him; "you do it."
"I
can't. I'm working up front," he
declared, as if standing around looking self-important and conceited is
considered work.
...and he
made me stand there for almost ten minutes.
In those ten minutes, I had two short conversations of note, one with
him and one with another nazi. In the
first conversation, a female nazi came up behind me and said, "Y'know,
sir, this is a difficult job, and we try to be as nice as possible when we do
it; you need to be more cooperative."
"Nice? What's nice about nazis?"
"I resent
that description..." she pouted.
"I
resent nazis."
"So do
I; it's a good thing there aren't any around here," she huffed.
"I see
16, 18 nazis in blue shirts right here."
Within just a few feet of me there were almost two dozen TSA agents I
could see, of which maybe 5 were doing anything of note - two checking IDs, one
at the x-ray conveyor, one giving instructions at the pornoscanner, ... make
that 4 I could see actively doing something.
Of the over dozen nazis I could see who were not doing anything obvious,
easily half of them were male ... yet none of them could bother doing the grope
portion of the pointless "screening".
They were all milling about looking stupid.
I alluded to
this when I mentioned to the male nazi who had yelled at me to not move as he
was just standing in front of me, "You're not supposed to harass or retaliate."
I quoted this from your "Civil Rights for Travelers" memo.
He scoffed
back, "I'm not harassing you!"
"No,
but you're retaliating; There's a half dozen male nazis doing nothing,
including you, and rather than have one of them grope me, I'm just standing
here. How long does this need to take?" I got no answer.
A few
minutes later, another male nazi wearing blue gloves came up and asked if I was
the opt-out.
"No, I'm
the one for the groping. Are you going
to be my groper?"
He said
something, but had his back turned and I didn't hear what it was. He motioned for me to follow, and I did ... to
an arbitrary spot about 20 feet away, because it was SO much better than where
we had been before. He stopped and
imperiously asked which lane my stuff was in.
I looked
around and didn't see my stuff and started to panic that it actually had been stolen.
The nazi
with blue gloves got snotty and sneered, "It's real easy, it's either this lane or it's that lane."
Yeah, well,
bite me, I don't see my stuff. But I did
see my wife and son [finally] and shouted to my wife, "where's my
stuff?" She pointed to indicate
that my stuff was hidden behind a bunch of other stuff. The nazi with blue gloves made me follow him
to my stuff.
"Do you
want the pat-down here? or in private?"
"No
no! Everything
is going to be in public." The
entire TSA experience is humiliating to the general public in the first place;
if groping those who won't play along humiliates the TSA nazis in return ...
that is at least a partial victory.
At this
point he proceeded to launch into a long-winded description of what he was
going to do, how he was going to do it, and why he was doing it. Several seconds into this pointless tirade I
told him, "Just skip the foreplay, wujja?
You wanna grope me, so grope me."
...the first
nazi, the ID-checker, was haughty and childish.
The nazi at the pornoscanner was obliviously confused as to why anyone
would, gorsh!, not want to be
irradiated by a sick pedophiliac fuck in the next room. The nazi who yelled at me to not move but who
had no other [apparent] job skill was high and mighty. The nazi who resented being called a nazi
almost, but not quite, as much as I resent nazis was condescending.
This nazi,
though, the one with the blue gloves about to grope me, was peevish and
whiny. "I will not 'skip the foreplay'!!" he whined ... and he proceeded to
start his pointless blather, obviously learned by rote, from the very beginning;
more wasted time. He finally got around
to groping me, making a significant and unnecessary production out of it, and after
he got his jollies out of the way, he informed me I was free to go.
Gee! imagine
that, an American, a free citizen of a free country, was finally free from the
warrantless [and useless and impractical] search for snow globes conducted by
the government each American citizen is supposed to be free from. Another American proved himself
innocent! Yay team! Go USA, go!
As I put my
sandals and jacket back on, he thanked me - for what, I don't know. I was
going commando, so perhaps he got off a little.
I don't
welcome being presumed guilty by my own government ... which is supposed to be
prohibited from making that assumption, and I find it offensive that I might be
thanked for it, so I answered "You're not welcome, nazi."
"Yeah,
well, neither are you to be honest about
it."
"Sieg
heil, nazi," I replied. And as I
left the nazi interment zone I said "Sieg heil" to four or five more
blue-shirted brownshirts, each and every one I passed on my way out.
We finally
escaped! My wife changed my son's diaper
in the ladies room, I got a cup of coffee and waited for her in front of the
restrooms. I thought I'd have been done
being harassed by nazis for the day; I was wrong.
Shortly
after my wife came out of the restroom and we were trying to decide what to do
while we waited for the plane, up comes yet
another nazi, this one wearing shorts, and despite having a mustache and
appearing to be in his 40s or 50s, looking for all the world like a
HitlerJugend.
He stood
directly in front of me, staring at me with his chest thrust out at me, and
after a moment he said, "Have a nice day!" Yet this was not a greeting; it was not a
banal pleasantry. It was certainly not intended as an apology of
any sort for the litany of retaliatory abuse I'd just been given - an apology I
was due, by the way. You don't jut out
your chin and your chest and throw your shoulders back to give greetings or
banal pleasantries. It was thoroughly
aggressive and insincere, and intended as a childish challenge. A taunt.
I replied,
"And sieg heil to you, too, nazi."
And the boy had
the gall to get offended! He went out of
his way to add harassing behavior to the already retaliatory actions the rest
of his gang of nazis had perpetrated, and he
was offended by my refusal to allow it to go unnoted.
"DON'T
CALL ME THAT AGAIN. IT'S A VILE
TERM!" he yelled at me, attracting the attention of at least two passers-by.
Of all the arrogant self-righteousness. I was now actually angry. No government official has the authority, in
public, to tell me what I can and cannot say, and I'll say any goddamned thing
I want to.
"I know
you nazis hate the 4th Amendment, but is this a 1st Amendment-free zone as
well?"
"I SAID DON'T CALL ME THAT! IT'S A HORRIBLE WORD!" he shouted
over my rhetorical question.
Yes I know
it's a horrible word, and what makes it more horrible is that it applies. If you don't want to be called nazis, then
don't do to Americans what nazis did on a daily basis to Germans, under the
pretense of protecting those Germans from Jews, and Gypsies, and political
subversives, and homosexuals. By
contrast, TSA is protecting us from snowglobes, excessive amounts of shampoo in
our carry-on, large tubes of toothpaste, and unbaked cupcakes. And don't bother quibbling about this because
TSA hasn't accomplished anything else.
They have zero
successes on identifying anyone considered to be a legitimate threat of air
piracy or air sabotage.
Let me
repeat that in case you still can't comprehend it: ZERO SUCCESSES.
By standing
up to, and being rude about [while still complying with] the imperious edicts
of the government, I would have been called a political subversive under the
Third Reich. And I was being treated in
the Ft Meyers airport exactly as political subversives under the nazis were
treated: harassed, continually challenged, facing childish retaliation not to
mention risking arrest and detention for daring - daring, I tellz ya - to assert my right to tell the government, and
its brainless agents, exactly what I think of what they do. ...and them for doing it.
Seriously,
how difficult is this? You don't like
being called nazis? don't act like them.
It was only
at this point that I decided I'd had enough of these childish assholes. "Do you have one of your little
complaint forms on you?"
"No I
don't; they're at the desk." He
seemed almost happy that I was now threatening to file a complaint against him
and his gang of thugs. We arrived at the
desk in the nazi interment zone, and he told the nazi guard behind the counter,
"This gentleman seems to have a complaint to make. Would you get a complaint form?"
The only -
and I mean only - nazi I encountered
at Ft Meyers who did not insist on advertising himself as having a small ego
with too much power was the guy behind the desk; he reached into a drawer and
handed me a form and kept his mouth shut while doing it. I don't even think he looked at me. Good for him. Just do your job and keep quiet about it.
I got the
form, and turned to the mustachioed HitlerJugend; "What's your name?"
I asked.
"Mario
[something]," he answered. It
sounded vaguely Spanish, and there's a few ways of spelling the various Spanish
sounds; my last formal Spanish language lessons occurred in 7th grade back in
the early 70s.
"Would
you repeat that?" I asked. Mario
repeated; I still didn't understand his last name. Another nazi - the condescending one - was
standing beside him with a pen and notepad, undoubtedly transcribing the
encounter.
"Can I
borrow your pen?"
"No you
may not," she pouted, hiding it from me.
She and Mario thought this was amusing, in the same way that a 4 year
thinks their own immature behavior is amusing.
Alright, then, if that's as grown-up as you're going to be...
I had the
form, Mario would be easy to identify by description if nothing else, and I
turned to leave.
Mario
cat-called after me, "Have a nice da-a-ay."
I turned and
called him "nazi" one last time.
While writing
out my complaint by hand while waiting for our plane [delayed by 33 minutes due
to FAA rules], several TSA nazis walked past me, and all of them glowered at
me. They didn't simply glance at me;
they slowed down, made a point of turning their head in my direction, waited
for me to make eye contact, and they glared at me until they were past me.
Yes; I see
their point ... how dare an American act as if he should be free from his
government making nosy and offensive presumptions about him. I'm obviously the unreasonable bad guy here
...
Grow the
fuck up.
=====================================================================
The stated
objective of your complaint forms, not to mention the "External Compliance
Division", is to improve the "customer" service of TSA ...
despite TSA having no customers, only a throng of free citizens trying to go
about their daily business which TSA
does everything they can to prove to them how UNfree they truly are.
Until such
time as we get an elected government who's actually read - and understands - the US Constitution and the type of government we
were designed to have with the severe limitations on power that were intended
to be in place, my advice to you, in both terms of classical customer service,
as well as reduction of retaliatory and harassing behavior, is as follows:
1] Many
people don't mind engaging in idle chit-chat.
You wanna ask them how they're doing?
Go right ahead. Some people do mind engaging in idle
chit-chat, either because it's a useless activity in general, or because of who
they're being engaged by. If someone
doesn't want to talk to you, then shut the fuck up and leave them alone.
2] Most
people resent the pornoscanners for the dozen reasons you're already aware of
though most will grin and bear it; some, though, will go out of their way to
object to it; I will never enter one. Stop acting surprised by these objections,
and for godsake, stop acting as if the guy who objects to it is committing a
crime by refusing to play along with it; he has legitimate options and you are
obliged to fulfill those options without grabbing a pound of flesh along the
way. Just put these people in a separate
line without the yelling and the screaming and the autocratic orders to stay
motionless, and IMMEDIATELY grope them; no waiting. Making people wait any longer than anyone
else has to wait to get through your infernal nazi-machine is retaliation. You are declaring that their failure to make
your job easier rather than their own life less humiliating carries
consequences for them; that is retaliation by definition. You are making them pay for inconveniencing
YOU ... as if your convenience means a damn.
It doesn't. Grow the fuck up.
3] Some
people don't want to be given a play-by-play of their groping ... again, shut
the fuck up. Just do your job.
4] When you
annoy people for obliterating their sense of privacy from government intrusion
that we were taught [at one time] we had a legitimate expectation of always having, and they call you nazis,
or pedophiles, or simply sick bastards, ... that's their right as an American
to do. As an agent of the government you
are not allowed to have PERSONAL feelings about it; your duty and obligation as
a government agent in the uniform of that government is to let them call you
those names. The reason I know this is
because **I** was a uniformed agent of the government at one time way back
when, and this was among the first things they drilled into our heads: I was
obliged to let them say what they wanted, and I could do nothing about it. THEY were the citizens; **I** was - to them -
the government. Perhaps I've mentioned
this before: do your job and do it silently; shut the fuck up. Laugh about it or grouse about it ... your
choice ... at the airport bar after work.
Quit and get a job as a Walmart greeter.
Go home and kick your cat. I
don't care. You do not have the luxury
of back-talking US citizens while you are in uniform.
5] When
someone gets through your maze of nazi officiousness with the same stew of
official childishness, condescension, self-righteousness and peevishness as I
encountered, ... and the same rudeness that I gave in response to it all ...
then any further encounters MUST consist of an agent in a supervisory position
making an apology for it, regardless of where he believes the bulk of the
responsibility lies. He should also ask
if there is anything he can do to ensure that such miserable encounters are
avoided in the future. That is
"customer service"; since you don't actually have customers, I'm not
terribly surprised you don't know this.
It would be a good idea also to have any complaint forms in his pocket
when he does this. Making childish
challenges because a professional ego [or six] was bruised does not cut
it. In any enterprise which actually had
customers and in which customer SERVICE actually matters, Mario's actions would
be either a reprimandable infraction, or a terminating offense. It was simply inexcusable.
6] I know
better than to expect much in the way of acknowledgment of your official
culpability, here, though there is much for you to be culpable about. I am fully aware that an apology is nothing
but an easy way out, and virtually all apologies are formulaic and
insincere. I don't want an apology from
anyone, not even the ego-on-his-sleeve Mario.
I want structural changes in the way you asshole nazis conduct your
business. As I said before: until we get
an elected government which actually understands the very strict limits on its
power, you're going to be browbeating all citizens you encounter and nothing
can be done about it except be rude to those who do it when it happens. No one likes being browbeaten, and some of us
will be rude to you when you do it even as they comply with your directions. There's a difference between being compliant
but rude, and being non-compliant, though.
People who are compliant but rude are no different from those who are
compliant-and-pleasant. Remember that,
always. Your ego goes off when your blue
shirt goes on.
7] The
people who pass through your nazi gates are almost entirely FREE CITIZENS of a
supposedly FREE COUNTRY. Why can we not
be treated like it? And no ... we are
not treated like it.
This last is
probably more of a question for the idiot politicians to grapple with; freedom
requires limited government interference, and there's nothing limited about the
government interference associated with airports ... with virtually all of the
interference being pointless and ineffective.
Don't think you're actually accomplishing anything worth accomplishing;
far too many reports and audits from within the same government say
otherwise. We both know this, so let's
not bullshit about it.
On the
off-chance that one of your higher-ups understands that I am largely correct
about the nature of my complaint and the institutional changes indicated
because of it [not likely] ... or if you simply wish to have your NSA brethren be
able to locate me more easily for their continued warrantless surveillance of
my insidious political subversion which in
no way resembles nazi tactics at all [far
more likely], my contact information follows.
Please
surprise me, though, and acknowledge that some of your staff were acting
childishly, others arrogantly, and Mario completely and inappropriately
combative. And then stop doing it.
Ross
Williams
