August 20, 2008
Creeping Totalitarianism Department
TSA Intrusions Endangering Passengers
One of the signs of emerging totalitarianism is the intrusion of the state security apparatus into areas where they don't belong, have nothing to contribute, or can cause serious harm by usurping the authority of true experts. For example, DEA agents have increasingly been interfering with medical decisions, first with painkillers and now with medical marijuana.
Now Jim Campbell of Aero-News.Net has another example from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport where a Transportation Security Administration employee decided to check the security of parked aircraft by climbing up the outside of them. In doing so, he damaged the Total Air Temperature probes on nine American Eagle jets, causing all of them to be grounded by maintenance personnel.
If you or I did this, we would now be in federal prison awaiting trial, and in the old days, if some airport security employee had done this, he would have been fired and that would be the end of it. But since parts of airport security were federalized after 9/11, this fool is a government employee who is probably untouchable. Thus the expertise of highly-trained pilots and aircraft engineers is subjugated for the self-serving needs of government security agents.
This is, to be sure, a small thing. No one got hurt. It takes more than a bent probe to crash an airplane. But the police intrusion into medicine has certainly killed people---chemotherapy patients choking on vomit because they can't control their nausea with medical marijuana or patients with painful diseases committing suicide because their doctor has been arrested for prescribing them too many painkillers. If this new intrusion isn't stopped, it may only be a matter of time until airline passengers start dying.
(Hat tip: Jacob Grier)
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