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Victoria Liberty @ 10:14 pm
Jennifer Robinson, lawyer to Julian Assange, tweeted that she is now on the “inhibited fly list” and is not allowed to travel without permission from the Australian government. While flying back to her native Australia from England after meeting with Assange, she was temporarily barred from boarding her flight at Heathrow Airport. ”I think if it is happening it is a real concern that human rights lawyers who are doing their jobs are under surveillance,” she said.
The Australian Lawyers Alliance said in a statement, ”Lawyers must be able to act for their clients without fearing that they will be harassed by government agencies, either in their own country or overseas. An independent legal profession is a hallmark of a democratic society and the UK and Australian Governments’ actions towards lawyers, such as Ms Robinson, undermines that.”
On a slightly related topic, swimsuit model Bar Refaeli tweeted her outrage about an intrusive pat-down that she was forced to undergo, possibly at the same airport.
Read about various famous people who have spoken out against airport security excesses here.
If you haven’t already, check out this viral video of a TSA agent patting down and swabbing a 3-year-old boy with a broken leg in a wheelchair. It was taken a couple of years ago but was just posted this weekend.
“There is another human being putting their hands on my child. That is not acceptable. If he was putting his hands on my child at McDonald’s or anyplace else, we would immediately have him arrested and call the police…
I think the whole exercise was intrusive and disrespectful to a human being, and a 3-year-old human being.”
I’m a little late with this news, but it’s too awesome not to point out. The blog TSA Out of Our Pants released a video showing how basically anyone can bring basically anything through a nude body scanner without detection. The trick? Carry it on your side.
So basically, not only is the government violating the Fourth Amendment, taking away the privacy and dignity of travelers, and spending huge sums of money on these scanners, but they don’t even work!
Most of the world, I’m sure, has already heard of Senator Rand Paul’s act of courage yesterday, but I must pay tribute to him anyway. At a Nashville, TN, airport, Senator Paul, after already being forced to go through a full-body scanner, was ordered to submit to a pat-down. He refused and was subsequently escorted from the airport by police.
In a telephone interview with the Associated Press, Paul said that the incident occurred after an alarm went off when he passed through a scanner at Nashville Airport Monday. Paul said the alarm had apparently been triggered by his knee, though “the senator said he has no screws or medical hardware around the joint,” the AP said.
TSA agents refused his request to walk through the scanner again to reconcile the anomaly, and he refused their demand for a pat-down, Paul said.
The Kentucky Senator said that “he asked for another scan but refused to submit to a pat down by airport security,” the AP reported. Paul “said he was ‘detained’ at a small cubicle and couldn’t make his flight to Washington for a Senate vote scheduled later in the day.”
Some may argue that refusing a pat-down isn’t enough to make someone a hero. In my opinion, Rand definitely qualifies for that title because of everything he has done to defend liberty in his life so far. Although what he did yesterday was a small, everyday act, it is things like this that little by little advance the cause of freedom and make the world a better place.
In December, two elderly women, in separate incidents, accused the TSA of violating their rights with degrading, excessively intrusive airport security screenings. Now the federal agency is apologizing for what their agents did:
“In an about-face, the feds have admitted wrongdoing in the cases of two elderly women who say they were strip-searched at Kennedy Airport by overzealous screeners.
Federal officials had initially insisted that all ‘screening procedures were followed’ after Ruth Sherman, 89, and Lenore Zimmerman, 85, went public with separate accounts of humiliating strip searches.
But in a letter obtained by the Daily News, the Homeland Security Department acknowledges that screeners violated standard practice in their treatment of the ailing octogenarians last November.”
Although it’s always good for the TSA to apologize for humiliating innocent travelers, they aren’t exactly doing so for the right reason. Both women accuse TSA agents of strip-searching them, but the TSA still denies this and is only apologizing for making Sherman show them her colostomy bag and putting Zimmerman’s back brace through a scanner, both of which are against official policy. As Zimmerman said, ”I don’t have a problem with the back brace. I have a problem with being strip-searched.”
The TSA has gotten some (deserved) bad publicity in the past few days due to a couple of very questionable airport security decisions.
On Thursday, a teenage girl was stopped and ordered to check her purse because it had a gun design on it:
“A teenage girl’s sense of style got her in trouble at the airport.
Vanessa Gibbs, 17, claims the Transportation Security Administration stopped her at the security gate because of the design of a gun on her handbag.”
The agents said that it could be considered a replica weapon, which have been banned on airplanes under federal law since 2002. It’s bad enough for governments to trample on people’s right to bear arms…but now they ban gun designs, too? Ridiculous.
In somewhat related news, an elderly lady is claiming that TSA agents strip searched her at JFK Airport in New York:
“An 85-year-old woman said Saturday that she was injured and humiliated when she was strip searched at an airport after she asked to be patted down instead of going through a body scanner, allegations that transportation security officials denied.
Lenore Zimmerman said she was taken to a private room and made to take off her pants and other clothes after she asked to forgo the screening because she worried it would interfere with her defibrillator. She missed her flight and had to take one 2 1/2 hours later, she said.”
It’s worthwhile to point out that the TSA is denying these allegations…but if they are true, then this is just another example of security gone way too far, at the expense of liberty.
Last week, sadly, Jesse Ventura’s case against the TSA was dismissed. The former Minnesota governor had filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, (correctly) calling the use of airport full-body scanners and pat-downs without probable cause unconstitutional, demeaning, and degrading. He gave quite a press conference afterward, saying that he would never fly again, that he would apply for dual citizenship with Mexico, that he would call our country the Fascist States of America, and that he might even run for president:
“I will not be treated like a criminal. In our airports today, we citizens are treated like criminals. We’re guilty until we’re proven innocent…I will never stand for a national anthem again. I will turn my back and raise a fist the same way Tommy Smith and John Carlos did in the ’68 Olympics, Jesse Ventura will do that today.”
Good for him. If I filed a lawsuit to stand up for my constitutional rights and it was thrown out, I would be mad too!
