320 Years of History
Gold Member
Today the TSA announced new procedures at the airport security checkpoints, specifically that one cannot in the U.S. opt for a pat down instead of going through the scanner. Whether this is a temporary change, I do not know; I just heard about it.
The thing that went through my mind is whether, as some folks have suggested, this, along with other TSA procedures, is a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. At the very least, it seems plausible that it is, and that concerns me. It doesn't concern me as a person, even though I fly somewhere every two to three days. It does concern me as a citizen of the U.S. who has no interest in seeing the Constitution and its Bill of Rights substantively abrogated by executive department fiat rather than by the legislative actions of the states.
The topic of discussion for this thread then is not whether any single act or policy is a violation of one or more of our rights. Little by little we see the TSA and other executive departments/agencies chipping away at the freedoms we've long considered inalienable. Yet, with each passing lustrum we find bits and pieces of them becoming becoming foreign to us. Thus, the topics for this thread are:
The thing that went through my mind is whether, as some folks have suggested, this, along with other TSA procedures, is a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. At the very least, it seems plausible that it is, and that concerns me. It doesn't concern me as a person, even though I fly somewhere every two to three days. It does concern me as a citizen of the U.S. who has no interest in seeing the Constitution and its Bill of Rights substantively abrogated by executive department fiat rather than by the legislative actions of the states.
The topic of discussion for this thread then is not whether any single act or policy is a violation of one or more of our rights. Little by little we see the TSA and other executive departments/agencies chipping away at the freedoms we've long considered inalienable. Yet, with each passing lustrum we find bits and pieces of them becoming becoming foreign to us. Thus, the topics for this thread are:
- whether the process of gradually chipping away at them results in our becoming a nation not all that different from the ones we decry
- whether by allowing the erosion of bits and pieces of the rights codified by our Constitution the people and groups who/that seek to destroy us will have effectively done so