With little fanfare, the TSA has expanded to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, weighstations [View all]

[phantom power]

“The T.S.A., huh,” said Donald Neubauer of Greenville, Ohio, as he walked past the squad. “I thought they were just at the airports.”

With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

T.S.A. and local law enforcement officials say the teams are a critical component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, but some members of Congress, auditors at the Department of Homeland Security and civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. The teams are also raising hackles among passengers who call them unnecessary and intrusive.

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They even admit that this is mostly Security Theater. And that sounds so sweetly benign, doesn't it? But the effect of this isn't, in the end, to make little old ladies feel safer by confiscating the 8oz bottle of Geritol in their handbags. It's to train citizens to submit to authorities without probable cause. That's exactly what's happened in airports, after all. Americans are so docile about it that people in other countries are astonished to see us taking off our shoes and otherwise disrobing at airport security without even being told. (They don't have to.)

If what you desire is to make the Bill of Rights an anachronism, this is the sort of thing that works over time to make people wonder why they ever cared that they had any privacy or right to demand that authorities have good reason to stop and search them. Arguments against it already have the tone of something from another era

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/vipr-is-pits-teaching-us-to-reflexively.html