Could a resident lawyer explain the full effect of this bill?
Text of the bill:
SECTION 1. NO IMMUNITY FOR CERTAIN AIRPORT SCREENING METHODS.
No law of the United States shall be construed to confer any immunity for a Federal employee or agency or any individual or entity that receives Federal funds, who subjects an individual to any physical contact (including contact with any clothing the individual is wearing), x-rays, or millimeter waves, or aids in the creation of or views a representation of any part of a individual's body covered by clothing as a condition for such individual to be in an airport or to fly in an aircraft. The preceding sentence shall apply even if the individual or the individual's parent, guardian, or any other individual gives consent.
IANAL, but I believe it means that if you misbehave while giving a pat-down or by storing child porn pictures from the x-ray scanner, you will got to jail and the organisation responsible for your actions will go down in flames, just the same as if you were guilty of sexual assault or pedophily and they condoned it with company policy, no matter whether anyone gave consent for you to perform your dirty deeds.
This puts enormous emphasis on airports and/or security organisations to make absolutely god damn sure that no such misbehaviour happen, unless they want to be wide open to lawsuits that will tear them to shreds.
If an underage teenager texting a naked picture of themselves qualifies as a child pornographer, a TSA employee storing pictures of a naked child certainly does too.
In a perfect world, yes. But maybe once the feds and their outsourced hands get painted with the same broad brush as the populace, maybe we'll see some of these way-too-broad think-of-the-children laws be tossed out and rewritten to something resembling sane policy.
Doesn't mean it is right though. Wikipedia: "Pornography or porn is the portrayal of explicit sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual excitement and erotic satisfaction." How is a simple picture of a naked child explicit or exciting?
Oh, sweet Jesus, have you just started reading the Internet today? People have been convicted on child porn charges for pictures they took of their own children in the bathtub. Any picture of any child or any non-child or cartoon character intended just to look like a child has been treated as full-blown pedophilia for the last ten years or more. Computers have been impounded and people ruined - and it's always won't someone think of the children, until it's the TSA doing it and that's just hunky-dory because we have to stay safe at any possible cost.
I have to go have a little lie-down now, the grar is melting my brain.
Ron Paul's intent, as he describes, is to say that TSA employees shouldn't be allowed to do anything anyone else can't do. If you or I (or Ron) are not allowed to grope people the TSA employee shouldn't be allowed to grope people. If you and I are not allowed to expose people to X-rays, the TSA employee shouldn't be allowed to expose people to X-rays. Etc.
In other words, it's not about outlawing "misbehavior" by TSA employees, it's about outlawing the bulk of their job, as performed recently.
That was my impression as well, though it seems inconsistent with the point of government. The sole distinguishing characteristic of government, that which sets it apart from all other forms of human organization, is its capacity to legitimately perform acts that would be considered criminal for anyone else to do. Absent the legitimacy, they would be a protection racket; absent the power, they would be a non-profit organization.
You're arguing the completist case: that of a totalitarian state, where legitimacy is significantly a function of the execution of power against part of the populace.
One intermediate form of a state is a rule-of-law state which regularly trades significant power for increased legitimacy - examples are chartered government agencies that have a goal (source of core legitimacy), are governed by public legislation and regulation, and who are restricted in the the types of power they may wield in all situations and who are subject to an independent administrative, judicial or political review which may be triggered by aggrieved members of the populace. They gain additional legitimacy by the fact that they may only use the least force or power that is considered by the populace as necessary to achieve their legitimate goals.
I quite like rule-of-law states, and find the current rebalancing of minimum power/legitimate goals very interesting in a historical context, viz. security theatre and traditional concepts of civil liberties.
>You're arguing ... legitimacy is significantly a function of the execution of power against part of the populace.
I was not advocating anything, merely describing what often goes undescribed. Further, I wasn't arguing from where the legitimacy emerges, only that it exists, and that that extant legitimacy, coupled with the extant power and willingness to engage in otherwise-criminal acts is what makes a government a government. Take away one or the other and we wouldn't call it a government.
>I quite like rule-of-law states
Here ya go, a long but rather good piece written by a former professor of mine:
I'm sorry if "arguing" means "advocating" to you, my meaning was that the conclusion that you reached was an extreme end of a continuum. Decrease one or the other and you can still call it a government for many possible points on the continuum.
Thanks for the article, it was quite interesting as I don't have a US background. I was a bit surprised that the author thought that people might assume that a system of explicit rules, judgements and binding agreements could be anything other than political in practice.
We use language to create these legal instruments, and interpret them as language users in a community, each of us with our own interests. Politics is what we call this interpretation, negotiation and transformation process. But the fact that there is a political process (whether you agree about the current scope of these state-sanctioned instruments, or whether you'd prefer that civil society manintains them instead) is a classic marker of a rule of law society: totalitarianism, as the extremis case you describe, has very little of this political process and for very good reasons - it's not necessary in the broad.
It's a bit silly if that's the extent of the bill, and it's difficult to say exactly how courts would apply it, but basically it says that the TSA (well, every government agency) and their employees do not have immunity if they do something wrong or illegal.
The easiest examples would be with children. A TSA employee could be charged for viewing the image of a child produced by the new imaging scanners on the grounds that it could be considered pornographic. Or if a TSA employee pats down a child, it could be considered molestation. Again, though, it's really difficult to say what effects, if any, this bill would realistically have, especially if that's all there is to it (it's not available on THOMAS yet).
In any event, I can't see this bill getting through the House, not to mention the problem of trying to find a sponsor in the Senate.
They would presumably be covered by the same kind of immunity as the police/welfare officers when it is necessary for them to view child pornography (in the context of investigation a child pornographer) or to search a child (for some valid reason, suspected of carrying drugs/weapons?).
I find it funny that there's a bigger uproar against airport security screenings than there is against a war where civilians are injured and killed. Both are related to terror, but what a difference in perception.
In the case of airport screenings, it's pretty clear that cost >> benefit. Cost = sleazy govt employee looking/touching at my balls, and maybe saving the photos. Benefit = risk of death reduced by an amount less than 1 extra gym session per year.
In the case of the assorted wars, it's not as clear. Cost = visible casualties of real war in Afghanistan. Benefit = preventing the invisible casualties of 10-15 years more living under the Taliban + invisible civil wars that would have eventually overthrown the Taliban.
(Fun fact: on 9/12 or 9/13, shortly after Osama was labelled as the culprit, an Afghani friend IMed me. "I'm very sorry for what happened to your country, but this could be the greatest thing that ever happened to mine." He then expressed a hope that we wouldn't "pull a somalia".)
Haven't spoken with him in a while, but his biggest concern the last time we spoke was that Hillary might beat Rudy and abandon Afghanistan. He drew analogies to Bill abandoning Somalia and Rwanda.
His general perspective was that you have war/tyranny regardless of US involvement, but at least with US involvement there is hope for the future. He was also pretty critical of western anti-war types - he thought they cared more not seeing war on TV than actually about the actual victims of war/tyranny.
(Note: his perspective was a little unusual by Afghani standards. He wasn't Muslim and only part of his family escaped to US (in 1996) on refugee visas, fleeing persecution. )
People aren't in uproar simply over 'airport security screenings.' They are in uproar over certain practices that they believe greatly infringe upon their rights. The majority of individuals, myself included, feel that we shouldn't have to make a choice between being touched inappropriately by a stranger or allowing a stranger in a back room somewhere to look at our genitalia to travel by plane.
You're probably correct that there should be greater public outcry over civilian casualties in war, but that doesn't mean we can't rally against privacy-invading things like full body scanners.
How come there was no big outcry over The Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, CCTV all over, enhanced interrogation, suspension of haebeous corpus.. etc...?
Most people are not that worried about me eavesdropping on half of their cellphone conversation (I wish they were, then they might STFU) or watching them walk from their car to the mall. They probably wouldn't even care if I spied on their banking details as long as I didn't buy stuff with their CC.
On the other hand, most people would be bothered if I touched their balls or viewed nude pictures of them on my computer.
Apparently some people feel similarly about homeland security doing these things.
This is easy: Most people don't and will never directly feel the consequences of that stuff. Millions of people fly every day and directly experience the TSA nonsense.
This is just my opinion, and I'd love to hear whether people agree or disagree with it.
I think part of the reason for the lack of outrage over The Patriot Act was the timing. When the Patriot Act was created, it was a short enough time after 9/11 that the US was still strongly emotionally effected by it. It was easier to say "This will prevent terrorism" and be believed.
Years later, it's become easier to take a rational look at the risks and benefits, and see that it's unlikely that such measures will prevent enough terrorism to outweigh the costs.
Honestly, I hope that's true. Every recent discussion (outside of Hacker News) that I've seen relating to either the full body scanners or the new pat-down procedures has been riddled with the majority making statements like "They don't bother me, and you should chill out cause it keeps me safe," "If you won't submit to search, you shouldn't have the right to fly" or worse, in my opinion "God I hope you're not slowing my line down with your crazy hippie opt-out."
It is sad, but it's really the classic NIMBY reaction. --The wars are happening on a different continent, so not nearly as many people feel that they are directly affected by the wars.
My legislation is simple. It establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any US law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person. It means they are subject to the same laws as the rest of us.
This seems to me to target the wrong people. Most of the screeners are just doing their jobs. They are not the ones who decided to use these machines or implement the groping policy.
If it doesn't strike down the $10,000 civil fine (which could make you lose your house, think about it) it's pointless.
Is there a record of how many bills Ron Paul has gotten passed? Because if he's as loony as his son, this is never going to get serious attention (anyone can introduce a bill and anyone else can put a hold on it too).
Text of the bill:
SECTION 1. NO IMMUNITY FOR CERTAIN AIRPORT SCREENING METHODS.
No law of the United States shall be construed to confer any immunity for a Federal employee or agency or any individual or entity that receives Federal funds, who subjects an individual to any physical contact (including contact with any clothing the individual is wearing), x-rays, or millimeter waves, or aids in the creation of or views a representation of any part of a individual's body covered by clothing as a condition for such individual to be in an airport or to fly in an aircraft. The preceding sentence shall apply even if the individual or the individual's parent, guardian, or any other individual gives consent.