Those TSA Screeners Are Criminals
Ben Franklin was correct: To claim we should give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety is Appeal to Cowardice
TSA Screeners, known officially as TSOs, literally are committing a crime when they randomly scan or search you. There are several reasons why this is so:
Just Obeying Orders
I have rapidly tired of Liberals, especially Neocons, claiming we should sympathize with the Transportation Security Officers (screeners), because (yes, real quote) “they are just obeying orders“.
Has our socialized education system so failed that nobody remembers when, in the Nuremberg war crime trials, people who said “we were just obeying orders” were executed?
Anything for a Job
“They have to do it, or they will get fired!”
If you take a job as a private delivery man, and then discover that your employer is using you for drug running, the government would require that you refuse, even if you will get fired.
Doing something that is criminal is not OK just because you want your job. Not even if your employer is the government.
Porn-and-Grope is Illegal
“But it’s a law”.
No, it is NOT a law. It is a REGULATION. Regulations are not laws. To even treat them like laws is unconstitutional.
But even if it were passed by congress as a law, it would not be real:
An unconstitutional act is not law;
it confers no rights;
it imposes no duties;
affords no protection;
it creates no office;
it is in legal contemplation,
as inoperative as though it had never been passed.
–Norton vs. Shelby County, 118 US 425 p.442
Because it violates the 4th amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, any rule requiring a random search is not a real rule at all. It has no validity.
Government Mafia
It is imposed only by threat of force, as any organized crime syndicate can do. When a government official violates the Constitution, he is nothing but a mobster, and has no more legitimate power or bearing on you than Al Capone’s hired muscle.
What’s more, it is literally illegal to randomly feel you up, in most cities with airports. Some actually are promising to arrest TSOs who try, if you call the police.
These TSOs are committing a crime each time they randomly search you. No constitutional law, or even regulation, supplies them with the power to search anyone without probable cause.
If the rule was that people behaving suspiciously, or otherwise giving cause to be suspected, had to be searched that would be legitimate. These random searches are not.
And anyone who engages in them is a criminal.
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This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
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But Now You Know 
I am so glad to have found your site!
My guess is that if taken to court, the argument in favor of letting this go on will be related to the idea, nation wide, that driving a car is not a right, but a privilege. ( from the latin, Privi Legis, “Private law”)
Every traffic court says this. It is a privilege to use the roads your taxes payed for.
They may argue that flying in an airplane is also a privilege, not a right, and is therefor subject to whatever that calls for. just as the roads have rules that are not laws, (think insurance) the skies may be places in that same legal fiction. thus, you have no right to fly.
There are provisions in the Patriot Act that can be interpreted to support the authority of the TSA screeners. The patriot act is a very tricky document that alters legal usages all over the government. In it most of the content you find are references to law, rules executive orders and official procedures. an example i read said that seventh word of the second sentance as used in section blah-blah paragraph so-and-so of the federal penal code be changed from “federal Circuit Court Judge” to “The federal law enforcement official most senior to the case”. As i recall, said reference had to do with the ability to search without a warrant. my point is, the way the law has been corrupted, we may find that we have no rights at all in an Airport.
Thank you for publishing this. We haven’t had this problem here, but I can only imagine what U.S. citizens have to endure to be able to travel in the U.S. I live in Jordan, by the way, where no airport security people touch anyone’s privates.