DHS Gets Public Comment, Whether It Wants It Or Not

OverTheGeicoE writes "The motion to force DHS to start its public comment period is still working its way through the court (DHS: 'We're not stonewalling!', EPIC: 'Yes, you are!'). While we wait for the decision, Cato Institute's Jim Harper points out another way for the public to comment on body scanners, tsacomment.com. Even before this site existed, of course, the government was receiving public comment anyway in the form of passenger complaint letters, which they buried in their files. Even so, the public can get a chance to view those comments as the result of Freedom of Information Act requests. An FOIA request about pat-downs by governmentattic.org yielded hundreds of pages of letters to the government from 2010, including frequent reports of pat-down induced PTSD and sexual abuse trauma."

Comments

Popular vote

[girlintraining]

I believe I speak for many Americans when I say my comment is "Go away."

Re:Popular vote

[firex726]

Many yes, but far too many feel that "If that's the price we have to pay for safety, then so be it".
Which of course has SO much wrong with it.

Re:Popular vote

[Anonymous Coward]

There was recent poll (on CNN I believe), that claimed people in general were satisfied with the TSA (note that some of them dont fly at all, and have never experienced the TSA, but decided to vote)

Re:Popular vote

[seepho]

People have opinions on subjects they're ignorant of? Surely you jest.

Re:Popular vote

[cpu6502]

The majority also supported the roundup of Japanese-americans during WW2, depriving them of their liberty, property, and right to a jury trial. That doesn't make the majority's trampeling of individual rights okay, either then or now.

What good is public comment

[Hatta]

when your comments are completely ignored?

DHS' existence makes the case for states rights

[BMOC]

...over federal power. If you give the federal government too much power, they do things like this. They are simply not equipped (due mostly to incompetence) to deal with the concerns of it's citizens like local government is, and they should only exist to settle disputes between states and provide for the common defense and law. But when you put them in charge of things like this, you are guaranteed to get problems. The DHS is literally the poster child for why you should never ever ever give your executive branch in a representative republic more power than you would give your local mayor.

Re:DHS' existence makes the case for states rights

[Cormacus]

Well their secondary recourse, in a town of 185 people, is to leave. This kind of voting with your feet is why pushing governmental functions down to the lowest (read: most local) level is a good thing. The feedback loop is tightest there. If the city government in a small city is out of touch and not listening, the final stage in the feedback loop is for the residents to up and leave for the next town over. The larger the area covered by that government, the more difficult it is to do that.

Re:This is going to get ugly

[Joce640k]

They don't have to beat the TSA. They can blow themselves up in the queue for the scanner and have pretty much the same effect.

communists won

[Dan667]

remember with the US use to make fun of communists for their "show me your papers" paranoia? tsa is UnAmerican.

Re:Anxiety

[Smidge204]

but living under that fear should not be a necessity of a reasonably safe flying experience

There is no evidence at all that you are any safer. In fact the TSA has failed to detect smuggled banned objects in every official test, several unofficial tests, and several anecdotal accounts that I'm aware of - and there have been numerous publications on how the various methods they use are easily fooled and/or don't detect the proper types of materials.

You are living in fear and you're not even safer for your trouble.
=Smidge=

Re:There are much better ways to spend money

[mr1911]

You have obviously never been raped.

it's not like you didn't know it was coming.

Ahhh, the justification that makes everything the TSA does A-OK.

Re:Enhanced Pat Down

[gstoddart]

However, not being an American, and being on my way out of the country, I had no choice.

Maybe not then, but you do now.

My choice is not to visit the US. At the moment, their airport security there isn't something I'm willing to subject myself to.

I've been lightly frisked elsewhere (politely, and not overly invasive), which is fine because I refuse to get into that scanner thing. But compared to what I've heard of the idiocy with TSA ... not happening.

Ever since Alberto Gonzales said habeus corpus isn't actually guaranteed, there's been a fairly obvious conclusion that pesky things like the US Constitution just get in the way. (How an Attorney General can have no idea how your laws work still baffles me.)

And since now apparently there's a huge Constitution Free Zone ... if it doesn't apply to citizens, I sure as hell don't want to be a foreign national.

Sadly, 9/11 was when America jumped the shark in terms of her historical defense of rights.