getting serious about suspicious behavior

Earlier I read that the TSA is readying a “new behavior detection plan for airport checkpoints“:

The federal government is planning to introduce new behavior detection techniques at airport checkpoints as soon as next month, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Thursday.

TSA already has “behavior detection officers” at 161 airports nationwide looking for travelers exhibiting physiological or psychological signs that a traveler might be a terrorist.

A couple of commenters piped up.

A change in security theater. The whole thing is so stupid that it defies description. The major security risk at airports is the lines leading to the checkpoints. A terrorist bomb there would kill.injure hundreds. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with government control of the peasants.

Yes, the people standing in line are sitting ducks, and any successful bomb blast in front of a TSA airport gridlock hub would make the government look responsible, as well as make people even more reluctant to travel (if such a thing is possible).

This comment (while gourouniophobic) gave me a chuckle:

Bomb sniffing pigs are the answer.

And I especially liked what Radley Balko said earlier on Facebook:

Compliment your TSA agent by letting out a soft, sexy moan during the pat down.

I guess that would be “reverse psychology”? OTOH, moaning during a pat down might be seen as terrorism. These days, almost anything is. Earlier I read about Tea Party terrorism.

No seriously.

As we stumble closer to Aug. 2, it has become clear that many in the tea party are willing to inflict massive harm on the American people to obtain their political objective of a severely shrunken federal government. Their persistence in rejecting compromise, even as the economic effects of the phony crisis they have created mount, has taken their radicalism beyond tough negotiating, beyond even hostage-taking.

As markets fall in anticipation that there may not be a timely resolution; as credit agencies issue dire warnings that the U.S. political system has become so dysfunctional that a credit downgrade may be inevitable, and as America looks weakened in the eyes of the world, the tea party’s hostage-taking has evolved into the intentional infliction of harm on innocent Americans to achieve a political objective – terrorism.

Terrorism is a tough term, but, unfortunately, it describes tea party tactics precisely. Their first step was to vow not to vote to raise the debt ceiling.

Hey, there you go. Sure sounds like terrorism to me!

So, if the TSA is really on the ball with the new program, perhaps they should start questioning passengers about the debt ceiling and the size of the federal budget, and if they give the wrong answers, well, it’s time for a cavity search.

Have to teach these terrorists a lesson, you know….

All passengers with Gadsden flags, Ron Paul buttons, libertarian slogans, and other such terrorist regalia, prepare to bend over.