The Transportation Security Administration
has quietly expanded its
grope reach beyond airports:
As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds.
The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads—VIPR teams for short—assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States.
Included in those "transportation hubs" are highway weigh stations, train terminals, sporting events, music festivals and ... rodeos. Next they'll presumably be making everybody take off their boots and spurs before going through metal detectors and full-body scanners set up to check out everybody's junk at the entrance of 4-H Jamborees.
More searches without probable cause because, you know, terrorism. So they'll be patting down the crowd at marathons from now on?
The VIPR teams were initiated in 2005 and the program now has a $100 million budget and 37 teams. These comprise federal marshals, bomb experts and bomb-sniffing dogs. Ron Nixon at
The New York Times reports that VIPR conducted 8,800 unannounced operations outside of airports in 2012, including at the Indianapolis 500, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
Read more about these searches below the fold.
TSA officials say the VIPR squads increase public confidence by introducing a random element that could disrupt a terrorist attack. But they would not disclose whether they actually ever had stopped one. Civil liberties groups say VIPR's actions include warrantless searches that violate constitutional protections.
“The problem with T.S.A. stopping and searching people in public places outside the airport is that there are no real legal standards, or probable cause,” said Khaliah Barnes, administrative law counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “It’s something that is easily abused because the reason that they are conducting the stops is shrouded in secrecy.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee that oversees TSA, also has some concerns on that score as well as use of behavior protection profiling people in crowds. “I haven’t seen any good science that says that is what a terrorist looks like. Profiling can easily be abused. [...] It’s hard to quantify the usefulness of these teams based on what we have seen so far.”
As usual, much of this is rationalized on the basis that people who have nothing to hide should welcome the VIPR squads' actions. But given some of the grotesque stupidity we've seen in TSA airport behavior at airports, there ought to be, at the very least, a thorough effort to quantify the squads' usefulness no matter how hard it is.
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Richard Lyon has a discussion on the subject here.