Nullification isn’t about groveling before politicians and judges to get a few scraps of liberty. Nullification is about the people standing up to the federal government and simply saying no. “These are our rights. This is what the constitution limits you to. You may go no further.”

Nullification is the only way that someone outside the federal government, which always wants as much power as it can possibly have no matter who is running it at any given time, can have a say as to what’s constitutional and what isn’t. It’s the only way that the People, instead of their would-be masters in Washington can have a say as to how much liberty they’ll be able to enjoy.

Thanks to Tom Woods and his book, more and more people are waking up to the reality that Presidents, Congress and judges aren’t going to fix things for us. Ever. And, more and more people are looking to nullification as a potential solution to the government’s ever-increasing intrusion on our lives.

Jacob H. Huebert [send him mail] is the author of Libertarianism Today (Praeger, 2010). He is also an attorney, Adjunct Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law, and an Adjunct Scholar of the Mises Institute. Visit his website.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This testimony was delivered on March 30, 2011 to the State Government Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The legislation in question is HR16 and HB852 – using the power of the state to protect liberty from abuses by the TSA.

Track state legislation to ban unconstitutional TSA practices here

Reprinted from www.cato.org

*******

Chairman Metcalfe, Ranking Member Josephs, and members of the committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. I am keenly interested in the subject matter of your hearing, and I hope that my testimony will shed some light on your deliberations.

My name is Jim Harper, and I am director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. The Cato Institute is a non-profit research foundation dedicated to preserving the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace. In my role there, I study the unique problems in adapting law and policy to the information age, problems like privacy and security.

I also serve as a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, which advises the DHS Privacy Office and the Secretary of Homeland Security on privacy and related issues. The committee meets quarterly to examine the privacy consequences of homeland security programs, of which there are many.

My service on the DHS Privacy Committee convinced me some years ago that neither security nor privacy would be adequately protected in the United States until we got a handle on the terrorism problem. So for the last few years Cato colleagues of mine — experts in foreign policy and defense — and I have been conducting a project on strategic counterterrorism.

It began in the late summer of 2008, when we convened a group of more than thirty terrorism experts from around the country and world for a meeting in Chicago. Early in 2009, we assembled many of these experts for a two-day public conference in Washington, D.C. And we conducted another conference a year later, reviewing the counterterrorism policies of the current administration after its first year. Our edited volume of essays highlighting select issues in counterterrorism. It is called, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix It.

In addition to my professional duties, I maintain an online resource about federal legislation and spending called WashingtonWatch.com. I speak only for myself today and not for any of the organizations with which I am affiliated or for any colleague. I will highlight two points in my testimony today. One is to encourage you as state leaders to play the role that was prescribed for you in the U.S. Constitution. You are right to press for the interests of your constituents as you perceive them, and you are right not to be cowed by federal authority, even when that puts you in conflict with the federal government. The Constitution intends for you to do this.

Second, I will highlight defects in federal security policy that you can help remedy. The federal Department of Homeland Security has not done the risk management analysis that justifies its policies, including the use of “strip-search machines” as a primary screening tool and the intrusive pat-down “alternative.” You can have confidence that bills like H.R. 16 and H.B. 852 contribute to balance in the national conversation on security and privacy. Protecting your state’s residents against the overreaching that you perceive is well warranted.

Federal-State Relations: Legal Supremacy is Not Omnipotence

Sixteen years ago, one of the things that caused me to move to Washington, D.C. from my native California was the unrelenting growth of the federal government. Power has been accumulating at the federal level since the New Deal era, with unfortunate results for liberty and for governance generally. Election results in 1994 promised a change back toward a constitutional balance that would be better for our country. But it didn’t go all that well. I’m still stuck in Washington, D.C.

Our federal constitution is structured to keep power closer to the common sense that is available in state government, local government, and with the people themselves. Under the Constitution, the federal government is one of limited powers. Its powers are restricted to those listed, or “enumerated,” in the Constitution. Even when it acts under an enumerated power, the federal government must do so in ways that are “necessary and proper” to effectuating a federal power. I am delighted to speak to this particular committee, where I expect you recognize the value of setting policies in Pennsylvania that are appropriate for Pennsylvania, and that are consistent with the values of Pennsylvanians.

The federal power that arguably permits the federal Department of Homeland Security to operate security systems at airports is the Article I, Section 8 power to “provide for the common Defence.” When that language was written, warfare was not purely a formal state-on-state affair — indeed, it was non-state actors who fought the Revolutionary War against the English monarchy — but the power primarily went to defending against foreign governments’ attacks on the territory of the United States. It did not go to defending privately held infrastructure against criminality.

Politically motivated attacks on private infrastructure are perhaps in part a federal responsibility because of their political or geopolitical content. But they are also a state responsibility because they are properly perceived as criminal violence, which the Constitution leaves to the jurisdiction of the states. One of the most important recent federalism cases was U.S. v. Lopez,¹ which held that a federal gun possession law — a criminal law — was not within the power of Congress to pass.

The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause gives the federal government the leading role when it is acting properly under an enumerated power. Proper federal laws preempt conflicting state laws. The federal government also has the “bully pulpit,” not only in the president’s access to media, but in the habit of the media and opinion leaders to look to Washington, D.C. for answers. But the federal government does not have a lock on political power.

You, as state representatives, are closer to the people of Pennsylvania. You understand their interests better than federal officials, far better than the unelected federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. who often presume to direct life in every dimension. The challenge to federal power in H.R. 16 and H.B. 852 are appropriate assertions of state power.

Unfortunately, the constitutional discussion above is not a prediction of how the Supreme Court would rule if a case were presented to it today. It will take several decades — if all goes well — for the courts to start recognizing and enforcing the limits on federal authority, especially in the area of security and counterterrorism.

The legal situation with regard to the Department of Homeland Security’s airport policies is also murky and changing. The TSA operates airport checkpoints under “security directives” that are not publicly available. (“Secret law” is, of course, repugnant to the Constitution and the rule of law.) Accordingly, my discussion of the legalities is tentative. It should not be taken as legal advice for travelers headed to the airport. Instead, it is my understanding of the legal situation for your use in determining how you might act as legislators.

When Congress created the Transportation Security Administration² and later the Department of Homeland Security,³ it did not invest TSA agents with law enforcement officer status. They are not entitled to carry weapons or make arrests. Their police-style uniforms notwithstanding, TSA agents are civilians like you and me.

Because these are not law enforcement officers conducting legal searches, the fiction in operation at the airport is that travelers have consented to search as a condition of travel. Accordingly, on the two occasions when I have been directed to a “strip-search machine” at an airport and have declined that opportunity, I have told the TSA agent proposing to pat me down the extent of my consent to his search. (I do so politely and have not had a problem so far.)

If I am correct in my assessment of the legal situation at the airport, the scope of such a search can be defined in Pennsylvania law as H.B. 852 proposes to do. You are free to define other elements of the interaction, such as by dictating that “stranger” body searches like this must be immediately preceded by the oral granting of consent, for example. This would help educate Pennsylvanians about the legal environment at the airport so that they do not mistake an airport search for a mandatory search by law enforcement personnel.

The one caution I would suggest is that you do not outlaw private, consensual body searches. If people want to play “TSA Agent and Traveler” at home, they should be free to do so! A tighter version of the legislation might define the indecent body search offense as one in which contact is made with a stranger’s intimate areas.

The search that American travelers undergo at the airport is as intimate as what prisoners in American jail cells get. It is shocking that the federal government is willing to treat law-abiding citizens this way.

The reason for the legal fiction I referred to above is because this search practice would probably not pass Fourth Amendment muster. This searching is not limited to cases of reasonable suspicion, and it pushes exceptions to Fourth Amendment rules to the breaking point. The Department of Homeland Security has not shown this search to be reasonable and has not validated its policies with analysis to the extent it should. This leaves it up to you to defend the privacy and rights of Pennsylvanians.

DHS Has Not Justified the Strip-Search/Pat-Down

It is very important to secure the country and travelers from terrorism, as well as all other threats. But the Department of Homeland Security has not done the work necessary to validate the use of “strip-search machines” or the invasive pat-down that is presented as an “alternative.” Risk management is something that DHS officials often speak about, but it is not something that they apparently used before instituting the “strip/grope” policy.

Since before my work with the DHS Privacy Committee and with my Cato Institute colleagues on counterterrorism policy, I have studied risk management and cost/benefit analysis a great deal. I will share with you my assessment of the strip/grope policy using those analytical tools.

Risk Management

Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks, followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events. It sounds complicated, but we are all risk managers, and we make decisions every day by balancing the risks we perceive against the things we want to achieve. In an area like air transportation, risk management requires more than common sense or “going with your gut,” of course. Risk management means thinking things all the way through.

A formal risk management effort will generally begin with an examination of the thing or process being protected. This is often called “asset characterization.” In airline security, the goal is fairly simple: ensuring that air passengers arrive safely at their destinations — specifically, by ensuring that nobody successfully brings down a plane.

The next step in risk management is to identify and assess risks, often called “risk characterization” or “risk assessment.” The vocabulary of risk assessment is not settled, but there are a few key concepts that go into it:

• Vulnerability is weakness or exposure that could prevent an objective from being reached. Vulnerabilities are common, and having a vulnerability does not damn an enterprise. The importance of vulnerabilities depend on other factors.
• Threat is some kind of actor or entity that might prevent an objective from being reached. When the threat is a conscious actor, we say that it “exploits” a vulnerability. When the threat is some environmental or physical force, it is often called a “hazard.” As with vulnerability, the existence of a threat is not significant in and of itself. A threat’s importance turns on other factors.
• Likelihood is the chance that a vulnerability left open to a threat will materialize as an unwanted event, a development that frustrates the safety, soundness, or security objective. Knowing the likelihood that a threat will materialize is part of what allows risk managers to apportion their responses.
• Consequence is the significance of loss or the impediment to objectives should the threat materialize. Consequences can range from very low to very high. As with likelihood, gauging consequence allows risk managers to focus on the most significant risks.

Analyzing vulnerabilities and threats permits risk managers to make rough calculations about likelihood and consequence. This process will float the most significant risks to the surface. Though these factors are often difficult to measure, a simple formula guides risk assessment:

Likelihood x Consequence = Risk

Events with a high likelihood and consequence should be addressed first, and with the most assets. Those are the highest risks. Events with low likelihood can wait, or they can even be ignored.

The most common error I see in risk management is the propensity to address vulnerabilities rather than full-fledged risks. In late 2009, a bomber’s attempt to take down a plane by concealing explosives in his undergarments exposed a vulnerability. It is possible to sneak a small quantity of explosive through conventional security systems, though not necessarily the needed detonator and not necessarily enough explosive material to take down a plane.

But this says nothing about the likelihood of this happening again — or of it being successful. In hundreds of millions of enplanements each year, this attack has manifested itself once. And it failed. The TSA effort is going after a vulnerability — of that there is no doubt — but it is arguable whether or not it is addressing a significant risk.

After risk assessment, the next step in risk management is choosing responses. Though the concepts and terminology are not settled in this area either, there are four general ways to respond to risk:

• Acceptance – Acceptance of a threat is a rational alternative that is often chosen when the threat has low probability, low consequence, or both.
• Prevention – Prevention is the alteration of the target or its circumstances to diminish the risk of the bad thing happening.
• Interdiction – Interdiction is any confrontation with, or influence exerted on, a threat to eliminate or limit its movement toward causing harm.
• Mitigation – Mitigation is preparation so that, in the event of the bad thing happening, its consequences are reduced.

In its operation, the strip-search/grope combination is an interdiction against any who may try to carry dangerous articles on planes. As to the air transportation system, it might also be conceived of as a preventive measure.

The next analytical lens to look through is benefit-cost analysis, or trade-offs. The goal is to allay risk in a cost-effective way, spending the least amount of money, and incurring the least costs overall, per unit of benefit.

Security Benefits

Security systems involve difficult and complex balancing among many different interests and values. The easiest, by far, is comparing the dollar costs of security measures against the dollar benefits. This is analysis that U.S. Government Accountability Office says the TSA has not done. A March 2010 GAO report says:

[I]t remains unclear whether the AIT [strip-search machine] would have detected the weapon used in the December 2009 incident based on the preliminary information GAO has received. . . . In October 2009, GAO also recommended that TSA complete costbenefit analyses for new passenger screening technologies. While TSA conducted a lifecycle cost estimate and an alternatives analysis for the AIT, it reported that it has not conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the original deployment strategy or the revised AIT deployment strategy, which proposes a more than twofold increase in the number of machines to be procured.⁴

If DHS did a cost-benefit analysis, the fact that these machines reveal most articles a person might try to sneak onto a plane appears on the benefit side of the equation. And that is an important benefit.

There are at least two important limitations on the benefit. First, there is an open question as to whether the strip-search machine would successfully detect lower-density material like the explosive PETN. If it does not, the machine’s utility against underpants bombing relies on potential attackers’ ignorance of that to deter their attempts. Second, the benefit of the strip-search/grope is not what it achieves from a baseline of zero, but the marginal security improvement in provides over alternatives like the status quo magnetometer and random pat-downs.

How do you reduce security benefit to something measurable? It’s difficult, but I’ve been mulling a methodology for valuing security against rare attacks in which you assume a motivated attacker that would eventually succeed. By approximating the amount of damage the attack might do and how long it would take to defeat the security measure, one can roughly estimate its value.

Say, for example, that a particular attack might cause one million dollars in damage. Delaying it for a year is worth $50,000 at a 5% interest rate. Delaying for a month an attack that would cause $10 billion in damage is worth about $42 million. It is best to assume that any major attack will happen only once, as it will produce responses that prevent it happening twice.⁵

Of course, one must consider “risk transfer.” That’s the shifting of risks from one target to another — say, from planes to buildings. (An organization like the Department of Homeland Security would regard this as lowering the benefit of a security measure, while an airline would be indifferent to it — unless it owned the building…) There is also the creation of new risks, such as the possible health effects of the strip-search machines. This brings us to the cost side of the ledger.

Costs

On the cost side of the ledger, the easy things to measure includes the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that must be spent on strip-search machines themselves. As much or more money will be spent on an ongoing basis to operate the machines. My observation is that it takes three people to operate one strip-search machine: a guide, an analyst to review the image, and a person to do the secondary pat-down which occurs regularly (though it would occur less over time). On a nationwide scale, this is hundreds of millions of dollars per year spent on TSA employees.

The value of travelers’ time is also important. This hasn’t received much discussion, but as more and more strip-search machines come into use, there will be more discussion of how much time they consume compared to magnetometers.

Reviewing tape of TSA checkpoints reveals that passing through the machines takes at least seven seconds per passenger. Variations in the time it takes to traverse the security checkpoint require all travelers to increase the amount of time they spend at the airport as a cushion against the risk of missing flights, which can cost many hours per occurence. If each of 350 million trips in a year results in an additional minute at the airport to accommodate the vagaries of the strip/grope, five to six million person hours at the airport will be wasted, a cost of $145 million per year if we value travelers’ time at $25 per hour.

It is more difficult is to balance interests like privacy and dignity against security benefits. The legislation we are discussing in the hearing today is evidence that the security procedures do not comport with the American people’s sense of privacy. If the airport strip/grope does not survive a dollars-to-dollars cost/benefit analysis, and if it also violates privacy, this is an inappropriate policy. What you do to reduce its privacy costs and right the balance is well worth considering.

My own view is that the strip/grope is security excess. If I had my way, I would choose the airlines and airports that do not go to this extreme. I do not get to have my way, and neither do you if you prefer a different security/privacy mix, because the federal government has commandeered airline security from the airports and airlines who should properly have responsibility for it.

The TSA should be abolished and responsibility for security restored to airlines and airports. Their experimentation could blend security with privacy, convenience, and comfort, improving the travel experience overall while restoring liberty to American travelers. In the meantime, your effort to provide a counterweight to federal overreaching in this area is a welcome protection for Pennsylvanians and an example for state leaders across the nation to emulate.

As director of information policy studies, Jim Harper works to adapt law and policy to the unique problems of the information age, in areas such as privacy, telecommunications, intellectual property, and security. Harper is a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee and he recently co-edited the book Terrorizing Ourselves: How U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It. He has been cited and quoted by numerous print, Internet, and television media outlets, and his scholarly articles have appeared in the Administrative Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, and the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. Harper wrote the book Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood. Harper is the editor of Privacilla.org, a Web-based think tank devoted exclusively to privacy, and he maintains online federal spending resource WashingtonWatch.com. He holds a J.D. from UC Hastings College of Law.

¹ 514 U.S. 549 (1995).
² Congress created the TSA within the Department of Transportation in the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, Pub.L. No. 107-71 (Nov. 19, 2001).
³ Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, transferring the TSA to that new agency, in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, Pub.L. No. 107-296 (Nov. 25, 2002).
⁴ United States Government Accountability Office, “TSA Is Increasing Procurement and Deployment of the Advanced Imaging Technology, but Challenges to This Effort and Other Areas of Aviation Security Remain,” GAO-10-484T (Mar. 17, 2010)http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10484t.pdf
⁵ The 9/11 “commandeering” attack on air travel is an instructive example. By late morning on September 11, 2001, passengers and crew recognized that cooperation with hijackers contributed to the deadliness of attacks rather than saving their lives. They spontaneously changed the security practice to meet the new threat, and the 9/11 attacks permanently changed the posture of air passengers toward hijackers, along with hardened cockpit doors bringing the chance of another commandeering attack on air travel very close to nil.

If US media coverage is any indication, the public interest in the unconstitutional  TSA screening processes is waning seriously just when we need it to spike to support the state legislation that has recently been introduced.

Consider this recent article in the UK Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/10/transport-usdomesticpolicy

The TSA (actual motivational motto: “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”) decided “ritualised humiliation of travelers” made an acceptable substitute for “transportation security.” Last year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) started pushing nude scanners on the American flying public. These require travellers to adopt surrender-criminal body positions – feet apart, hands in the air, don’t move – while potentially carcenogenic radiation generates nude images graphic enough to permit TSA agents to see travellers’ genitalia (though not, apparently, clear enough to show guns smuggled in travellers’ undies).

Last week, however, state legislators in Texas and New Hampshire introduced legislation identifying TSA behaviour as the criminal activity it is. (Similar bills have already been proposed in New Jersey, but are currently stalled in committee.) The Texas bill, co-written by a Republican and a Democrat with support from 20 other legislators spanning the political spectrum, would ban the scanners in state airports, and add TSA-style grope-downs to the list of “sexual assault” offences in the penal code. The New Hampshire bill would make “the touching or viewing with a technological device of a person’s breasts or genitals by a government security agent without probable cause a sexual assault.” The TSA has completely ignored those two words – probable cause – since its inception.”

Consider the track record of Isreal as summarized in this article

In Israel you can carry liquids on to the plane, they don’t do electronic strip searches, they don’t perform sexual assault (the unwanted touch of any individual against any other person’s genitals) on their travelers, and they have a perfect security record for several decades now. All of this while being the number one target for terrorist activity in the world. 

The absurdity of the TSA policies is clear when reviewing the behavior from a safe distance as pointed out by this blogger.

The GAO released a report that said at least 16 individuals later accused of involvement in terrorist plots flew 23 different times through U.S. airports since 2004. Yet none were stopped by TSA behavior detection officers working at those airports. None.

The bottom line is, the TSA spends $6.3 BILLION per year, has 60,000 employees, and has does not seem to have made us safer. Their argument might be that TSA run programs prevent people from even trying… but security existed in the airports for decades prior to the TSA and the results were no different.

So what can WE THE PEOPLE do to raise awareness and to flex our inalienable rights?

Well some people have already been paving the way and testing the response of the TSA.

Medical doctors have sent letters to DC expressing their concern over the radiation and the risk of spreading disease through the pat downs. See this and this. Their comments have brought light to the accuracy of the safety tests regarding the radiation and the TSA has admitted at leasts some of the tests were flawed.

“It would appear that the emissions are 10 times higher. We understand it as a calculation error,” TSA spokesman Sarah Horowitz said in a telephone interview.

Citizens from all around the country have refused to go through the scanners and have found creative ways to show that they had nothing to hide.

One man stripped to his underwear, another lady went through in a bikini.

One man wrote an abbreviated version of the 4th amendment on his chest and stripped down to reveal it while refusing the pat down.  

“Tobey was unduly seized by government agents in violation of the Fourth Amendment, despite the fact that he did nothing to disrupt airport routine,” says John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute in a statement.

There are several ethical issues involved in the dilemma over submitting to the radiation and pat down screenings. Some, like Tenth Amendment Center founder Mike Boldin, have opted not to fly so that they do not embolden the TSA to sexually molest citizens with government sanction but without probable cause.

Many would prefer to drive or stay home than to unwittingly give their silent approval (by sumbitting to the process) to TSA agents who sometimes fondle women with prosthetic breasts, leaves a bladder cancer patient covered in urine, anger and humiliate random citizens, and leave 3 year children crying and screaming stop touching me.  

What would Jesus, Ghandi, or Martin Luther King do about this ethical dilemma?

Martin Luther King and Ghandi were champions of non-violent visible mass resistance. 

Jesus, in dealing with a government official that would force a citizen to walk one mile, suggested that they go two (Matthew 5:41). He advised that citizens should exceed what is required. In doing so, the citizen is not cowering as he is being dominated, intimidated, or controled.  Instead the citizen is making an empowering choice.

I wonder if that is what the maker of this tshirt had in mind with his catchy slogan:

Expedite Air Travel, Fly Naked.

It seems to me that wearing the tshirt or complying with its mesage, would both be effective ways to exercise dissent and increase the visibility of the continued violation of the rights of US citizens in clear violation of the 4th amendment. 

I should not be subjected to what is government-sanctioned sexual assault in order to board a plane.” Sharon Kiss, 66

Jamie Davis is the chapter coordinator for the Jacksonville/First Coast Tenth Amendment Center and the Communications director for the Florida Tenth Amendment Center

I was always something of a careless child, and as a result, I struggled with math because of the importance of precision in mathematical problem solving. When I was learning algebra, I remember often experiencing frustration after flawlessly following the correct problem solving steps, only to come up with the wrong answer because I miscopied a number in the original equation. Despite a passionate defense of my proper technique, my teacher always insisted the answer was wrong, because – well – it was wrong.

Many Americans make the same kind of error in their application of logic.

You see, if you start with a flawed premise, you will always come up with the wrong answer.

This fact struck me as I was reading comments today on a news story posted on a Facebook page chronicling yet another botched, overly intrusive airport security screening.

Interestingly, despite the hue and cry over the last few weeks, and anecdotal evidence to the contrary, most Americans have no problem with full body scans and groping pat-down procedures recently adopted by the Transportation Security Administration. In fact, a recent CBS News poll revealed 4-of-5 Americans actually approve of the TSA security protocol.

Most people insist that the TSA, “is just trying to protect us.”

Others say, “If you have nothing to hide, why should it bother you?”

I’ve heard similar arguments voiced in defense of overzealous police searches, warrantless wire tapping and random traffic stops.

On the surface, this line of thinking appears reasonable. We all want to live our lives safe and secure. And most of us would be willing to put up with a little inconvenience to stop hardened criminals from preying on innocent victims. So why not allow government to exercise a little more power in order to keep society safe and sound?

But the logic rests on a faulty premise – that those in power will always use it with our best interests at heart.

Americans tend to give others the benefit of the doubt. We assume the best in people. We believe that those who “serve” us do so out of a benevolent heart. But history and any objective examination of human nature prove this a dangerous and naive assumption.

Modern psychology and pop culture promote the idea that most people are basically good. This is a relatively new notion in the history of humankind. Our predecessors took a much dimmer view of human nature.

“Man is nothing but a subject so naturally full of error that it can only be eradicated through grace.  There is nothing to show him the truth, for everything deceives him. The two so-called principles of truth–reason and the senses–are not only not genuine but are engaged in mutual deception. Through false appearances the senses deceive reason.  And just as they trick the soul, they are in turn tricked by it.  It takes it revenge. The senses are influenced by the passions which produce false impressions.” Blaise Pascal

History testifies to the truth of Pascal’s observation. Tyranny, oppression and injustice litter its pages.

Part of our problem as Americans in understanding the danger of concentrated power lies in the fact that we have rarely experience the terror of its application. And we assume that will always be the case. But we should know better. Just look at some of the laws on the books during the Jim Crow era and tell me that our government always has all of its citizens’ best interests at heart.

Get the New Book Today!

Our founders understood. They understood human nature. They understood the corrupting influence of power – as Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

The men and women who founded our republic lived under a tyrannical, overreaching government. And they spilled blood to free themselves from its yoke. Then they set about creating a Constitutional government with limited, enumerated powers to protect its citizens from its overzealous reach. George Washington summed up the founders’ view of government.

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

Those who would trade their liberty for a sense of security will ultimately end up with neither.

Remember, always check your premise.

Because a wrong answer remains wrong, regardless of the beauty of the process by which you reached it.

I’ve been thinking about the horrid situation at airports for weeks, and before that for even more months

Flyers now have the option enforced against them of either being scanned or groped. What a choice!

I haven’t flown in an airplane for years now. The last time was when I attended a conference at the Mises Institute in Alabama. I have been lucky. I didn’t need to fly or want to fly, but I still may feel I have to, and I am still deeply troubled by the scanning and groping. Both are despicable.

What I wish is that all flyers would organize and boycott all flying, or organize sit-down strikes at all the airports on a given day and hour, or organize some sort of widespread protest action or actions at specific times so as to make known their true inner feelings.

This hope banks on the notion that people now put up with the scanning and groping because they feel they have no alternative as individuals. I may be wrong. They may support it or feel it’s in their safety interest. I don’t know, but I can only express my own personal distaste for what air travel has come to and hope that someone better equipped to organize protests than I will do so. Such protests should be accompanied by publicized demands to end this travesty.

Stop it! Stop it now! Stop searching every traveler! Stop searching innocent people!

Stop searches that have no reasonable basis. Stop searches that are based only on one criterion: that the person is a traveler. What kind of reasonable basis for a search is that? None whatsoever! It is totally unreasonable to suspect everyone! It is totally unreasonable to suspect everyone who is a traveler. It’s unreasonable for the obvious reason that we all know that not one person in sixty million is a terrorist, and not one in six hundred million is at the point of trying to board a plane with an explosive device hidden on his person.

Groping and scanning are both searches. Both are equally vile. Both are unreasonable searches. Both need to be rejected.

Why should I submit to a search? What have I done to merit that? What criminal record have I accumulated in my 70 years? When have I uttered a threat against an airline? When have I encouraged anyone to blow up an airplane?

Where’s the probable cause? Where’s the reasonable basis to grope me, frisk me, x-ray me, or otherwise invade my person or property? There is none.

Where’s the warrant obtained from a judge? There is none.

It’s totally ridiculous to be searching me. I won’t stand for it. I am being assumed to be a criminal suspect for no good reason whatsoever. The people engaging in the criminal behavior are the searchers in this case, not the searchees.

I speak personally, but of course the same is true of millions upon millions of other people. What have they done to merit a search? Absolutely nothing. Nada.

There is such a thing as a U.S. Constitution, although adherence to it is zilch. It once meant something, and the government still claims it means something. What a bunch of liars and hypocrites they are. They deserve no respect. They deserve nothing but scorn. How can they conduct such searches of millions of innocent people in the face of the constitutional language?

The Fourth Amendment reads

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

There is no ambiguity here. The right to be secure in my person shall not be violated. Period. It doesn’t say that airports are an exception. Or that public roads are an exception. Or that public spaces are an exception. There are no exceptions listed.

If exceptions are allowed, such as supposedly to create safe air travel, then similar exceptions can be allowed for rail, bus, auto, and pedestrian traffic anywhere, anytime, and at virtually any place. Police state, folks. That’s what we’re talking about. Police state. We’ve got it. Now. Here and now. Don’t look now, it’s here already.

Am I an expert on the case law of searches? Have I read all the pertinent Supreme Court cases that develop exceptions and procedures and interpret the Constitution? No. I won’t waste any more time on such a fruitless endeavor. I did that for the case of America’s money. I did that in excruciating detail over the course of two solid months. I found, as have others before me, that the Supreme Court is perfectly capable of making things up as they go along. They have twisted the clear constitutional language to suit themselves and their own ideas. We cannot quietly submit to what the Supreme Court says. We must protest when conscience and reason tell us that the Court is in the wrong.

I demand the termination of these unreasonable searches and I urge you to demand the same. Boycott air travel, or else dream up some better manner of protest than I can think of. But don’t sit still for this. It’s not right, and you know it’s not right. It’s not lawful, and you know it’s not lawful. It’s mass insanity, and you know it’s mass insanity.

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

What a week we have all just endured! While the Democrats were re-writing the federal takeover of healthcare behind closed doors, the public face of the federal government was fixated on denying and then explaining all the gaps in its intelligence gathering. The Obama administration has been finger-pointing over who in the government let a murderous thug on a plane in Amsterdam that he tried to explode over Detroit.

First, the government said that the system worked. Then the President said it didn’t. Then he announced that the intelligence communities and security people would start to talk to each other so the bad guys could be kept out. Weren’t they supposed to be doing this all along?

At Newark Liberty Airport last Sunday, a TSA agent left his post, and a young man walked past it to kiss his girlfriend good-bye. Then the young man turned and left the secured area and left the airport. So far no harm, no foul. But because the government’s surveillance cameras in the airport didn’t work, the feds panicked and ordered over 10,000 passengers to leave the terminal, go out into the 15-degree Newark, NJ cold at night, and then re-enter the airport.

Flights were delayed and missed, kids did not get to school on Monday morning, and soldiers were listed as AWOL. All because the government overreacted to a kiss. This humiliated the feds: New Jersey’s 86-year-old senior Senator Frank Lautenberg demanded that the guy who kissed his gal be hunted down and prosecuted because of the chaos he caused. He caused? Let’s see; the government has cameras that watch us every time we scratch our noses, and when those cameras don’t work, the government blames the person whose picture it was supposed to be taking? Come on.

All this, of course, brings out the false argument of liberty versus security. And we hear it from the Progressives that the government must take our freedoms in order to keep us safe. That’s hogwash. Freedom is our birthright. It doesn’t come from the government; it is part of our humanity. America is the only country in the history of the world dedicated to the truism that we are endowed by our Creator, as Jefferson wrote, with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The government has forgotten basic civics: “Endowed by our Creator” means that our rights come from God and not from the feds. “Inalienable” means that we and our freedoms cannot be separated, unless and until we are convicted by a jury of violating someone else’s rights. What is the value of being safe if we are not free? Did our forefathers flee the kings and despots of Europe and come here to be safe? Did Patrick Henry say “Give me safety or give me death?” Here is the mistake that the Big Government crowd wants to thrust upon us: They want to balance liberty and safety. There is no such thing as balance when it comes to freedom. We will not trade freedom for anything, or balance it against anything, and we certainly won’t give it up to the TSA.

Can the government keep us safe? I don’t think so. Airline travel is safer today because pilots have guns, cockpit doors are like bank vaults, and the passengers have become courageous. All this was done by individuals in the private sector, not by the government.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if the feds had not stripped us of our natural rights to keep ourselves safe – by keeping and bearing arms – 9/11 would never have happened.

How about letting the airlines decide who gets on the planes, rather than a TSA worker who leaves his post? When industry competes for your business, you fly where you want to go, you get there in comfort and safety, and you do all this at a competitive cost. When the government runs the show, you stand in the cold night air for six hours because of a kiss. The government can’t deliver the mail, it can’t operate surveillance cameras at an airport; it can’t pay back its debts; it can’t tell the truth. That would be the same government that wants to manage your healthcare.

America, do you see what happens when we rely on the government too much? It gets authoritarian and we get weak. Our children grow to expect from the government what we once did for ourselves. Government is a fearful master. It is not faithful to us; it is not truthful to us; it can’t produce for us. It doesn’t obey its own laws; it doesn’t keep us safe; and it won’t leave us alone. It is mortgaging our futures, raising our taxes, and treating us all like children.

What to do? Challenge it at every turn. Expose it to friend and foe. Educate all you know about what you see and hear every day on this show. And return no one to the government who has stolen your freedom.

And one other thing: The God who gave us life also gave us liberty. He loves us. Praise Him from the roof tops, and ask Him to save us from a government that is out of control.

Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His next book is Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History, (Nelson, 2010).

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is no longer angering just us peons with its absurd airport checkpoints. It’s also infuriating foreign rulers. Which raises an intriguing question: given the American government’s habit of liberating oppressed people around the world, will one of these piqued potentates return the favor and liberate us from the TSA?

Becky just might be on to something – especially seeing that there’s nothing in the Constitution that even authorizes the TSA’s existence.

And that’s crucial, because the 10th Amendment states pretty clearly that any power exercised by the federal government must be clearly authorized by the Constitution.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

According to a post at ThinkProgress.org, it didn’t kick off too well. In fact, so many commenters were hostile, that the blog was “overwhelmed”

The Transportation Security Administration is having trouble with its new blog, which launched on Wednesday. The team of bloggers tried to set a friendly tone by introducing themselves with lines such as: “Hi! My name is Ethel and I’m from Wisconsin. I like music, I love ice cream, and I adore weird facts.” But by mid-day yesterday, comments had already been turned off the original “Welcome” post after “things started to get ugly.”

Needless to say, I felt this was a good opportunity to discuss the biggest problem with the TSA – the fact that it’s not authorized by the Constitution. So, I decided to write a comment on another of the TSA’s new blog posts:

So, where in the Constitution is the TSA even authorized?

In case anyone’s wondering, it’s not.

The Constitution was written under what’s referred to as “positive grant”

This means, that the federal government is only allowed to exercise those powers which are specifically given to it in the Constitution.

The 10th Amendment makes it clear that EVERYTHING else is left to “the States, respectively, or to the people”

Thus – everything an unconstitutional agency does is in direct violation of the constitution. (and that includes using your money to run this TSA blog)

Surprisingly, the TSA moderators approved the comment.

The point, though, is what’s most important. Arguments about the TSA’s methods, management, and the like – are a distraction from the true issue – the existence of the TSA is unconstitutional in and of itself.