mudra Tue Jan 03, 2012 4:35 am
TSA hits American trains and buses
POSTED BY ANIRVAN CHATTERJEE ⋅ DECEMBER 5, 2011 Attacks on passengers’ civil rights is one of the most unpleasant parts of flying. But the cancer is spreading to buses and trains. The TSA’s Visible Intermodal Protection and Response (VIPR) teams “detain and search citizens at railroad stations, bus stations, ferries, car tunnels, ports, subways, truck weigh stations, rest areas, and special events.” (via) According to the TSA News Blog:
“VIPR teams periodically descend on transportation hubs to conduct “random” searches, as they did in Tennessee; in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky; in Des Moines, Iowa; in Tampa, Florida; in Sacramento, California; and perhaps most notoriously, in Savannah, Georgia, where train passengers were separated from their luggage and body-searched after they got off the train. Amtrak Police Chief John O’Connor hit the roof when he found out and forbade the agency from ever setting foot in an Amtrak station without permission again. VIPR teams also operate in the New York City subway and in other cities, where, according to the TSA, they ‘surge into a transit agency.’…TSA head John Pistole recently testified before Congress that the TSA ‘conducted more than 8,000 VIPR operations in the past 12 months, including more than 3,700 operations in mass-transit and passenger-railroad venues.’” (via)
According to the TSA, VIPR teams have conducted 60,000 searches over the past six years, targeting train and bus passengers, among others. Imagining a world beyond dirty aviation also means imagining a world beyond an overreaching security state that imagines that terrorists are plotting to attack Greyhound buses.
read more : http://aviationjustice.org/2011/12/05/tsa-american-trains-and-buses/Love Always
mudra