Glenn?!

According to CNN, the TSA is actually more ineffective than I initially thought:

False Positives-

Members of Congress also expressed concern about the number of "false positives" -- people flagged for additional screening that resulted in nothing being found. For every person correctly identified as a "high risk" traveler by (the behavior detection officers), 86 were misidentified, Willis said. At random screening, for every person correctly identified, 794 were misidentified.

Effectiveness at detecting terrorists-

Experts agree that the fact that there is an extremely small number of terrorists makes it hard to evaluate the effectiveness of behavioral observation programs. The Accountability Office said it looked at 23 occasions in which 16 individuals -- people later charged with terrorism-related activities -- passed through high-threat airports. None is known to have been identified. But it is not known if the behavior detection officers were working at the time, the agency said.

So, in the best case scenario, for every person ultimately charged with a crime (not necessarily convicted) 86 are misidentified. And that is using "trained" behavioral analysts. Most TSA searches are random, which results in one charge for every 794 false positives. Note also that nearly 40% of the charges are immigration related. Most of the rest are probably drug related.

The TSA can't point to a single incident where its random searches or behavioral analysis actually has prevented a terrorist attack. Despite their utter failure, the TSA plans to spend another $1.2 billion over the course of five years on behavior analysis techniques.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/04/15/tsa.screeners.complain/index.html?hpt=C1 [cnn.com]

There's nothing specifically fascist about this. The same could be said for Socialist or Communist. Rather, it's generic totalitarianism.

I wish people would stop using "Fascist" for "Evil". It's only one of several evil forms of government.

Q: How many terrorists has the TSA caught?
A: ZERO

Q: How many terrorist attacks has the TSA stopped?
A: ZERO

For proof, the answer is obvious - a terrorist doesn't just decide that airplanes are too well protected so they are going to give up on the idea of causing mayhem, they will just look for easier targets like shopping malls, movie theaters, concerts, etc. Since we have had zero attacks on alternate targets, its clear the TSA isn't protecting airplanes from anyone.

The worst we've seen have been run-of-the-mill lone gunmen type like the Ft Hood shooter and the DC sniper. Everybody else, like the Times Square bomber have been so incompetent they couldn't even build a working bomb and most of those convicted have been guilty of nothing more than talking trash within the earshot of a snitch looking to get criminal charges dropped in exchange for narcing out someone, anyone.

I believe people who pat down six year olds are profiled as pedophiles. Speaking of that incident, did you hear that poor girl was crying and felt bad for "what she did wrong" after the pat down?

Racism is by no means a necessary ingredient. Mussolini was not racist - in fact, he explicitly distanced himself from racism - until shortly after Hitler became dominant in their relationship.

And "corporatism" is a word that has absolutely nothing with what we call "corporations" today. At the time, the meaning that fascists put into it most closely corresponded to statist syndicalism.

Consequently, "The form of post-9/11 authoritarianism embodied by the TSA" is not fascism. It's just authoritarian capitalism, business as usual.

The Stanford Prison Experiment [wikipedia.org] would probably be more relevant to the TSA situation than Milgram's experiment. However, both are great examples of the failings of humanity in a scientific context.