Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
The TSA is continuing its expansion from airports to train stations and other modes of transportation. On Monday, an independent journalist posted a video documenting TSA agents setting up shop at Union Station in Chicago.
The journalist, Julio N Rausseo, going by the handle 1776umphreys on YouTube, writes that when he entered the train station on July 5 he noticed a number of TSA agents. “I took out my cell phone and started to follow these TSA agents, and it appeared to me that they were setting up a Check Point for Amtrak Riders. This is just another example of how TSA expanding their operations and entering Train Stations, Bus terminals, and major sporting and concert events,” he writes.
“TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country,” the Los Angeles Times announced in December.
In a spectacle widely reported by the media, the TSA rolled out more than two dozen armed VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention & Response) teams around the nation last year and instructed them to violate the Fourth Amendment an estimated 9,300 times with “suspicionless” spot searches of travelers.
VIPR was established in 2005 and has conducted random searches at mass transit hubs with increasing frequency since that time.
Following publication of the above cited LA Times story, the TSA conducted a dog and pony show media event at Union Station in Los Angeles as part of the propaganda effort to get the citizenry accustomed to the prospect of armed goons with bomb sniffing dogs at the local train station (and eventually the local mall and sports stadium, a move announced by Big Sis back in 2010).
In order to move from airports to train stations, bus terminals and other modes of mass transit, the government cited the unsubstantiated murder of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and pointed to a trove of documents allegedly found purportedly revealing al-Qaeda plans to attack railways in the United States.
So brazen and unconstitutional is the move to expand its widely loathed operation, even the Los Angeles Times and other corporate media founts are noting that the “agency is stretching legal limits on the government’s right to search U.S. citizens without probable cause — and with no proof that the scattershot checkpoints help prevent attacks.”
In early 2011, a YouTube video of TSA agents groping and assaulting children went viral after a Gestapo checkpoint was established in Savannah, Georgia. During the illegal search, TSA employees forced women to lift their shirts up to their midriffs and patted their bras.
TSA bureaucrats later claimed passengers were not obliged to take part in the search and intrusive pat-down.
“Bus travelers were shocked when jackbooted TSA officers in black SWAT-style uniforms descended unannounced upon the Tampa Greyhound bus station in April with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaucrats in tow,” Tara Servatius wrote in 2011 after a TSA checkpoint was established in Florida. “The TSA clearly intends for these out-of-nowhere swarms by its officers at community transit centers, bus stops and public events to become a routine and accepted part of American life.”
Emboldened by public apathy and a mindless acceptance of increasingly outrageous Gestapo tactics, the TSA has expanded its odious operation under the guise of crime and terror prevention (the two are now inseparable).
Corporate media propaganda designed to frighten you into surrendering your right to be left alone.
In April, we reported on a program in Houston that will place undercover TSA agents and police officers on buses. They will perform bag searches, watch for “suspicious activity” and interrogate passengers in order to “curb crime and terrorism,” according to a Metropolitan Transit Authority of Houston (METRO) press release.
Short of any meaningful political action on the part of the public and their supposed representatives, the government will continue to move its Constitution violating “suspicionless searches” and sexual molestation of women and children from the confines of airports to bus and train stations and every other mode of public and eventually private transportation.
The point is not to save us from phantom terrorists or even gang-bangers (who are now routinely conflated with terrorists), but to condition us to accept the outward manifestations of tyranny.
THE GESTAPO 21st century style.