John Kelsey wrote...
Maybe. I guess the thing that's confusing about any of these answers is that the rules as they're >applied must be propogated to thousands of people. It's not like they could easily hide guidance >like "no more than 10 Arabs per flight" or "double-screen anyone with brown skin and a Koran"-->someone would leak it. Perhaps the written rules include things like this that they don't want to >subject to court scrutiny, but then how do they get that down to the people doing the screening >at the gate?
That's a good point. And those screeners ain't exactly the cream of the crop, if ya' know what I mean. A year ago they were making minimum wage, so if someone wanted a copy of those guidelines, it'd be easy as hell to con it out of one of em. (INVOKE SPIRIT OF TIM MAY HERE)...dress all official-like with a clipboard and some random badge, and start quizzing the locals about the current rules. Maybe that wouldn't work at JFK, but go to the airport at, say, Lexington So Carolina or Bumfuck Idaho and you'd get the information faster than a hillbilly can skin a possum for dinner.
So no way they could keep such a big secret, and I would suspect that the Brazil-factor is not so great that the TSA doesn't already know that.
I think you may be onto something w.r.t the Profiling issue. That may have more to do with it than anything. In other words, they don't want the thing contested in court, and the powers that be may not want to be personally liable.
So in other words, this law is basically secret so that it can be secret. If nothing else, the Iraq WMD debacle should teach that they really don't have some deep, secret and "justifiable" information.
-TD
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