Below is an email I sent to my Congresspersons on Friday, with a copy to AOPA, and a shortened version to the White House. If I Had found an email page for the head of DHS, I would have sent one to her as well.
I don't know whether it will do any good, but I considered it my civic duty to try.
Here is where to find contact info for elected officials:
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
They don't seem to publish direct email addresses anymore; you have to use the forms on their Web pages. When composing your message, keep in mind that some of the Congresspersons have a 10,000 character limit, and the White House has a 5,000 character limit.
__________________________
The most precious asset of the American People is freedom. As President Obama said in his inaugural address, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man -- a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake."
I'm writing to you today about a dictatorial culture that seems to have emerged at the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA seems determined to gather more and more power to itself, and the fact that they are punishing the innocent in the process by taking away our freedoms seems of little concern to them. They have recently been pursuing a series of initiatives that threaten to saddle private aviation with impractical, unaffordable, and probably ineffective restrictions. For example, they have proposed extending their use of secret blacklists such as the no-fly list to some private aircraft. What's next, a "no-drive" list for private automobiles?
They are already requiring background checks for mule drivers, of all things. Where's the sense in that?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/25/mule.skinner.blues/index.html?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail
Where will this process stop? Will we eventually be faced with the English equivalent of "papieren, bitte" wherever we go, even on foot? Their needs to be better oversight of this agency, and some means of instilling respect for freedom in its employees.
A recent TSA security directive threatens to seriously hamper general aviation operations at airports that have even a small amount of airline activity. Particularly egregious is the fact that it is a SECRET rule without an adequate process for public comment. It is scheduled to take effect on June 1, 2009, and I believe it is designated as Security Directive 1542-04-08F (although the last letter may have changed in subsequent revisions). In addition to unfunded mandates on the airports themselves, the businesses that are based there, and the pilots who are based there, this directive is thought to impose requirements on pilots and passengers of flights that originate elsewhere, to the extent that they cannot even get in or out of an aircraft without a badged escort present. This may sound innocent enough, but it creates economic, safety and constitutional issues that have apparently not been thought through. The following report of a meeting with the TSA at an airport in Colorado gives an excellent and detailed description of the problem, and shows that the TSA has no clue about the impacts of its directives on the general aviation industry.
http://www.aero-news.net/news/genav...7071071-8B54-4C66-BF6B-239760696F80&Dynamic=1
Here's what the Denver Post had to say about it:
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_12079380
One of the most egregious aspects of this is the difficulty that has been encountered by organizations responsible for representing the interests of general aviation pilots, such as the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). The TSA has reportedly taken the stance that such organizations do not have standing to even see the security directive, because they are not based at one of the affected airports!
This is unacceptable in a free society. AOPA's membership includes about two thirds of all licensed pilots in the U.S., and they represent both the interests of pilots who are based at these airports, and of those who fly into them from elsewhere. Would the TSA tell an attorney that he could not represent a client who is based at one of the affected airports because he is not personally based there? Would they tell members of Congress that it is none of their business because Congress is not based at one of the affected airports? It's an absurd and arrogant concept.
The Constitution gives the legislative power to Congress. I'm not fully versed on the constitutional justification for allowing Congress to delegate some of that power to the executive branch to create rules and regulations, but part of what makes it acceptable to citizens of our republic is that there is a public comment process for proposed regulations. I gather some justification has been devised for security directives to bypass this process, but when a directive affects as many people as this one does, and creates as many problems for law-abiding people as this one does, it needs to be published for public comment via the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) process. Historically, this process has created great improvements in proposed regulations, and avoided serious unintended consequences, because the more people who are allowed to view and comment on a proposal, the better are the chances that unfortunate consequences can be discovered and eliminated. The secrecy which the TSA has chosen instead for this security directive means that only a relatively small number of people are able to contribute to the process, which greatly magnifies the possibility of serious problems not being discovered until it is too late.
Another constitutional issue is the right to travel. This is discussed in the comments I recently filed on the TSA's Large Aircraft Security Program proposal:
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspubl...dfd54&disposition=attachment&contentType=msw8
As I discussed there, the U.S. Supreme Court in Shapiro v. Thompson stated that statutes, rules, or regulations must not unreasonably burden or restrict freedom of travel.
It is thought that the new security directive will mandate escorts for non-badged passengers and pilots on non-airline areas of an airport. These escorts are not going to work for free. The aviation businesses at the airport will either have to hire additional personnel to handle the workload, creating an unreasonable burden on an already economically fragile industry, or unreasonable delays will be created when the number of flights arriving or departing exceeds the number of available escorts. Furthermore, many of these airports do not have people on site 24 hours a day. If that prohibits aircraft from arriving or departing outside of business hours, that creates an unreasonable restriction on the right to travel. One of the reasons this is unreasonable is that it creates safety issues, because it limits the pilot's options in the event of an emergency, and at airports in mountainous areas, early morning or late evening may be the only time it is safe to fly due to the effect of heat, altitude, etc. on aircraft performance.
These issues could induce pilots to choose destinations without airline service in many cases, causing economic hardship for businesses located at the affected airports. In some areas, there may be no non-airline airports available, or the airline airports may be the only ones where ground transportation is available, thus allowing no means of avoiding the directive's onerous and unworkable requirements. The impact in sparsely populated areas of the country would be especially serious, and the impact in Alaska could be devastating.
Particularly incomprehensible is that each mandated security badge will ONLY be valid at one airport. I am baffled as to why, since this is a federal program, there could not be one security badge that would be valid at every airport in the country.
Even the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary (Civil Air Patrol) is concerned about the detrimental impact of this directive on their operations, as described in an email they recently sent to their members.
In summary, I am asking that measures be implemented to ensure adequate oversight of the TSA, to ensure that they don't go too far in trading our freedoms for the perception of security, and that they allow sufficient public comment on their proposals. If I were allowed to file comments on this directive, my suggestion would be to post security guards at the edges of the airliner parking areas (which are clearly marked with red lines on the pavement), and eliminate the impractical, expensive, and ineffective badging and escort requirements for the non-airline areas of an airport.
Sincerely yours,
Richard Palm
Mountain View, CA
You're of course absolutely correct.
