TSA expanding ‘horrific rights violations’: Analyst

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is increasing its “horrific civil rights violations” of Americans, says a former intelligence linguist in Florida, adding that the agency is part of the “expanding police state” in the United States.

The TSA is “unfortunately expanding its horrific violations on American civil rights as well as American constitutional rights,” Scott Rickard told Press TV on Saturday.

“You have an organization that was born post-9/11 that has really become one the many Stasi-type organizations that operates outside of the Americans’ civil liberties,” Rickard said. “The freedom in the United States has been under attack for decades, but certainly for the last 20 years it’s escalated.”

Rickard was referring to the Stasi agency, the Ministry for State Security in East Germany, which has been described as one of the most repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to ever have existed.

“There is no accountability and there certainly is no one regulating the TSA. They operate pretty much on their own as another security service much like the FBI… and it’s just an expansion of the police state that we’ve seen occurring in the United States over the last half-century,” he added.

The TSA, which was created after the September 11, 2001 attacks, is an agency of the US Department of Homeland Security that exercises authority over the security of the traveling public in the US.

The TSA has been widely accused of mistreating passengers and having sexually harassed passengers. The agency’s employees have also been accused of numerous failures and misconduct on the job.

A 2013 GAO report showed a 26 percent increase in misconduct among TSA employees between 2010 and 2012, from 2,691 cases to 3,408.