Hey, guys? Yeah, you, over in the corner with the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration? Yeah. You, and the guys from Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and especially you all with the Transportation Security Administration. Have you been reading too much Tom Clancy recently?
Ok, we’re small potatoes over here, but we know a bit about bureaucracy and red tape anyway. We also know a bit about who does what, and that’s what you guys seem to have lost track of. You’re so busy finding ways to make us look for Terrorists and Enemy Aliens (from Jupiter, perchance?) and -gasp- illegal residents for you, and pay for the privilege of doing so, that you seem to have conveniently lost sight of some basic facts about the organizational structure and powers of government in America.
Now, in one sentence: Licensing and record-keeping agencies cannot be law enforcement agencies. They don’t have the power. They don’t have the authority. Got that? Don’t tell us to arrest folks with documents some clerk thinks might not be entirely on the up-and-up, cause we can’t. Don’t tell us to notify INS of illegals that wander into license branches, ’cause we can’t. There’s a federal statute called the Driver Privacy Protection Act that says we can’t. I know, you read the USA Patriot Act, and it’s so monstrous that it drove all rational thought and memory from your minds, but the rest of the federal code is still out there and still applies, and a few of us even remember that. And for pity’s sake don’t tell us to hold those folks in the branches until the police get around to coming to take them away! What are we supposed to hold them with – laminator plastic? We are not the enforcement arm of the INS, the FBI, the SSA, or any other pot of alphabet soup you care to call upon. And while I’m at it, before you require us to send you information, please figure out who should get it and what you’re gonna do with it. That really doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
I would also like to see some rational relationship between the requirements and the purpose at hand. You TSA folks? Why are you asking for information appropriate to determining a Pentagon level security clearance for a guy with 2 years of high school that just wants to drive a truck? I can maybe see it if he wants to specialize in hauling high explosives, but why apply it to the guy who isn’t going to haul anything more incendiary than milk? Next thing farmers are going to need the same clearance and security assessment, because they accept large deliveries of fertilizer.
And – oh. Well, no point in going on. You’ve just gotten another bright idea, and you haven’t heard a word I’ve said. Oh, well. Guess I’ll just go try to figure out how to keep a couple of statutes from colliding headlong. Maybe I’ll go read the Bill of Rights while I’m at it, just for nostalgia’s sake.
There’s a Bill Of Rights…?
I *know* there’s a Bill of Rights around here somewhere…maybe we should look between the sofa cushions at Homeland Security’s main office?
I know there was once a Bill of Rights. When I first met Murray, I think in 1990, he sang about how it was being eroded away in “Won’t see Miranda”. Oh! Is this what you meant? See how he is not one to say I told you so.
Love,
Kerry
“Would you believe,” said Murray in his best nasal Don Adams cybervoice, “Kerry, would you believe that until you mentioned it that thought had not occurred to me?”
Actually, I don’t believe that it hadn’t occured to me; it’s so obvious…except that it’s true.
Scary.