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If undercover cops started hanging around outside your house, following you to work, etc, but never arrested or otherwise interfered with you, would that be fine? Nobody else in your town should have a problem with that, when it comes to light?
And if you happen to be a well-known and outspoken critic of your town's mayor, and you find out that other critics of the mayor are being followed by undercover police too, everything's still fine and nobody else should be upset?
Of course that would be a problem. I'm slightly more sensitive to privacy violations than the average American, but... scale matters, as does the risk of privacy violations (and other considerations not exhaustively listed here, such as the risk of false positives). The act of flying in a domestic passenger airplane is fundamentally a public act, but not only that, it's somewhat infrequent even for a career politician and only captures a small subset of behavior and time. In other words, the risk of the government violating your privacy is low. In fact, the government already has your flight records to start with, so what exactly is at risk here is unclear. Let's make a contrast to your example. Following someone 24/7 is of a fundamentally different nature than monitoring you on an airplane flight. As a crude but effective example, they might accidentally discover that you are having an affair, which is none of their business.
Of course we also have to address the intimidation angle too, but if the process was indeed secret and unknown to the subject as is alleged to be the case, that angle doesn't really exist! So again, the main detriment to Gabbard is not a privacy concern but a mere inconvenience, plus an allegation about waste of public funds. I'm writing a separate comment in this thread about the degree of inconvenience, but at least according to the info I'm looking at, it's nothing too exceptionally different than what everyone else in America has accepted as par for the course for flying nowadays - the chance of pat-downs, waiting a little longer for the special scanners, a chance of having your luggage hand-searched. I don't like the placement of the current bar, and think a lot of it is mere security theater, but pretending it's abnormal is just incorrect.
That's probably true, but the status quo of flying nowadays is already a gross violation of our civil liberties. It is absolutely reprehensible that the TSA is allowed to exist on that basis alone, let alone the massive waste of taxpayer funds that they incur. And on top of that, it turns out that there's politically motivated harassment going on? Hell no! These organizations never should've been allowed to form in the first place, but they must not be allowed to stay.
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