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It's much more than just having an air marshal tag along on each of her flights. It also comes with enhanced security screening at each checkpoint. Even if you're comfortable with the wasted resources—and three marshals per flight plus a bomb dog team at each stop comes to a lot of resources—that's harassment unless they really have some evidence of wrong doing.
How is it harassment if she's unaware? About the details, I found this 2018 ACLU article about the same program interesting. A few points:
Allegedly the program is largely algorithmic in who it selects, and this algorithm is often pretty irrational. This means while it's still possible it was targeted at Gabbard, on balance I'm inclined to say it wasn't. Apparently a group is considering suing on her behalf, and this might (we would hope) surface some details, and I support that kind of accountability and attempt at transparency, so I approve.
Allegedly the marshals use some subjective judgements about "suspicious" behavior, which does raise false positive concerns, but presumably the escalation is simply banning flying altogether, which I would assume (could be wrong) would be a higher bar and one especially unlikely for a high-profile person like Gabbard, so I'm not quite convinced this is a real worry.
In terms of waste of money? Yes, it sounds like an absolute waste of money. I would appreciate this program were to receive more scrutiny. But sadly, this seems fairly par for the course in terms of the American paranoia about terrorism. And to be fair, taken in aggregate, the government does seem to have been fairly effective over the last decade in preventing mass terror attacks, including on planes, so I think it's quite possible that the general public doesn't mind this kind of cost too much.
What does the enhanced checks look like? Sounds like "Quad S" which means your luggage might be swapped for explosives, might be searched, and you go through a metal detector and a patdown. Most of those things are fairly normal in today's situation, though of course
We should also consider the alternate hypothesis: maybe she did actually deserve scrutiny? Certainly we don't want politicians to be above the law. This is admittedly a super-tricky balance to strike. IMO, this being exposed is good and so are any lawsuits that come of it.
In other words, at risk of sounding cliche, but the system is working fine. Politician suffers minor inconvenience and secretive government program receives more scrutiny. Not a bad trade.
Tulsi Gabbard is an American-born, female, military veteran, Congresswoman who is in her 40s and has publicly denounced Islam -- you think she was flagged algorithmically as a threat to aviation?
I find it quite unlikely that such an algorithm would be deployed, and if it were true the real story would be that the algorithm could use some serious fixin'.
I think her family is running some weird cult, so on a pragmatic level I can understand the spooks wanting to keep the tabs on her especially given her positions in public service, but yeah, it does make a mockery out of the very idea of liberal democracy .
Cults should not be spied on either, unless they are a criminal organization.
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