Day after day,
story after story, we find out more and more about how corrupt, inept, scurrilous the Bush administration is. They are unable to stop themselves from violating the principle of trasparent, honest governance:
The federal agency in charge of aviation security collected extensive personal information about airline passengers even though Congress forbade it and officials said they wouldn't do it, according to documents obtained Monday by The Associated Press.
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Congress said that no money could be spent to test such an identity verification system "until TSA has developed measures to determine the impact of such verification on aviation security and the Government Accountability Office has reported on its evaluation of the measures." That language was part of the Homeland Security Department spending bill, which became law on Oct. 18.
The GAO didn't issue its report on Secure Flight testing until March 28.
In violation of the law, the TSA collected and distributed private information on flyers.
But Bruce Schneier, a security expert who serves on the TSA-appointed oversight panel for Secure Flight, said the agency was explicitly told not to try to verify passengers' identity with commercial data.
"They're doing what they want and they're working around any rules that exist," Schneier said.
Laws? What laws? That merely applies to those beneath us.
One thing we can give credit to Bush for is the creation of a new generation of small government voters. Because this big government scary as hell.