State Security

Writes Tim Grieve of Salon.com: “For all the talk of inaugural security — for all the money spent, the roads closed, the surface-to-air missiles ready to launch — the lockdown around the Capitol isn’t exactly airtight, at least from where we’re sitting, which happens to be the front row.

“We walked onto the Capitol grounds this morning carrying a color-coded orange pass that provides access to a seating area about 30 feet from where Dick Cheney and George Bush will take their oaths of office. Along the way, we saw law enforcement and military officers of every stripe, and we saw lots and lots of people standing in line to pass through metal detectors. We saw all that, but we weren’t subjected to any of it. Through what we assume was an inadvertent breakdown of the multimillion-dollar security system, we were led to our front-row seat unsearched, unchecked and unmolested by any security force whatsoever. Maybe we just look trustworthy.”

Share

4:15 pm on January 20, 2005

State Security

As late as the Hoover administration, a citizen could knock on the door of the White House. When I worked for Ron Paul in the late 1970s, you could walk into a Congressional office building and knock on the door of any Congressional suite without being x-rayed, frisked, or even questioned. You could also walk into, say, HUD, and stroll the huge corridors full of people doing nothing. How glad the government was to shut all that off from the people. The Congress in particular has spent hundreds of millions of dollars fortifying itself, with internal security troops/cops patrolling everywhere. But since the government is only good at spending (and destroying — often the same thing), it doesn’t work. Yesterday, the whole place shut down in shivers and chaos when one of the highly paid guards stopped chatting and glanced at his computer screen to see the outline of a plastic pistol, which someone had brought into the Cannon building earlier. Total Panic. The expensive Security Alert system that links all the offices also failed. Hours later, state security reported that Congressional staffers had brought in the plastic gun with their Halloween costumes, presumably to say to the taxpayer what the state always says: trick or treat.

Share

7:53 am on October 31, 2003