The former congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard, has an entourage of government agents, courtesy of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), assigned to her every time she flies. Greeting her at airports are two explosive detection canine teams, one transportation security specialist, an explosives expert, one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals. Why would someone who's no longer in Congress merit this level of protection? According to TSA’s thought process—if it can be called that—any bomb or weapon the team might find wouldn’t be aimed at her. Rather, she'd be the one trying to carry it on the flight, presumably in order to blow it up or to hijack the plane to where? Russia, maybe? All those tax dollars that are used on every connecting flight Gabbard catches are spent to protect Americans from her, if you believe what federal authorities tell you. But the facts tell a different story.
Until recently, Gabbard had no idea she’d been put on a terrorist watch list under the auspices of the Transportation Security Agency’s Quiet Skies program, which began as a response to 9/11, and then expanded after the January 6 riot. TSA doesn't inform its targets about their suspect status so they have the option of contesting their surveillance. Instead, it waits for them to see enough dogs at airport security gates and cop-like people checking them out when they eat or go to the bathroom on the plane to put two and two together. The ones who don't do the math probably just get lost in a cloud of paranoia.
“In fact, it’s [Quiet Skies] an important program,” TSA says on its website. “If your local police department had intelligence that your neighborhood was at an elevated threat for dangerous activity, you’d want an increased police presence until the threat was gone. Federal Air Marshals serve in that same capacity in the aviation environment.” While local police departments produce arrest records to back such claims, TSA hasn’t one arrest to point to. The American skies are quiet, but no thanks to the Quiet Skies program. The agency isn't even targeting those suspected of crimes. People end up on their watch list for doing things like traveling to “suspicious” places, which an algorithm picks up on, and then a human team vets.
The Boston Globe broke the Quiet Skies story in 2018 with a nifty bit of investigative journalism. With TSA’s secret exposed, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey then got a chance to hold the agency accountable when Congress summoned TSA administrator David Pekoske, a former military man, to explain his agency's Stasi-like program. It went like this:
Q: Does TSA monitor whether Americans go to the bathroom during flights?
A: [considerable hemming and hawing in bureaucratese, but no answer]
Q: Yes or no?
A: Yes.
Q: Does TSA monitor what Americans eat on flights?
A: I would not use the term monitor. This is a law enforcement mission. They observe.
Q: So the answer is yes?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Does TSA follow Americans after they have deplaned and are walking to their cars?
A: Yes, sir.
So that's the treatment Tulsi Gabbard’s now getting after serving two tours of duty in Iraq. The former congresswoman noticed a few weeks ago, when she was returning home from a trip with her husband, that they encountered unusual activity at every airport they passed through, starting with their boarding passes stamped “SSSS,” a dreaded designation calling for enhanced screening measures that often indicates a flier has been placed on a watch list. There were dogs at every screening point. The couple found themselves facing random searches lasting up to 45 minutes and according to Gabbard, covered every square inch of her clothing and underwear. Such an absurd attention to detail suggests she's being subject to intimidation/humiliation tactics.
Gabbard thought she might be paranoid until she saw a report in UncoverDC, a website edited by Tracey Beanz, an investigative journalist with 640,000 Twitter followers. UnCover interviewed Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council, the national advocacy group for the Federal Air Marshals that two TSA whistleblowers (including one agent tasked with following Gabbard) had turned to. The interview revealed that Gabbard had been placed on a domestic terror watch list on July 23, 2024, but the whistle blowers couldn't identify why Gabbard was designated as a potential domestic terrorist. That mystery continues, with a strong whiff of partisan dirty tricks. According to LaBosco, who believes the Gabbard surveillance is connected to Jan. 6, Quiet Skies is also watching 17-year-old cheerleaders going to competitions, eight-year-old kids, and soldiers who’ve lost their legs in combat.
Gabbard’s not a favorite of the Democrats. She’s been a harsh critic of the Biden administration from its outset. The day before her placement on the terror watch list, she appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, criticizing the “warmongers” promoting the war in Ukraine and the military industrial complex she said Kamala Harris wasn't strong enough to stand up to. The memory of Gabbard's merciless takedown of Kamala Harris in the 2020 Democratic Party primary debate lingers on today in the minds of some powerful Democrats. There will be questions why Gabbard started getting treated like a terrorist and traitor right around the time Harris took over the candidacy from her deposed boss, Joe Biden.
The abuses of Quiet Skies are the result of a new vision for the federal enforcement state that has moved from placing an emphasis on making cases and building prosecutions to endless intelligence gathering without any crime identified. Conveniently, for the authorities, this new approach relieves them of the burden of concerning themselves with constitutional rights such as probable cause. Since a passenger on a commercial airliner has no guarantee of privacy, surveilling them based on scant evidence presents few legal roadblocks. Now that cases aren’t brought to court, federal agents have moved their focus to supposed “disruptions” of potential terrorist activity. Agents credited with such disruptions are able to advance their careers without arresting anyone, or foiling any plots.
The mentality is, “Warrants aren't necessary, so collect all the information that's freely available and see what it might lead to. It's what novelist Philip K. Dick, in his Minority Report, wrote about a law enforcement agency, called “Precrime,” that operates under the logically fallacious principle that while a crime hasn’t yet occurred, it is still a foregone conclusion. In the story, Precrime intervenes to punish, disrupt, incapacitate or restrict those deemed to embody future crime threats, which is the current TSA playbook.
Here's the rest of the congressional exchange between Senator Markey and the TSA administrator:
Q: Once you determine they're [Quiet Skies selectees] innocent, you delete the records immediately?
A: Sir, I wouldn't use the word innocent. Once we determine they don't present a risk, they're removed from the program and the records are preserved for two years.
Q: How many people has TSA monitored so far under Quiet Skies?
A: It's in the thousands.
Q: How many have been arrested or prosecuted?
A: I don't believe any of them have been arrested or prosecuted.
Q: How many plots has it foiled?
A: None to my knowledge.
So nobody’s innocent according to TSA. Sometimes it just takes time to nail them. TSA says the goal of Quiet Skies is to ensure passengers and flight crew are protected during air travel. But the agency could’ve flushed all those dollars ($394 million per year) spent on Quiet Skies down the toilet and gotten the same results. What a surprise that all that “monitoring” of bathroom breaks and meals hasn't done anything to keep even one American safe. Not long ago, this would've been a huge story, but the MSM’s response has been muted so far. Somebody has to get Tulsi Gabbard off this watch list, but it won't be the media or the Democrats working to fix this latest instance of gross overreach by the federal government.