Back in January of 2010, there were allegations that Federal Air Marshals managers allegedly ridiculed lesbians, gays, and African-Americans, and the story was encapsulated in the imagery of the ‘Jeopardy Game Board’ from the Orlando Field Office of the Federal Air Marshals. As photographic evidence of the allegedly bigoted office climate, a “Jeopardy Game Board” — a mock-up of the Jeopardy game drawn with blue marker on a whiteboard — gays were allegedly referred to as “Pickle Smokers,” lesbians allegedly referred to as “creatures,” and African-Americans allegedly referred to by “Our Gang.”

As historian Jay Feldman describes in his brilliantly researched and artfully written new book, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, there have indeed been a great many things wrong with this country specifically with respect to government attacks on civil liberties. Feldman pulls together a jaw-dropping historical catalogue of 20th Century examples where the United States government not only trampled the Bill of Rights, but did so while whipping up class warfare, xenophobic hysteria, and political mob violence, all on the pretext that war or the threat of war necessitated the abrogation of liberty.

A Frontier Airlines flight from Denver to Detroit was taken to a “remote area of the airport” and searched for explosives. ABC reported “suspicious behavior,” which in fact was two people “making out” in the bathroom. The local ABC affiliate WXYZ in Detroit was more explicit: “The ABC News National Security team is telling Action News that their sources say the flight was disrupted by two people having intimate relations in one of the bathrooms.”

The FBI’s statement on all this covers up the fact that a couple Americans were trying to join the Mile High Club and that is why NORAD ended up scrambling F-16 jets to “shadow the flight until it landed.” The statement claims they were sent “out of an abundance of caution.”

Thursday’s No Justice No BART protest–which shut down Powell Street Station in San Francisco–turned into an ugly attack on free speech and freedom of the press when BART police arrested between 25 and 30 people, a third of whom are reported to be journalists, including seven student journalists from San Francisco State University and the Chronicle’s Vivian Ho.

In the aftermath of the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) moved to increase airport security. Passengers flying “non-stop” to the US were subject to enhanced screenings, including in some cases a full-body pat-down. But, immediately, TSA realized that this placed an “extraordinary burden” on airports and airlines and TSA moved to develop a “regime” that would subject a “reduced pool” of passengers to “enhanced screenings.”

On January 13, 2010, it was announced a list of fourteen countries of interest. The list included: Cuba, Sudan, Syria, Iran (four countries on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism) and Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. The new regime meant all passengers traveling from any of the fourteen countries would, regardless of nationality or US citizenship, be subject to increased security and possible violations of privacy.

Newly published cables from WikiLeaks shed light on reactions from leaders of countries on the list.

Gosh, you’d think security at LaGuardia Airport would be able to tell if a woman were wearing unmentionables under her shorts and tee-shirt–I mean isn’t that why we have the new see-through screening box?– but apparently JetBlue supervisor Victor Rodriguez, who was working the airline ticket counter, decided to check for himself once Malinda Knowles had boarded her flight to West Palm Beach, Florida.

A court has ruled, in a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Transporation Security Administration (TSA) violated federal law when it went ahead and installed airport body scanners without seeking comments from the public.

I’ll admit, I was merely disgusted when Mickey Mouse tried to trademark Seal Team 6. But Mickey’s seeming embrace of GateGrope is far more disturbing. (h/t Bruce Schneier) In a press release boasting about changes to Walt Disney World’s Star Tour ride, Disney boasts of their imitation TSA checkpoints!

My question for tonight is: who would you cast off the airplane? Whom would you return to the jetway? Who doesn’t fly with Pilot You?

The TSA may not be good at math, and they may suck at keeping their own Secretary up to speed on their planned retests, but one thing they are really good at is media management.