Andy Chalk said:
The trouble is that if it doesn't fail, we have a problem, and given the tendency these days to interpret laws to fit particular contingencies - declaring that waterboarding isn't torture, for instance - I don't like the idea of leaving it to chance or to the discretion of our law enforcement agencies. These are the people who made a disabled four-year-old child remove his leg braces for an airport search, let us recall. With that sort of person "watching out for us," I'm not inclined to take anything for granted.
No, these aren't the same people that did that. The CIA (our local waterboarding advocate) operates with very little transparency and oversight... and we could go volumes on the pros and cons of that, but that's a whole other thing. And the FAA is not a law enforcement agency. (It's a
policy enforcement agency, if anything)
I agree this law has the potential to cause problems, in the short term. But the very broad comparison to these federal misbehaviors (which, quite tellingly, most people
agree are misbehaviors) is a bit disproportionate.
Sure, someone's going to try to bring someone to court because the first party's kid called the second party's kid a dickbite over Live. And sure, it might make it to court.
Civil court, most likely, but let's say somehow it makes it to criminal court... what then? How far do you think a case like that's going to get?
I don't have blind or complete faith in our system, but I also don't think it's good practice to start shooting at every shadow. Better to save our ammo for the real fights.
(To be clearer: I don't like the law as worded. I'd prefer it be revised, rather than passing. However, I don't think that a law like this passing is automatically some awful thing -- it would just require a few "aftermarket" adjustments in the form of judicial precedent. Wasteful, to be sure, but not the end of any portion of the world.)