Having recently made a flight home from a trip to visit some relatives and was astounded-though I should not have been-when a TSA agent said the following to my five year old son (who was listening and behaving) “I make the rules here”. I think that sums up many of the problems that the TSA has had since their birth as an agency. Since their inception the TSA has subjected American citizens to invasive body pat-downs, humiliating searches and detainment, x-ray machines that they assure us are safe and a frustrating assortment of rules depending on your location. Even Senators have felt their wrath.

Why am I writing about an agency that is now 10 years old and hasn’t been in the headlines since 2012 you ask? Because I still cannot believe that this agency has any real worth in our nation. That is right, I am questioning the legitimacy of the TSA. In a beautiful article titled “Top 10 reasons to abolish the TSA” in May of 2012, writer Julie Borowski of Freedom Works outlined her main gripes with the agency. Her top reason was that it violates the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, which states:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

She is absolutely correct, in our legal system we are innocent until proven guilty. TSA searches function on the very opposite premise-that we are all guilty until proven innocent. This alone is reason enough to abolish this agency in my opinion.

Her second reason is another that is close to my heart as a survivor of sexual assault-the pat-downs that those who refuse the x-ray machines are subjected to are akin to sexual assault. Explain to me how any suicide bomber is going to hide blocks of C4 in her labia (sorry for the unpleasant mental image, but you catch my drift).

Perhaps if we learned from our allies, the Israeli’s, that profiling does work we wouldn’t have to subject everyone to this type of humiliation. As I have said many a time myself, mostly in jest, if you are looking for an IRA bomber I might be your girl, but a Muslim radical-not so much. In Israel they have profiled for years, and it has produced what we in the US desire-safe air travel. According to an article in Israeli newsmagazine Haaretz profiling is at the heart of Israeli security at airports and has been for years.

“In airports around the world, passengers may have to accept the fact that boarding a plane will become much more bothersome, as they all have to go through the same lengthy treatment, rather than singling out the potential terrorists according to their religion and ethnicity.

Here we don’t have that option, the powers that be have mandated that security and the comfort of the majority must triumph. Every month or so, the Israeli media publishes the case of an Arab-Israeli who missed a flight because of the security checks, and of course all of us have privately heard horror stories of visitors who were put through hell.But the basic premise remains unquestioned and the authorities never apologize. These are simply the procedures ensuring everyone’s security, they respond.”

My final issue with the TSA is an entirely pragmatic one-they are a money pit. In 2013 the agency’s budget was $7.6 billion. You may ask “Isn’t our security worth that?”, my answer would be simply this-not when we could slim down the TSA workforce and streamline security procedures while realizing a major savings to the taxpayers and an increase in safety. After all, results speak for themselves and Israel hasn’t had a successful attack on their airports since they 1972 Lod Airport Massacre. In a leaked report  from the TSA we found that TSA agents at LAX failed to find 75% of simulated bomb parts and explosives while screeners at Chicago’s O’Hare airport missed 60% of the simulated bomb pieces and explosives. These two airports are two major hubs in the US air travel system. At San Francisco airport (SFO) where a private security firm is used for screening their agents found simulated bomb parts and explosives 80% of the time. As we conservatives know-if you leave it to the government it will fail, leave it to the private market and the chances of success increase exponentially.