Will American families soon spend Saturday mornings waiting in line for US Transportation Security Administration friskings and scannings outside the local shopping center? We can hope not. But, Miranda Green reports in the Daily Beast that the US Department of Homeland Security is “urging shopping malls in the United States to increase security in the aftermath of the carnage wrought by al Qaeda’s Somalia affiliate over the weekend in Nairobi.”
The US government has over the last few year made extensive preparations for making shopping center checkpoints a reality, including TSA’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams that recreate TSA’s airport harassment anywhere and US Customs and Border Protection that is pursuing similar Fourth Amendment-free zone activities far from US borders. Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security is moving forward quickly to implement an ambitions facial recognition program in cooperation with state and local police, having conducted Saturday another test of its Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS) at a Kennewick, Washington hockey game.
The US government’s acronyms tell us the plan: Show Americans who is the BOSS and sic the VIPRs on them. The recent killings at the Nairobi mall may provide the excuse to take the next step in that plan.
