Warrantless searches of private airplanes?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

http://www.toledoblade.com/business/2013/09/09/Private-pilots-chafe-at-surprise-searches.html

In a blog published last month by its editor, Robert Goyer, Flying magazine reported extensively on email and telephone conversations with an unnamed “law enforcement source … who is knowledgeable about aviation matters” who described his 2009 training to participate in a federal drug interdiction program targeting private pilots.

Flying’s source said he was taught that pilots were to be treated as though they had no right to refuse the search.

....

The owners and pilots association said that all of the members who have made reports to it — 42 confirmed as of Friday — disputed that any probable cause or reasonable suspicion existed for the searches conducted on their planes. None of the pilots had crossed a U.S. border during a recent flight.

...

Mr. Brodsky said the airplane searches suggest to him a law-enforcement apparatus that is losing its bearings.
“When they got all this Homeland Security money, well, there are only so many terrorists out there to fight,” he said, so it was predictable that it “would be turned on our own citizens.”

So now it looks like police officers think they can search private planes with no warrants and no probable cause. What next, cars and houses?

[NYC_SKP]

1. For most of my life, I've thought that the greatest threat was from Russia or Communist China.

I never for a moment thought that the greatest threat would be domestic institutions of commerce and government, working in collusion.

Amazing.

[Egalitarian Thug]

2. K&R. Thanks for posting this, but it has been going on since the mid-'80s.

One of the first seizures to get media attention was a private charter service. The government, lacking any cause or evidence to get a warrant or charge the owner, they just declared his assets to be proceeds of criminal activity and took his planes and equipment.

We've been telling you so for decades, I'm just glad people are finally catching on.