Homeland Security Hassles Owner of Truck with Bumperstickers

The Progressive Magazine reports:

Dwight Scarbrough used to be in the Navy. He was a machinist on submarines, some of them nuclear, in the Pacific from 1975-1980.

Now he heads up the Vets for Peace chapter in Boise, Idaho.

And he’s not shy about expressing his opinion.

At any given time, he may have as many as ten bumperstickers or peace signs on every conceivable spot of his truck.

He usually doesn’t get hassled, he tells me.

But then, on February 7, at his day job for a federal natural resource agency, Scarbrough got a call from, of all places, Homeland Security.

An official told him to come out to the parking lot and said he was in violation of the Code of Federal Regulations.

When Scarbrough came out, he found two armed officers of Homeland Security, who told him he was violating the regulation against the posting of signs on federal property.

(Scarbrough, fearing trouble, brought a tape recorder along and taped the entire confrontation. You can read a transcript at the Boise Weekly, which broke the story on February 15 in an excellent article by Nicholas Collias.)

Scarbrough tried to point out that those signs were not on federal property but on his own private property—his personal truck.

And by the way, the signs were really subversive, like “Honor Vets, Wage Peace,” and “Another Veteran Against War with Iraq.”

“Sir, you’ve got signs posted on your vehicle. I’m informing you that you’re in violation,” one officer told him, according to the transcript.

Scarbrough: “That’s not illegal. That’s not illegal.”

Are T-shirts the next "security" area for the Department of Homeland Security to attack? Big Brother just makes up stuff as it goes along.