[fabsroman]

What exactly gives them the right to search your car? Is it just the fact that you were hunting? Does the mere fact that we are out hunting mean that there is probably cause to search our car. Of course, once you gave them the okay to search your vehicle, they no longer needed probable cause.

I bet you never would have dreamed of them making an issue out of that feather. That is why I always tell LEO's no when they ask to search my vehicle if though I have nothing to hide.

At BWI airport a year or two ago, they were doing random searches of vehicles and I happened to get pulled over. Mind you, I was driving a Taurus which wouldn't be the ideal car bomb. Anyway, they asked if they could search my car and I said no. They then told me they had the authority to do so anyway and asked me for my driver's license and registration. I got out a tape recorder to record the conversation, but the LEO refused to let me record the conversation and said he would arrest me if I hit play. I told him that at the minimum I was going to record his name and badge number, that I was giving him advance warning of this, and that if he chose to speak while I was recording his name and badge number, that was with the full knowledge that I would be recording at that time. They kept me there for about 10 minutes as they "searched" my trunk, which was pretty clean, and ran my license and registration. I know they were hoping that they would find something on me.

Turns out that during an orange alert, LEO's have the power to search all vehicles entering airports pursuant to the Homeland Security Act. The warning wasn't up at that point, but on subsequent trips to BWI I noticed that they had a flashing sign warning people that vehicles were subject to random searches. I wrote Homeland Security an e-mail, which I never got a decent response to. I was also going to write the Governor a letter and inform him of the way I was treated by the Transportation Authority Police, but I never got around to it.