Are Airlines Abusing the Patriot Act? (rhetorical question)

Tamera Jo Freeman lost custody of her children after an incident on a Frontier Airlines flight. "A woman spanking her child is not as great a threat to aviation as members of Al Qaeda with box cutters," says one expert.

While everyone else is offering saturation coverage of the inauguration of President Obama, I found this L.A. Times story about something so obvious that it barely qualifies as news. Here are some excerpts from the article:

At least 200 passengers have been convicted of felonies under the Patriot Act, often for behavior involving raised voices and profanity. Some experts say airlines are misusing the law....

"I had no idea I was breaking the law," said [Tamera Jo] Freeman, 40, who spent three months in jail before pleading guilty.

Freeman is one of at least 200 people on flights who have been convicted under the amended law. In most of the cases, there was no evidence that the passengers had attempted to hijack the airplane or physically attack any of the flight crew. Many have simply involved raised voices, foul language and drunken behavior.

Some security experts say the use of the law by airlines and their employees has run amok, criminalizing incidents that did not start out as a threat to public safety, much less an act of terrorism.

According to FAA guidelines issued in 2007, "interference or intimidation of a crew member by itself is not chargeable under the [criminal] statute unless it rises to the level of physical assault, threatened physical assault or an act posing an imminent threat to the safety of the aircraft or other individuals on the aircraft."

Sept. 11, however, changed everything. Within two months of the attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, a sweeping attempt to improve the nation's defenses against international terrorism. It included broad new powers for law enforcement in such areas as electronic surveillance, money laundering and search warrants.

Included were two key provisions on airline security. The first defined disruptive behavior as a terrorist act, reflecting the seismic shift in airline security.

The second broadened the existing criminal law so that any attempt or conspiracy to interfere with a flight crew became a felony -- a change that allowed flight personnel to act against suspicious passengers even if they hadn't begun an actual assault.