Fair or not, it's best to be ultra polite with any public facing government offical.

And yes I realize this is also about Homeland Security having overreach but this guy did himself no favors and would have suffered in many other situations acting the same way.

The converse - that it should be fine to be disrespectful to people who hold state backed power makes no sense that I can see - that seems to be a dehumanizing act with no apparent benefit.

If one chooses to engage in activism, then it’s worth recognizing that this is what you are doing and that they will be likely consequences.

It seems, before engaging in a protest, to be a good idea to think about whether it’s likely to be effective or not.

For example, before deliberately being disrespectful to an individual government employee, why not consider whether it would be better to be cooperative in that moment and then make a donation to a group that supports political change in that particular area?

Saying that such prosecution would clog up the courts with a million cases is to admit the problem.

Quite the opposite - I think they should be subject to regular testing where some kind of internal control officers behave flippantly towards them (perhaps even disrespectfully) and if they respond by abusing their power they are (at the very least) immediately relieved of their state backed powers.

Randomly disrespecting government officials seems to play no part in bringing this about.