Presented without comment. Image here, HT to Uncle.

For more Cato work on the TSA, see “Body Scanners: The Naked Truth,” “On Air Security, We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” and “TSA Searches, Bomb Risk Near Zero.”

Jim Harper has some blog posts on the topic as well: here, here, here, and here.

Worth a Thousand Words is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The TSA is exceeding its authority.

At what point does an airport search step over the line?

How about when they start going through your checks, and the police call your husband, suspicious you were clearing out the bank account?

This kind of thing was supposed to stop after the TSA revised its policies a year ago. The revision came in the wake of the unconstitutional seizure of Campaign for Liberty staffer Steven Bierfeldt for carrying cash donations (prompting a lawsuit from the ACLU). A federal judge had already determined that fake passports found on an airline passenger were inadmissible in court.

The TSA is not a law enforcement agency. TSA screeners aren’t supposed to search for anything beyond weapons and explosives. Or, as TSA policy currently reads, “Screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security.”

Kathy Parker, a business support manager for a large bank, was flying with a deposit slip and several checks made out to her and her husband. TSA screeners suspected she was skipping town in the midst of a “divorce situation.”

Two Philadelphia police officers joined at least four TSA officers who had gathered around her. After conferring with the TSA screeners, one of the Philadelphia officers told her he was there because her checks were numbered sequentially, which she says they were not.

“It’s an indication you’ve embezzled these checks,” she says the police officer told her. He also told her she appeared nervous. She hadn’t before that moment, she says.

She protested when the officer started to walk away with the checks. “That’s my money,” she remembers saying. The officer’s reply? “It’s not your money.”

Glad to see that we’re in good hands, and that no one has lost focus on the aviation security mission at TSA. Read the whole thing.

TSA on the Prowl for Embezzlers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An airport security staffer faces discipline after using a whole-body imaging machine to ogle a co-worker, according to this report. It’s another signal of what’s to come when the machines are in regular use. (In a previous post, I aired my doubts about the veracity of reports that a famous Indian movie star had been exposed, but the story foretells the future all the same.)

I’ve written before that whole-body imaging machines in airports create risks to privacy despite TSA’s efforts to minimize those risks with carefully designed rules and practices.

Rules, of course, were made to be broken, and it’s only a matter of time — federal law or not — before TSA agents without proper supervision find a way to capture images contrary to policy. (Agent in secure area guides Hollywood starlet to strip search machine, sends SMS message to image reviewer, who takes camera-phone snap. TMZ devotes a week to the story, and the ensuing investigation reveals that this has been happening at airports throughout the country to hundreds of women travelers.)

Rules against misuse of whole-body imaging are fine, but they are not a long-term, effective protection against abuse of “strip-search machines.”

Stunner: Strip-Search Machine Used to Ogle is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

And we’re better off when it fails this way than when we learn the hard way that someone found an exploit.

Watch for the TSA to give extra scrutiny to wheelchairs, casts, and orthopedic shoes now that the screening manual giving those items a pass has been released.

Security-by-Obscurity Is Weak is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Security guru Bruce Schneier comes down on the strictly pragmatic side in this essay called “Fixing Airport Security.” Because of terrorism fears, he says, TSA checkpoints are “here to stay.” The rules should be made more transparent. He also argues for an amendment to some constitutional doctrines:

The Constitution provides us, both Americans and visitors to America, with strong protections against invasive police searches. Two exceptions come into play at airport security checkpoints. The first is “implied consent,” which means that you cannot refuse to be searched; your consent is implied when you purchased your ticket. And the second is “plain view,” which means that if the TSA officer happens to see something unrelated to airport security while screening you, he is allowed to act on that. Both of these principles are well established and make sense, but it’s their combination that turns airport security checkpoints into police-state-like checkpoints.

The comments turn up an important recent Fourth Amendment decision circumscribing TSA searches. In a case called United States v. Fofana, the district court for the southern district of Ohio held that a search of passenger bags going beyond what was necessary to detect articles dangerous to air transportation violated the Fourth Amendment. “[T]he need for heightened security does not render every conceivable checkpoint search procedure constitutionally reasonable,” wrote the court.

Application of this rule throughout the country would not end the “police-state-like checkpoint,” but at least rummaging of our things for non-air-travel-security would be restrained.

I prefer principle over pragmatism and would get rid of TSA.

Schneier and Friends on Fixing Airport Security is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the same bill that Congress limited the use of whole-body imaging or “strip-search machines” at airports (text of the amendment here), it required the Transportation Security Administration to study using facial and iris recognition to identify people in line for airport security checkpoints (Sec. 242 of House-passed version here).

So glimpses at de-identified bodies are a privacy outrage while massive biometric databases and records of people’s travels are good to go?

Not necessarily. Average people (and members of Congress) understand better what a look at the body is, but they don’t understand as well what biometric tracking and databasing of our movements means. So they’re quick to object to the former and lagging on the latter.

Those of us who understand the privacy consequences of government-deployed facial recognition and tracking must press to educate our less-well-versed fellow Americans.

Congress on Privacy: Schizophrenic or Lagging? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog