15 ms·

TSA can "envision" all it wants, it must operate within the confines of the constitution. CBP gets away with a lot due to the unique legal quagmire that is the

by clubm8 8y ago

TSA can "envision" all it wants, it must operate within the confines of the constitution. CBP gets away with a lot due to the unique legal quagmire that is the US border. TSA has no such luxury, and thus (with a little help with orgs like ACLU and EFF) such initiatives should fail. Some restrictions apply - void where prohibited[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

mbreese 8y ago
Air travel is not a right guaranteed by the constitution. TSA gets a lot of leeway because of this.
- aesh2Xa1 8y ago
  What's the argument here? Spaghetti and meatballs aren't explicitly guaranteed, either, but you can eat them without signing away any other rights.
  - beambot 8y ago
    s/spaghetti & meatballs/illicit drugs/ and that argument falls apart. You will quickly lose other rights, even though drugs aren't explicitly guaranteed or prohibited by the constitution either. (Not addressing GPs argument, just that the spaghetti & meatballs one doesn't hold water.)
    - samstave 8y ago
      Bone Saws aren't banned either, and retinal eye-scans of assassins will not make the world a safer place. Having Humanist-Centric politics makes the world a better place. Humans with shitty governments, parenting and environments which are shitty typically wind up being shitty humans. Building walls, guns, bombs, cages, cops, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes are no substitute for actually working to be better humans
      - afjl 8y ago
        I agree but you can't realistically build policy around "working to be better humans". Walls, guns, surveillance, etc are all easily deployable policies with easily measurable results. I don't enjoy the surveillance state or waiting 2 hours for airport security but it is tolerable...to an extent.
  - labster 8y ago
    Tell that to the residents of Old Smoky, who lost their poor meatballs to government regulation.
- joshuamcginnis 8y ago
  It is unfortunate we surrender our freedom of movement and 4th amendment rights for the illusion of security.
  - johndubchak 8y ago
    That's the central argument right there. We just need people to refuse to use air travel based on this if it comes to pass - I know I will.
- walterbell 8y ago
  What would happen if businesspeople refused to travel if their constitutional rights were not respected, and the economy ground to a halt? A small precedent was the widely flaunted "ban" on small electronic devices during takeoff/landing. A revolt among business travelers caused a rapid change in the rule.
  - URSpider94 8y ago
    I’m betting we will never find out. The number of people who have been driven out of air travel because of today’s draconian restrictions is basically zero. People are conditioned to comply with any request in order to board an airplane. EDIT: you edited your post after I posted. As long as you don’t make people uncomfortable on the plane, that is. Don’t take away their phones, laptops or headphones, and you can grab as many images as you want of their irises, retinas and fingerprints.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    The percentage of people caring about privacy is too low for TSA to worry about it, though.
  - azinman2 8y ago
    Did business travelers stop traveling? And the economy suffered?
  - adventured 8y ago
    > What would happen if businesspeople refused to travel if their constitutional rights were not respected, and the economy ground to a halt? When have business people as a very large collective ever been particularly outraged about the surveillance state? Nothing about the NSA's activities have been fundamentally rolled back. They won, across the board and across party lines. I'm not talking about seven executives from some corner of tech lodging a twitter protest, I mean the millions of people that make up the "businesspeople" category. They have never widely protested the surveillence moves of the last 17 years. Americans will resist this as much as 24/7 cctv surveillence has been resisted in other developed nations such as Britain. Not at all. Most people do not view it as a threat to their liberty, they view it as an isolated intrusion that is to their security benefit.
- baddox 8y ago
  Note that regulating air travel is also not listed in the Constitution as an authority of the federal government.
  - cr1895 8y ago
    Interstate commerce is though, right?
    - nybble41 8y ago
      Only because at the time that clause was written no one expected the relatively benign power to "make interstate commerce regular", i.e. to facilitate trade between the states, to be used as cover for absolutely any kind of interference in state affairs Washington can dream up—including actions which actively inhibit trade, or have precious little to do with interstate commerce in the first place—in preference to actually useful things like standardizing weights and measures and curbing fraud.
- aosmith 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure freedom of travel is covered by liberty.
- clubm8 8y ago
  > Air travel is not a right guaranteed by the constitution. TSA gets a lot of leeway because of this. Travel in general is protected, and in addition the 9th Amendment clearly states: >The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
  - pishpash 8y ago
    Travel on public roadways perhaps but airports and airliners are all private property.
    - gasull 8y ago
      You can't violate the Constitution on private property.
      - tallanvor 8y ago
        Private companies acting in a private capacity cannot violate the constitution. The limits of the Constitution apply to government employees (or even private employees performing a service contracted by a government agency) whether they are on public or private property.
        eesmith 8y ago
        The major exception being slavery, that is, a private company with slave labor, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", violates the 13th amendment, with penalties set by Congressional legislation. There also have been cases where the courts have treated private companies as state actors. See https://www.nyclu.org/en/publications/column-applying-constitution-private-actors-new-york-law-journal https://www.nyclu.org/en/publications/column-applying-consti...
        nybble41 8y ago
        That is not an exception. The 13th Amendment prohibits the government from legally classifying a person as someone else's property (with the one noted exception). A private citizen treating a person as a slave may be guilty of kidnapping, assault, battery, or any number of other crimes, but they are not violating the 13th Amendment—only the government can do that, by granting legal recognition to the victim's status as a slave. If a private company is acting in ways normally prohibited to private actors, on the state's authority, then they are effectively acting as an extension of the state. The state obviously cannot grant a private company the authority to do something which both private actors and the state itself are prohibited from doing. However, it's still the government, not the private company, which is bound by the Constitution.
- kakarot 8y ago
  If air travel is the only feasible way to leave the country, then yes, it is guaranteed by the Constitution.
- ip26 8y ago
  Nobody is required to give you free air travel, no. But the government is not supposed to be allowed to obstruct you from traveling, whether you want to go by air, boat, road..
  - daenz 8y ago
    Suppose the TSA becomes a private entity of airlines?
    - jdbernard 8y ago
      Then some other airline create a huge competitive advantage by not using it.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Travel is essential, just as the right to work, breathe when you want etc etc. So, my bet is that it is. Granted with some restrictions to make sure everyone is as safe as possible...without getting a cavity search
djsumdog 8y ago
The TSA already gets to harass, molest and assault people all they want. We've had nearly a decade of videos of crazy invasive and disturbing pat-downs of both adults and children. It's pretty obvious if you want to touch people inappropriately and legally, the TSA is the career choice you should be looking at. I rarely fly anywhere unless I absolutely have to. I've flown a lot outside the country and no other country is anywhere near as bad as the US/TSA. No other country makes you take off your shoes. I feel like early on, Americans fought hard against TSA security theatre and nothing changed and people kept flying, so it's just stayed pretty much the same. It's gotten a little better. TSA agent can't harass people as much and have to be nicer since everyone is recording, but everything they do is still worthless. Millimetre wave machines are filled with so many false positives you should just have people roll a six-sided die.
- pishpash 8y ago
  They just turned it into a shakedown: pay for Precheck and you will be harassed less.
  - anon7429 8y ago
    Yup. Same tactic as economy plus and biz class... misery to sell upgrades
  - clubm8 8y ago
    > They just turned it into a shakedown: pay for Precheck and you will be harassed less. OTOH I've seen days where the precheck line was slower moving/longer if it's a time when lots of business travelers fly.
- rbetts 8y ago
  I fly quite a bit. I signed up for TSA pre. It typically takes me about 5m to get through a security lane and usually involves a walk through a metal detector. Shoes on; laptop in bag; no need to remove toiletries. It is a fast, efficient, and polite experience. I'm sure others have different experiences - or aren't willing/able to pay for the TSA pre program. But in general, I prefer my experience traveling domestically to passing through security internationally.
sailfast 8y ago
No fly lists are inherently unconstitutional. They are secret lists that limit travel. They are applied arbitrarily with no judicial process. They have existed since 9/11 and they need to be banned. But yet... the electorate still believes in the safety they create because no legislator that I’m aware of has even broached the topic. I hope to see candidates with some sane opinions on this soon.
- Simulacra 8y ago
  The “illusion of safety”. There is no legitimate safety guarantee from TSA. If someone wanted to do harm in an American airport or airplane, they could. We need to stop kidding ourselves. If a terrorist was serious about death and destruction at an American airport, they could do it. It is absolutely possible to bring down an airplane right now, with all the safeguards and TSA crap. We’ve all just fooled ourselves into thinking more security and less civil rights equals more safety.
  - opportune 8y ago
    This is true, but the other side of the coin is that you want to make attacks hard enough. Yes, a group with $100k and a team of 3-5 people planning for a few months could really be destructive. But attacks (this applies to the digital world too) are generally unsophisticated, poorly planned, and take the easiest route possible. If you protect against, or at least mitigate, the easiest possible attacks, you eliminate a very large portion of security risks weighted by the likelihood of attackers to actually take those risks It's just like there can be no legitimate safety guarantee that software companies are unhackable. But you can make it really, really hard. Of course the TSA doesn't make it that hard, and mostly wastes a ton of money on things with little value, but in theory there should be some amount of physical security to prevent people from hijacking what are essentially missiles containing 100s of regular people
    - eesmith 8y ago
      "The other side of the coin"? I think you have presented a strawman opposition. Few argue there should be no security, but rather that a few simple changes, like hardening cockpit doors for the cockpit and a change to the hijacking policy (based as it was on the assumption that the hijackers wanted to live and, for example, go to Cuba), were enough "physical security to prevent people from hijacking what are essentially missiles." How does yet more biometrics help? Is the cost justifiable? We could have 5 security guards on every plane. That would surely help prevent people from 'hijacking what are essentially missiles', yes? But the costs aren't worth it. Eg: "An assessment of the Federal Air Marshal Service suggests that the annual cost is $180 million per life saved. This is greatly in excess of the regulatory safety goal of $1-$10 million per life saved. As such, the air marshal program would seem to fail a cost-benefit analysis" - https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2068 https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repositor... The "illusion of safety" comes from putting policies into place which aren't justified by a reasonable cost-benefit analysis, but exist mostly for cover-your-ass reasoning.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Curious, if fingerprints are allowed constitutionally, why not faces as identification? Laws might not allow it, but they'll change them

by clubm8 8y ago

mbreese 8y ago

Air travel is not a right guaranteed by the constitution. TSA gets a lot of leeway because of this.

aesh2Xa1 8y ago
What's the argument here? Spaghetti and meatballs aren't explicitly guaranteed, either, but you can eat them without signing away any other rights.
- beambot 8y ago
  s/spaghetti & meatballs/illicit drugs/ and that argument falls apart. You will quickly lose other rights, even though drugs aren't explicitly guaranteed or prohibited by the constitution either. (Not addressing GPs argument, just that the spaghetti & meatballs one doesn't hold water.)
  - samstave 8y ago
    Bone Saws aren't banned either, and retinal eye-scans of assassins will not make the world a safer place. Having Humanist-Centric politics makes the world a better place. Humans with shitty governments, parenting and environments which are shitty typically wind up being shitty humans. Building walls, guns, bombs, cages, cops, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes are no substitute for actually working to be better humans
    - afjl 8y ago
      I agree but you can't realistically build policy around "working to be better humans". Walls, guns, surveillance, etc are all easily deployable policies with easily measurable results. I don't enjoy the surveillance state or waiting 2 hours for airport security but it is tolerable...to an extent.
- labster 8y ago
  Tell that to the residents of Old Smoky, who lost their poor meatballs to government regulation.
joshuamcginnis 8y ago
It is unfortunate we surrender our freedom of movement and 4th amendment rights for the illusion of security.
- johndubchak 8y ago
  That's the central argument right there. We just need people to refuse to use air travel based on this if it comes to pass - I know I will.
walterbell 8y ago
What would happen if businesspeople refused to travel if their constitutional rights were not respected, and the economy ground to a halt? A small precedent was the widely flaunted "ban" on small electronic devices during takeoff/landing. A revolt among business travelers caused a rapid change in the rule.
- URSpider94 8y ago
  I’m betting we will never find out. The number of people who have been driven out of air travel because of today’s draconian restrictions is basically zero. People are conditioned to comply with any request in order to board an airplane. EDIT: you edited your post after I posted. As long as you don’t make people uncomfortable on the plane, that is. Don’t take away their phones, laptops or headphones, and you can grab as many images as you want of their irises, retinas and fingerprints.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  The percentage of people caring about privacy is too low for TSA to worry about it, though.
- azinman2 8y ago
  Did business travelers stop traveling? And the economy suffered?
- adventured 8y ago
  > What would happen if businesspeople refused to travel if their constitutional rights were not respected, and the economy ground to a halt? When have business people as a very large collective ever been particularly outraged about the surveillance state? Nothing about the NSA's activities have been fundamentally rolled back. They won, across the board and across party lines. I'm not talking about seven executives from some corner of tech lodging a twitter protest, I mean the millions of people that make up the "businesspeople" category. They have never widely protested the surveillence moves of the last 17 years. Americans will resist this as much as 24/7 cctv surveillence has been resisted in other developed nations such as Britain. Not at all. Most people do not view it as a threat to their liberty, they view it as an isolated intrusion that is to their security benefit.
baddox 8y ago
Note that regulating air travel is also not listed in the Constitution as an authority of the federal government.
- cr1895 8y ago
  Interstate commerce is though, right?
  - nybble41 8y ago
    Only because at the time that clause was written no one expected the relatively benign power to "make interstate commerce regular", i.e. to facilitate trade between the states, to be used as cover for absolutely any kind of interference in state affairs Washington can dream up—including actions which actively inhibit trade, or have precious little to do with interstate commerce in the first place—in preference to actually useful things like standardizing weights and measures and curbing fraud.
aosmith 8y ago
I'm pretty sure freedom of travel is covered by liberty.
clubm8 8y ago
> Air travel is not a right guaranteed by the constitution. TSA gets a lot of leeway because of this. Travel in general is protected, and in addition the 9th Amendment clearly states: >The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
- pishpash 8y ago
  Travel on public roadways perhaps but airports and airliners are all private property.
  - gasull 8y ago
    You can't violate the Constitution on private property.
    - tallanvor 8y ago
      Private companies acting in a private capacity cannot violate the constitution. The limits of the Constitution apply to government employees (or even private employees performing a service contracted by a government agency) whether they are on public or private property.
      - eesmith 8y ago
        The major exception being slavery, that is, a private company with slave labor, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", violates the 13th amendment, with penalties set by Congressional legislation. There also have been cases where the courts have treated private companies as state actors. See https://www.nyclu.org/en/publications/column-applying-constitution-private-actors-new-york-law-journal https://www.nyclu.org/en/publications/column-applying-consti...
        nybble41 8y ago
        That is not an exception. The 13th Amendment prohibits the government from legally classifying a person as someone else's property (with the one noted exception). A private citizen treating a person as a slave may be guilty of kidnapping, assault, battery, or any number of other crimes, but they are not violating the 13th Amendment—only the government can do that, by granting legal recognition to the victim's status as a slave. If a private company is acting in ways normally prohibited to private actors, on the state's authority, then they are effectively acting as an extension of the state. The state obviously cannot grant a private company the authority to do something which both private actors and the state itself are prohibited from doing. However, it's still the government, not the private company, which is bound by the Constitution.
kakarot 8y ago
If air travel is the only feasible way to leave the country, then yes, it is guaranteed by the Constitution.
ip26 8y ago
Nobody is required to give you free air travel, no. But the government is not supposed to be allowed to obstruct you from traveling, whether you want to go by air, boat, road..
- daenz 8y ago
  Suppose the TSA becomes a private entity of airlines?
  - jdbernard 8y ago
    Then some other airline create a huge competitive advantage by not using it.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Travel is essential, just as the right to work, breathe when you want etc etc. So, my bet is that it is. Granted with some restrictions to make sure everyone is as safe as possible...without getting a cavity search

djsumdog 8y ago

The TSA already gets to harass, molest and assault people all they want. We've had nearly a decade of videos of crazy invasive and disturbing pat-downs of both adults and children. It's pretty obvious if you want to touch people inappropriately and legally, the TSA is the career choice you should be looking at. I rarely fly anywhere unless I absolutely have to. I've flown a lot outside the country and no other country is anywhere near as bad as the US/TSA. No other country makes you take off your shoes. I feel like early on, Americans fought hard against TSA security theatre and nothing changed and people kept flying, so it's just stayed pretty much the same. It's gotten a little better. TSA agent can't harass people as much and have to be nicer since everyone is recording, but everything they do is still worthless. Millimetre wave machines are filled with so many false positives you should just have people roll a six-sided die.

pishpash 8y ago
They just turned it into a shakedown: pay for Precheck and you will be harassed less.
- anon7429 8y ago
  Yup. Same tactic as economy plus and biz class... misery to sell upgrades
- clubm8 8y ago
  > They just turned it into a shakedown: pay for Precheck and you will be harassed less. OTOH I've seen days where the precheck line was slower moving/longer if it's a time when lots of business travelers fly.
rbetts 8y ago
I fly quite a bit. I signed up for TSA pre. It typically takes me about 5m to get through a security lane and usually involves a walk through a metal detector. Shoes on; laptop in bag; no need to remove toiletries. It is a fast, efficient, and polite experience. I'm sure others have different experiences - or aren't willing/able to pay for the TSA pre program. But in general, I prefer my experience traveling domestically to passing through security internationally.

sailfast 8y ago

No fly lists are inherently unconstitutional. They are secret lists that limit travel. They are applied arbitrarily with no judicial process. They have existed since 9/11 and they need to be banned. But yet... the electorate still believes in the safety they create because no legislator that I’m aware of has even broached the topic. I hope to see candidates with some sane opinions on this soon.

Simulacra 8y ago
The “illusion of safety”. There is no legitimate safety guarantee from TSA. If someone wanted to do harm in an American airport or airplane, they could. We need to stop kidding ourselves. If a terrorist was serious about death and destruction at an American airport, they could do it. It is absolutely possible to bring down an airplane right now, with all the safeguards and TSA crap. We’ve all just fooled ourselves into thinking more security and less civil rights equals more safety.
- opportune 8y ago
  This is true, but the other side of the coin is that you want to make attacks hard enough. Yes, a group with $100k and a team of 3-5 people planning for a few months could really be destructive. But attacks (this applies to the digital world too) are generally unsophisticated, poorly planned, and take the easiest route possible. If you protect against, or at least mitigate, the easiest possible attacks, you eliminate a very large portion of security risks weighted by the likelihood of attackers to actually take those risks It's just like there can be no legitimate safety guarantee that software companies are unhackable. But you can make it really, really hard. Of course the TSA doesn't make it that hard, and mostly wastes a ton of money on things with little value, but in theory there should be some amount of physical security to prevent people from hijacking what are essentially missiles containing 100s of regular people
  - eesmith 8y ago
    "The other side of the coin"? I think you have presented a strawman opposition. Few argue there should be no security, but rather that a few simple changes, like hardening cockpit doors for the cockpit and a change to the hijacking policy (based as it was on the assumption that the hijackers wanted to live and, for example, go to Cuba), were enough "physical security to prevent people from hijacking what are essentially missiles." How does yet more biometrics help? Is the cost justifiable? We could have 5 security guards on every plane. That would surely help prevent people from 'hijacking what are essentially missiles', yes? But the costs aren't worth it. Eg: "An assessment of the Federal Air Marshal Service suggests that the annual cost is $180 million per life saved. This is greatly in excess of the regulatory safety goal of $1-$10 million per life saved. As such, the air marshal program would seem to fail a cost-benefit analysis" - https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:2068 https://ogma.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repositor... The "illusion of safety" comes from putting policies into place which aren't justified by a reasonable cost-benefit analysis, but exist mostly for cover-your-ass reasoning.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

Curious, if fingerprints are allowed constitutionally, why not faces as identification? Laws might not allow it, but they'll change them