Here’s one person’s story of flying without ID. All this time, money, and privacy abandoned just for the ritual of security theater.
Cato at Liberty
Cato at Liberty
Email Signup
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Topics
Technology and Privacy
10,000 Bills in Congress, and the Annual Spending Process Ignored
Before leaving for its August recess last week, Congress saw the introduction of its 10,000th bill. Meanwhile, not a single one of the twelve annual bills that direct the government’s spending priorities in 2009 has passed the Senate and only one has passed the House. Congress is neglecting its basic responsibility to manage the federal government, and is instead churning out new legislation about everything under the sun.
What does Congress occupy itself with? A commemorative postage stamp on the subject of inflammatory bowel disease. Improbable claims of health care for all Americans. And, of course, bringing home pork. Read about it on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.
Related Tags
“Reforming Fourth Amendment Privacy Doctrine”
Frankly, I don’t expect the scholars, lawyers, and judges who have been steeping in traditional Fourth Amendment doctrine their entire careers to get the thesis of my recent American University Law Review article. But you can! And, eventually, if I do enough work, they will.
Here are some highlights from the introduction to “Reforming Fourth Amendment Privacy Doctrine”:
Since 1967, the Supreme Court and lower courts have relied too heavily on an unreliable test that arose from the leading Fourth Amendment case, Katz v. United States. Distracted by Justice Harlan’s concurrence in the case and befuddled by the concept of “privacy,” courts have ignored the simple rule of the actual holding in Katz and conditioned Fourth Amendment rights on surmises about privacy “expectations.”
Privacy is a real thing that need not be a matter of conjecture. The Katz Court held that personal information was protected by the Fourth Amendment because, as a factual matter, the defendant had kept it private. Installing a wiretap to overcome Katz’s use of law and physics to conceal information was unreasonable without a warrant. The Court did not base its holding on open-ended “expectations” or “reasonableness,” as Justice Harlan’s concurrence suggested, but on the affirmative steps Katz took to conceal that information.
…
If an individual has secured the privacy of particular information, the Fourth Amendment focuses on the reasonableness of the government’s actions in undoing that privacy, not on the reasonableness of the individual’s expectations.
The “Coburn Omnibus”
The WashingtonWatch.com blog has a breakout of all 36 bills in the “Coburn Omnibus.”
#36: a greenhouse in Suitland, Maryland!
Related Tags
The Mechanics of Government Gaining Ground
Over at the new WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve posted a piece illustrating the simple modern mechanics of something Jefferson warned against: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”
Congress is considering a bill to cancel the scheduled termination of a commission that studies minority veterans issues. It would only cost three cents per U.S. family to keep it going, but it’s one of nearly 10,000 bills of all different stripes pending in the current Congress.
Did minority veterans fight for a country where each group looks to the government for special treatment or a little cut of the loot from taxpayers? Or for the country where the people’s spirits are still free?
Related Tags
The NY AG’s Anti-Free-Speech Shakedown Racket
Here’s a good article by Declan McCullagh on New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s outrageous vendetta against Usenet. The article is good not only because yours truly is quoted.
Terrorist Attacks on Aviation — 11 Per Day!
… or so you would infer from a statistic reported on the Threat Level blog.
Threat Level reports on a new policy that has the Transportation Security Administration doing deep dives into people’s public-record dossiers when they arrive at airports without government-issued ID: “The new rules went into effect June 21, and in the first five days, 1705 people out of 10 million attempted to fly without identification and 59 of those were denied access to the plane.”
Fifty-nine refuseniks in five days works out to more than 11 terrorist attacks thwarted per day.
Of course, these weren’t actually terrorists. These were people whose papers weren’t in order. When this happens, TSA employees at its operations center in Virginia dig into public records databases and relay questions to screeners at the airports. If a traveler passes the test, he or she can fly. If the database information is wrong, or if the traveler is forgetful, he or she is stranded.
We were already quite a long way from getting any actual security benefit out of these programs, but as Threat Level suggests, all one need do to impersonate another is memorize the information about them in public records. I think this will happen most often among siblings and family members, who already know such info. But we’re talking about public records. They are collected, packaged, and sold by services like Lexis-Nexis. Sophisticated criminals and terrorists could get them just like anyone else.
Or they could present government-issued ID, having adopted the “clean-skin terrorist” technique that was recently reported to Capitol Hill by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.