My new study on the Transportation Security Administration mainly focuses on the agency’s poor management and performance. The TSA has a near monopoly on security screening at U.S. airports, and monopoly organizations usually end up being bloated, inefficient, and providing low-quality services.
The study proposes contracting out or “privatizing” airport screening, which is the structure of aviation security used successfully in Canada and many European countries.
I briefly discuss some of the civil liberties problems surrounding TSA. Note that Cato’s Jim Harper also addresses those issues in his work, as does Robert Poole of Reason Foundation. I noticed this recent blog post by Poole that nicely summarizes some of the realities of TSA, terrorism, and civil liberties:
Read the rest of this post →A couple of years ago Jonathan Corbett, a tech entrepreneur from Miami, posted videos online showing him successfully passing through TSA airport body scanners with a metal box concealed under his clothing, seeking to demonstrate that the scanners are an ineffective replacement for walk-through metal detectors for primary screening. In 2010 he filed a lawsuit contending that body-scanning and pat-downs are both unreasonable searches that violate the Fourth Amendment.
As part of the discovery process, TSA provided Corbett with 4,000 pages of documents, many of them classified. He was allowed to produce two versions of his brief, one containing extracts of classified material, and available only to the court, and a heavily redacted version which could be made public. But as several news sites reported last month, a clerk in the US Court of Appeals (11th District) mistakenly posted the classified version online, and it was quickly noticed and reproduced on various websites. Although the court issued a gag order prohibiting Corbett from talking about the classified material, there was no way to stop others from doing so.