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Pat-Downs or Full-Body Imaging? TSA Airport Security Backlash

by Ryan Young on November 15, 2010 · 2 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk

The TSA has crossed a line. Its new security procedures require employees to either touch passengers’ genitals or take pictures of them. The public backlash is loud and growing. My colleagues Michelle Minton, Brian McGraw, and Ivan Osorio have all covered the issue. Here are what other people around the country are saying:

Tim Carney reports that the CEO of Rapiscan, a scanner manufacturer, is an Obama donor and accompanied the President on his recent trip to India.

A group of activists has declared November 24 to be National Opt-Out Day. November 24 is the day before Thanksgiving, and will be one of the year’s busiest travel days. Since pat-downs take more time than full-body scans, the goal is to clog security until TSA removes full-body scanners from airports. I will be participating.

The proprietor of Our Little Chatterboxes, a blog about child development issues, recounts her encounter with the TSA’s new pat-down procedures. She writes, “[The TSA employee] felt along my waistline, moved behind me, then proceeded to feel both of my buttocks. She reached from behind in the middle of my buttocks towards my vagina area… She then moved in front of my and touched the top and underneath portions of both of my breasts… She then felt my inner thighs and my vagina area, touching both of my labia.”

The blogger at Insert Title Here tells his story, with video. He was threatened with a $10,000 civil suit.

The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman wrote an excellent column, noting that “The U.S. Marshals Service recently admitted saving some 35,000 images from a [full-body scanning] machine at a federal courthouse in Florida. TSA says that will never happen. Human experience says, oh, yes, it will.”

Art Carden calls for abolishing the TSA. “The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility,” he writes.

The Drudge Report posts a picture of a TSA agent fondling a nun’s private parts.

Photo credit: cjdavis’ flickr photostream.

LibertyWeek 96: Donut Day Disobedience

by Richard Morrison on June 8, 2010

in CEI Projects, Features, Podcast, Zeitgeist

Richard Morrison and Marc Scribner welcome Chris Horner, Sam Kazman, and Ryan Radia to Episode 96 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We cover Chicago’s dishonorable gun restrictions, a special interview with bestselling author Christopher C. Horner, civil disobedience on National Donut Day, a shout out to CEI’s annual dinner gala and the FTC’s proposed “Drudge Report Tax”.

Government gets ‘emergency’ control of the internet in new Senate bill

by Gary Howard on August 28, 2009 · 1 comment

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Tech & Telecom

This story just hit the Drudge Report’s front page.  Declan McCullagh at CNET writes today about the latest revision of S.773, a bill that would give the president “emergency control” of the internet in case of a “cybersecurity emergency.”  Wayne Crews, CEI Vice President for Policy,  released a statement on the naming of the cybersecurity chief and wrote an article on this back in May.  See an excerpt below:

Policy makers should avoid collectivizing and centralizing risk management, especially in frontier industries like information technology. Yes, we need government-backed “police forces” to protect private networks and infrastructure, but we also need the “barbed wire” and “door locks” which private companies continuously compete with each other to improve. When government overrules market competition for information/electronic security, it creates barriers to innovative private security solutions. We become less secure, not more.

Some reports indicate that the administration and Congress are seeking government authority over private networks-like power grids and computer networks-in the event of breaches. The very term “cyber” at once means everything and therefore nothing: American telecommunications, the power grid; virtually anything networked to some other computer is fair game to a new czar. The dominant tenor of the cybersecurity debate today is toward greater federal control over private infrastructure.

Washington has a proper role. It entails protecting government’s own networks and setting internal security standards, not regulating private networks. It involves arresting computer criminals and avoiding creating threats to data security in the form of data retention mandates, national ID schemes, proposals to re-regulate encryption, and czars that set terms for all they survey.

Security is an industry, and industries-and abstract concepts like “technology”-do not need czars in Washington. Innovation in information security and privacy protection do not flow from D.C. Rather, a government tech czar would likely grow in “stature” as a target for lobbyists. A federal technology chief could all too easily become an agent for establishing government authority over frontier technologies.

Both suppliers and customers increasingly demand better security from all firms. Improving private incentives for information sharing is at least as important as greater government coordination to ensure security and critical infrastructure protection. That job will entail liberalizing critical infrastructure assets-like telecommunications and electricity networks-and relaxing antitrust constraints so firms can enhance reliability through the kind of “partial mergers” that are anathema to today’s antitrust enforcers.

Private cybersecurity initiatives will gradually move us toward thriving liability and insurance markets for cutting-edge sectors. Heavy-handed cyber-czar gestures and legislation cannot address the lack of authentication and inability to exclude bad actors that is at the root of today’s cybersecurity problems.

Like everything else in the market, security technologies-from biometric identifiers to firewalls to encrypted databases-and cybersecurity services-from consulting to liability insurance to network monitoring-benefit from competition. Corporate information and security officers deal with cybersecurity concerns every day. It’s not clear what government could really fix-but it could break a lot.

See the statement release here.