Small victories

By The Economist | WASHINGTON DC

AMERICA'S Transportation Security Administration has revised its airport security screening procedures in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU said last week. The new guidelines make clear that TSA agents can only conduct searches that are aimed at enhancing airline passenger safety and security. The TSA, in other words, is not the FBI, and shouldn't pretend that it is. The ACLU now plans to drop its lawsuit, which stemmed from a widely publicized incident in St. Louis in March. From the ACLU's press release:

The ACLU filed its lawsuit in June on behalf of Steven Bierfeldt, who was detained on March 29, 2009 in a small room at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and interrogated by TSA officials for nearly half an hour after he passed a metal box containing cash through a security checkpoint X-ray machine. Bierfeldt was carrying the cash in connection with his duties as the Director of Development for the Campaign for Liberty, a political organization that grew out of Congressman Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Bierfeldt repeatedly asked the agents to explain the scope of their authority to detain and interrogate him and received no explanation. Instead, the agents escalated the threatening tone of their questions and ultimately told Bierfeldt that he was being placed under arrest. Bierfeldt recorded audio of the incident with his iPhone.

In the lawsuit, Bierfeldt and the ACLU sought a court order requiring the TSA to bring its search policies into line with constitutional requirements for passenger privacy, arguing that passengers moving through pre-flight screening can only be subject to searches aimed at keeping weapons and explosives off airplanes. Bierfeldt’s experience proved that TSA searches had taken on a much broader scope.

In July, Gulliver wrote that the Bierfeldt case raised "questions about what exactly the TSA is meant to be doing. If its suspicions have no relation to issues of airport security, is it really allowed to follow them up?" It turns out that the answer is a definitive "no."

Business travellers everywhere, rejoice: the ACLU has saved you some time at the security checkpoint without reducing passenger safety. Airport security already involves more than enough ineffective theatre. The TSA doesn't need to waste more of everyone's time questioning libertarians about how much cash they're carrying.