Tsa Security Problems

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So Brill and his Clear partners invented a shoe-scanning apparatus that would allow Clear members to clear security without removing their shoes. The T.S.A. approved the device in Orlando, the first airport with a registered-traveler program. But when Clear began opening registered-traveler lanes at other airports earlier this year, the T.S.A. abruptly refused to certify additional shoe scanners.

As a result, registered-traveler members “get nothing … in return for the security-threat assessment, biometric verification, and thousands of man-hours and audit pages and dollars of security hoops that we jump through,” Brill complained at a Congressional hearing in July.

As is always the case with the T.S.A., however, there is a still another fillip. You’ll recall that we’re required to remove our footwear at security checkpoints because a potential terrorist named Richard Reid boarded a post-9/11 flight with explosives hidden in his shoes. He wasn’t able to ignite his shoe bomb with matches, and Congress worried that he might have succeeded if he had used a lighter. Lawmakers then banned lighters, the only item that Congress has specifically proscribed since 9/11.

Infuriated that Congress would dare tell it what to do, the T.S.A. ridiculed the lighter ban whenever it could get the media or a Congressional committee to listen. Finally, an exhausted Congress bowed to the T.S.A. and last month allowed the agency to lift the ban. Of course, the T.S.A.’s own list of in-flight contraband—almost 4,000 words of picayune rules about the size of scissors, screwdrivers, and breast-milk containers—remains in full effect.

That’s where the T.S.A. has taken us six years to the day after the horrors of September 11. It vigilantly protects us from breast-feeding moms, frequent flyers with biometric IDs, and Ozzie and Harriet’s son. The terrorists? Well....

The Fine Print

When the T.S.A. lifted the lighter ban on August 4, it quietly added new restrictions on other types of carry-on items. The agency demanded that some previously exempt electronics items—larger CD and DVD players, videogames, and medical devices like sleep-apnea masks—be removed from carry-on bags and X-rayed separately. When asked why the agency didn’t alert travelers to the change, a T.S.A. spokeswoman told Chris Barnett, a columnist for JoeSentMe.com, that the new rules didn’t affect enough flyers to warrant a public statement. Retroactively, however, the T.S.A. added the items to its prohibited-items list.

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