The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is testing out a new program in which all books would need to be removed from carry-on baggage and subject to closer inspection. Is this 1984?
With proliferating fees for checked and larger cabin baggage, travelers are densely packing their carry-on bags. The TSA claims this has made screening more difficult. As a result, a new pilot program requiring all books, paper materials, and food to be removed from carry-on baggage aims to better search for explosives and other dangerous contraband. The expanded screening is being tested at a couple (undisclosed) small airports in Missouri and California.
Last month, the TSA rolled out a program in Kansas City (MCI) that required passengers to remove all paper from their carry-on bags. It did not go well and was stopped after a few days. Now the agency is trying again. Based upon the results of the pilot program, the TSA may roll out screening changes nationwide.
Privacy Concerns
It’s one thing to remove a closed laptop from your bag. It’s quite another to remove a book. Jay Stanley, a Senior Policy Analyst at the ACLU, is concerned.
[B]ooks raise very special privacy issues. As my colleague Nicole Ozer has discussed, there is a long history of special legal protection for the privacy of one’s reading habits in the United States, not only through numerous Supreme Court and other court decisions, but also through state laws that criminalize the violation of public library reading privacy or require a warrant to obtain book sales, rental, or lending records.
And we know that in the airline screening environment in particular, there have been multiple cases where passengers have been singled out because of their First Amendment-protected expressions. For example, in 2010 the ACLU sued on behalf of a man who was abusively interrogated, handcuffed, and detained for nearly five hours because he was carrying a set of Arabic-language flash cards and a book critical of U.S. foreign policy. We also know that the DHS database known as the “Automated Targeting System,” which tracks information on international travelers, has included notations in travelers’ permanent files about controversial books in their possession.
I tend to echo those concerns. At the same time, if densely packed bags and books in particular represent a genuine security concern, then I am not 100% opposed to this measure. I just hope it does not apply to PreCheck…
CONCLUSION
Will the TSA soon be reading your books? We should soon know.
All this theater in the name of being politically correct. Perhaps profiling would speed things along and be much less intrusive for almost everyone?
Buy a last minute one-way ticket with cash? Get ready for a proctological exam.
Global Entry Diamond Medallion member flying on an r/t ticket with family to Cancun? Step thru.
Geoff because then terrorists will simply become medallion members and fly on a rt ticket to Cancun with a family when committing their terrorists acts.
9/11 took far more time, resources, and planning than that.
I’m pretty sure a Saudi national with even the smallest ties to terrorist groups won’t have much luck becoming a Global Entry member,
Soon, we will read the news that a professor/researcher was detained because carrying the original version of The Canon Medicine, which written in arabic, thus presumed as terrorist.
How about we have tsa outlaw charging for bags checked or carry on then since it seems to be causing such a dire national security issue? That way it won’t violate our privacy rights.
I know that will never fly but it isn’t any more stupid than checking books and papers.
And what about corporate papers with confidential info? Or papers with medical information on them covered by HIPPA? Or notebooks containing proprietary research or inventions, which a tsa agent then steals and makes millions by doing so?
All of this “security” stuff has gone too far. It’s unAmerican and the founding fathers are probably rolling in their graves. Id argue that giving up our freedoms like this is exactly what the terrorists wanted and they’ve basically won.
I mean where do we draw the line between “security” and no longer being the free country we claim to be protecting from the terrorists? Well we aren’t allowed to know where that line is because homeland security will claim the terrorists will then use that knowledge to their advantage…
@Happy Flighting – I agree with a lot of what you have written here. Corporate documents, those where you are legally bound to keep them secret, personal journals, proprietary research – those could all be challenged by a court of law and should be. I am free to read what I want and write what I want, and so should anyone traveling into the country, what I would allow or at least wouldn’t have a problem with, is scanning the books through an x-ray machine (which they already do).
However, as to the founding fathers – you may be right, but those same founding fathers were fine with slavery, leaving women without a right to vote, and hanging witches (maybe not the founding fathers themselves naturally). So I don’t know that they would be as open as we think to protecting all of our liberties – their actions didn’t always match their deeds. But on balance, I agree with you that we are simply giving up too much for the sake of being safe, and need to apply more intelligence to our policies, procedures and those enforcing them.
They checked my book on June 21 @ MKE
@Ahmed – Could you expound upon this experience?
This is such BS, the TSA is not going to be able to do more than a quick check at the books content, it is a look at the potential contents stowed between the pages. They can already do this anyway if they feel like it. Who travels and dosent have their books on an iPad or Kindle in 2017 anyway. This argument is beyond ridiculous.
@Eric – I travel with physical books still. I just don’t like using a kindle or an iPad to read, though I have tried. I have also edited my choices when traveling (though for foreign prying eyes and not our own Government). For example, I left Factory Girls (a book about female industrial workers struggling to make it in China) at home during a trip to Beijing, and also left Opium Wars at home on a trip to Shanghai to avoid any negative attention should I have been stopped anyway. I did, however, just bring Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan and have been reading it on a trip to Vietnam.
Everybody: bring the entirety of JRR Tolkien’s LOTR trilogy in your carry-on. Plus maybe throw in Discworld for good measure.
Noone’s getting on a plane. Ever.