I haven’t talked much about my thoughts on the new Transportation Security Agency (TSA) screenings, but this Washington Post article pretty much sums it up: “Why the TSA pat-downs and body scans are unconstitutional.”
Key quote:
In a 2006 opinion for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, then-Judge Samuel Alito stressed that screening procedures must be both “minimally intrusive” and “effective” – in other words, they must be “well-tailored to protect personal privacy,” and they must deliver on their promise of discovering serious threats. Alito upheld the practices at an airport checkpoint where passengers were first screened with walk-through magnetometers and then, if they set off an alarm, with hand-held wands. He wrote that airport searches are reasonable if they escalate “in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search.”
While technically not in the Constitution, the Supreme Court has found interstate travel to be “a right so elementary was conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger Union the Constitution created. In any event, freedom to travel throughout the United States has long been recognized as a basic right under the Constitution.” (United States v. Guest (1966)
I can’t wait until someone tries this in court.
