[Infowarrior] - Followup on TSA Sippy-Cup incident

[Richard Forno]

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/tsa_and_the_sip.html

< paras about the original incident removed for brevity >

This story portrays the TSA as jack-booted thugs. The story hit the Internet
last Thursday, and quickly made the rounds. I saw it on BoingBoing. But, as
it turns out, it's not entirely true.

The TSA has a webpage up, with both the incident report and video.

    TSO [REDACTED] took the female to the exit lane with the stroller and
her bag. When she got past the exit lane podium she opened the child's drink
container and held her arm out and poured the contents (approx. 6 to 8
ounces) on the floor. MWAA Officer [REDACTED] was manning the exit lane at
the time and observed the entire scene and approached the female passenger
after observing this and stopped her when she tried to re-enter the sterile
area after trying to come back through after spilling the fluids on the
floor. The female passenger flashed her badge and credentials and told the
MWAA officer "Do you know who I am?" An argument then ensued between the
officer and the passenger of whether the spilling of the fluid was
intentional or accidental. Officer [REDACTED] asked the passenger to clean
up the spill and she did.

Watch the second video. TSO [REDACTED] is partially blocking the scene, but
at 2:01:00 PM it's pretty clear that Monica Emmerson -- that's the female
passenger -- spills the liquid on the floor on purpose, as a deliberate act
of defiance. What happens next is more complicated; you can watch it for
yourself, or you can read BoingBoing's somewhat sarcastic summary.

In this instance, the TSA is clearly in the right.

But there's a larger lesson here. Remember the Princeton professor who was
put on the watch list for criticizing Bush? That was also untrue. Why is it
that we all -- myself included -- believe these stories? Why are we so quick
to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and
arbitrary and drunk with power?

It's because everything seems so arbitrary, because there's no
accountability or transparency in the DHS. Rules and regulations change all
the time, without any explanation or justification. Of course this kind of
thing induces paranoia. It¹s the sort of thing you read about in history
books about East Germany and other police states. It's not what we expect
out of 21st century America.

The problem is larger than the TSA, but the TSA is the part of "homeland
security" that the public comes into contact with most often -- at least the
part of the public that writes about these things most. They're the public
face of the problem, so of course they're going to get the lion's share of
the finger pointing.

It was smart public relations on the TSA's part to get the video of the
incident on the Internet quickly, but it would be even smarter for the
government to restore basic constitutional liberties to our nation's
counterterrorism policy. Accountability and transparency are basic building
blocks of any democracy; and the more we lose sight of them, the more we
lose our way as a nation.