On October 23, Papers, Please! wrote:
Acting on a petition submitted in July 2015 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit today ordered the Department of Homeland Security to, within 30 days from today, “submit to the court a schedule for the expeditious issuance of a final rule ”governing the TSA’s use of virtual strip search machines or body scanners (what the TSA calls “Advanced Imaging Technology”) “within a reasonable time”.
The court didn’t say what it would consider “expeditious” or a “reasonable” time for the TSA to finalize rules for its use of body scanners.
I think we’re waaaay past “expeditious” by now and are more on the order of “sometime before the next millenium, folks?” Note that this is not ordering the actual rule be produced within 30 days – just a schedule for issuing a rule that should have been issued years ago.
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For its part, EPIC wrote:
The Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit today ordered TSA to comply with the ruling in EPIC v. DHS and conduct an “expeditious” rulemaking on the use of body scanners at airports. EPIC successfully sued TSA in 2011 to compel notice-and-comment rulemaking after the agency failed to solicit public comments as required by law. EPIC said the body scanner program was “unlawful, invasive, and ineffective.” The backscatter x-ray devices were subsequently removed from U.S. airports, though the millimeter devices remain. In 2015 the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a petition to compel TSA to issue a final rule as required by the EPIC v. DHS mandate. TSA now has 30 days to submit a rulemaking plan to the court.