Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age,” discusses why he thinks the screening procedures used by TSA are constitutional. He writes, in part:
In a 2006 opinion for the Us .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.”
As currently used in U.S. airports, the new full-body scanners fail all of Alito’s tests.
Read the whole article in the Washington Post.
Hat-tip, NationalOptOut