The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is testing out a new safety precaution to increase flight security. This new “safety procedure” requires all airline passengers to remove any books from their carry-on bags while moving through security lines. This understandably raises many privacy concerns.
The Week reported that the TSA began testing the new security requirement for books and other paper products at airports in Missouri and California earlier this month.
The new screening process could require passengers to remove all reading material and food from their carry-ons and place them in bins for screening.
And it would be bad enough if the TSA was trying this out in a few places and decided to scrap the whole project. But that is not the case. Start preparing for this be happening next time you on a flight.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday” in late May that the department would “likely” expand the new carry-on policy nationwide.
How is looking through books going to help the TSA help catch terrorists?
[B]ooks raise very special privacy issues,” senior policy analyst Jay Stanley wrote. “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.”
It honestly seems a lot more probable in today’s political climate to see someone reading a book arguing Islam is incomparable with America banned from a flight than someone reading a book called الله يحب الجهاد.
And what does الله يحب الجهاد mean? I probably can’t type it English without censorship cracking down on this article. But, look it up. Because this same state of consistent surveillance and censorship of the written word is now coming to airports, airlines and TSA agents near you.
Source: The Hill
Image: Travel and Leisure
I bought a kid an I-pod for Christmas one year. I hollowed out a book and put it inside, then wrapped the book. Christmas morning, he slit the side of the package, saw it was a book and put it aside without opening it. I let it sit for two weeks before telling him to look inside.
I have nothing to hide, so search away
Just what the public needs, longer wait times to clear TSA pervert check points.
This cant be true !!can it?