TSA Trouble!

USA Today is today reporting on a recent report from the TSA describing the state of the United States' airport screening. There are good omens for advocates of privatization:

At Chicago O'Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

Maybe this will excite ol' Kip into the voyeuristic project hinted at a week earlier in the same newspaper.

New Biometric System Introduced at SFO

The new SFO fast-pass technology Clear was launched yesterday to much fanfare.

Clear is part of a new wave of biometrically-based technologies being deployed at airports across the United States. These technologies provide airport customers with expedited security lines in exchange for voluntarily submitting their fingerprint, iris, and retinal data, which are linked to the customer’s other personal information (see Airports International, vol 40 no 3 pp 28-39 for further information).

While the federal government monitors these programs under the Registered Traveler's program (RT), the creation of biometric databases is, apart for privacy issues, a cause for concern for some. One such critic is Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who notes that, when biometrics was first implemented, it was used solely for the control and regulation of recidivist criminals.