The Civilized Explorer aggregation

A couple of lawsuits indicate that the TSA is limited by law to detecting weapons and explosives and preventing acts of criminal violence or aircraft piracy. However, TSA staffers are being rewarded for finding drugs or evidence of other crimes. In June, a federal judge dismissed a case against a man arrested for possession of fake passports because the search exceeded the authority of TSA agents.

The Bierfeldt case is still pending - a traveller detained because he had $4,700 in cash in his possession and he refused to answer questions until the TSA agents explained his rights and their authority to require him to answer.

Bennie Thompson, chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has ask the TSA to provide his committee with information on how Clear’s private data will be secured.

I guess what we need is to have a few congresspersons’ personal data at risk to get some answers; I have no idea if any members of Congress or Senators were in the Clear program, but I hope so.

Well, the headline is a little misleading. Clear says it would like to sell the data to another company which will continue the service of fast access through the screening process.

Clear’s letter to its customers is reprinted at the bottom of the article.

After my praise of Clear as a provider of prompt passage through airport security, they’ve apparently gone under. We flew to San Diego last weekend, and I saw no people in the Clear line when we waited for the people ahead of us to clear the air puffer at SFO. Turns out there are too few users to keep the company (Clear is run by Verified Identity Pass) going.

Now the issue is, what’s going to happen with all the personal information Clear has stored on its members. Clear assures us it will take appropriate steps to delete the information; we’ve all heard that before. According to the article:

• In addition to information such as Social Security numbers and home addresses, Clear took eye scans, fingerprints and digital photos of every one of its approximately 260,000 members.

  “I think the customers of Clear should be concerned about this,” Rotenberg said (Marc Rotenberg is executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center). “Fingerprints are one of the most effective ways to (steal someone’s) identity.”

  Rotenberg said he doesn’t believe that all the data the TSA collected from Clear members is going to be deleted. And the longer the data is held, the more potential there is for leaks.

The lawsuit is over the detention of Steven Bierfeldt, who was detained at an airport apparently for carrying too much cash.

Bierfeldt recorded some of his interrogation on his iPhone, and here’s a link to the recording. The TSA agents are definitely bullying in this recording, but the beginning of it is missing (Bierfeldt didn’t turn on the iPhone till after things were going downhill, it seems).

The ACLU is saying the entire detention was an illegal fishing expedition into Bierfeldt’s background. Bierfeldt was carrying about $4,700 in cash because he was in charge of collecting campaign donations for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.

He also says, 

• The chief executive of Europe’s largest budget carrier said the airline would also generate extra revenues by removing two out of the three toilets on its Boeing 737-800 jets and filling the space with up to six seats.

Yikes!