My cow-orker Seth attended John Perry Barlow’s trial this week — Barlow was arrested for possession of drugs after they were allegedly discovered during an airport security search; Barlow argues that security screeners don’t have any remit to be searching passengers for drugs, which are not a security risk to airplanes. Seth’s commentary on the proceedings are a must-read, a really eloquent and learned dissection of the absurdity in the courtroom.
The Federal government lawyer sat right behind the People’s lawyer and objected every single time that the defense asked anything about screeners’ training or procedures, or about statistics, history, trends, equipment, techniques, or anything substantive about the roles of different law enforcement agencies. And the judge essentially always granted the objections on “relevance” even when they were made on “privilege”. For example, the defense asked things like whether x-ray machines beep and whether they have two-dimensional displays, and the United States objected. The United States does not want you to know whether x-ray machines beep, or whether they have two-dimensional displays.
Intermittently, I found this hilarious, because much of the alleged “SSI” could be discovered immediately by a passenger or a journalist. (I am still working on a piece that will describe vulnerabilities in vastly more detail than almost all of the information the United States objected to at the People v. Barlow hearing. I intend to describe not only the security procedures used by specific airports and airlines, but a good deal of detail about how they can be circumvented, in the hope of showing that many of these measures cause privacy harm for no benefit. All of those descriptions derive solely from my experiences as a passenger on a single recent commercial aviation trip. That does not prove that the government is legally wrong to say that people within the system are forbidden to talk about equivalent things, but it suggests that there’s not much true security benefit at stake in forbidding them.) The security culture is reflexive, or, one might say, knee-jerk — the Feds are totally dedicated to idea that it is never appropriate to permit anyone within the system to disclose SSI to the public. It would be bad for national security, the theory goes, if screeners could tell people whether x-ray machines beep. Never mind that Federal law enforcement agencies themselves publish detailed information about how to conceal weapons to carry them aboard aircraft, what various kinds of concealed weapons look like under x-ray, which ones appear more suspicious than others, and where you can buy them!