TSA's VIPR Teams Now Conducting 'Suspicionless Searches' at Train Stations

January 6, 2012 at 2:22 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

Since the rest of this post is going to be a mix of straight news and borderline paranoia revolving around the increasing creepiness of TSA VIPR teams, let's start with some balance. Here are the TSA's top 10 good catches of 2011 and here is how they tried to help holiday travelers with medical conditions. Fair's fair. We also want it noted that we decline to create separate posts for each and every negative TSA story that crosses our desk (e.g. this annual holiday nonsense about hostility to pastries or this brutal Vanity Fair article on the uselessness of security theater). That would be obsessive.

Now that that's out of the way, let's proceed with the unpleasantness. Last November we told you about the increased tempo with which TSA has been deploying its so-called VIPR teams, which conduct anti-terror monitoring outside of airports. The program's actual scope is vague and arguably designed to expand, with different government sources and politicians having "differing descriptions of VIPR's exact mission." Critics ranging from mainstream civil liberties groups to batshit crazy conspiracy theorists have specifically picked out VIPR teams—which do their work at highways, ports, bus stations, tunnels, rest areas, etc—for violating the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Recently LA local news picked up on how 25 TSA VIPR teams have been rotating through train stations, including Union Station, since last summer. The reason the story is getting play again is because TSA announced plans to deploy 12 more teams across the country over the coming months. So people naturally wanted to know what the existing teams have been doing all of this time.

It turns out that in LA they've conducted over 9,300 "suspicionless" searches of travelers and commuters, and in Savannah they at one point randomly screened people who weren't even going into the station.

Before you conclude that a "suspicionless search" is obviously and by definition illegal—since police need probable cause to search you—that's not exactly right. The legal standard is that citizens are protected from searches when they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Presumably TSA, with the backing of the President and Congress, has concluded that you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a train station (although even the TSA blog addmitted that the stunt in Savannah was out of bounds).

None of which decreases our discomfort with the idea that traveling by definition now opens you up to random searching. That's what it means, after all, to declare that all airports, highways, ports, bus stations, train stations, and so on are fair game. Yikes. Legal doesn't mean not creepy.

[Photo: The Port of Authority / Wiki Commons]

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