Originally Posted by
codex57
That's my guess too - that they'd make a distinction btw being out in public vs being in an airport. There are certain areas they basically create distinctions. I haven't thought much about it, but the one that pops into mind is border control. It'd be a little stretch to apply that theory to airports within the US, but I can see it working for any airport considered international. It's not that much of a stretch if applied to international airports. The Supreme Court is 5-4 leaning towards conservative. Under the current court, I'd bet the ruling would allow TSA to keep going.
Seems to me if they can keep carving out exceptions then there really isn't much of a 4th amendment anymore.
With regards to international airports, the only place I can see that happening is wear customs and immigration is. The entire airport isn't international, and you exit into the "border" area as that's all blocked off. One could make the argument that planes do leave from domestic concourses and that's certainly true - look at places like ORD and IAD and you'll see international flights leaving amongst domestic. That doesn't mean that everyone in the airport is traveling internationally though. And arguably, the plane isn't going to leave US airspace for at least a few hours anyway, so I think it'd be hard to argue that that part of the airport is an actual border like customs is - it's the plane that's leaving the US and crossing the boarder at a later time and a different place.
While it's true that SCOTUS is leaning conservative, a couple conservative judges sided with the others in limiting searches (names escape me right now). So I don't know that it'd be an automatic defeat despite the makeup of the court.