Yeah, I have seen several more than this one, including the one where they were walking around holding up the gray bins trying to block the view of the person filming. That was at the least unprofessional, and in some other lights, could have been construed as possible harassment. The one thing in common in most of these vids are either a misunderstanding of the public filming rules, or a willful decision to act counter to all the training TSA gives them. I have actually had co-workers that would tell people "you can't film me without my permission, and I do not grant it to you" - I corrected them a number of times, and even heard a supervisor correcting them more than once. They are no longer employed with TSA, but it was a source of frustration for me personally, and professionally. TSA trains our employees from the first set of classes that it is ok to film in the checkpoints as long as a specific set of parameters is not violated, and yet this crops up again and again. I myself have had to advise co-workers of what the rules say, intermittently throughout the years. As I mentioned above, it is a source of frustration for me, because it is really very simple. I can make no excuses for someone that has been through our training, and says something counter to it.

These rules are ambiguous in some locations. The basics are universal, but some locales thumb their nose at the federal rulings that set the precedence for recording in public spaces. The basic laws I keep seeing indicate that recording "private" conversations without notification is illegal in some states/cities/federal institutions. The confusion sometimes (on both sides) comes from the understanding of what constitutes private - in public, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (general rule of thumb, backed by case law for ages - in several different 1st Amendment cases). There are even some cases on the books right now challenging wiretap laws in different states and cities, citing this long list of previous judgements against the prohibition of recording in public - including the law you may have run into in your description above. The rule is fairly simple in *most* situations, and especially in the case of TSA.