RE: no 2. Except for one thing. You are an agent of the United States Government. Once you open my private bag/briefcase for any purpose, it constitutes a search. "Clearing a threat" constitutes a search. The Supreme Court has said in no uncertain terms it is a search. You are only permitted a "limited administrative search" for the specific purposes at hand. Cash, contraband or other items not a direct threat to the safety of an airliner used in commercial air carriage held out for hire are beyond the scope of the permitted search. You argue that you are to report presumed contraband to the cops, thus triggering a probable cause provision and allowing a plain view seizure. The courts have disagreed with this.

No one wants to keep drugs off the streets more than I do. But we are (or were) a country of laws with strong protections against just what you advocate. The founding fathers wrote strong protections against you, the government, from looking willie nillie into my stuff without permission. That permission is granted, either from you asking me politely and I give it to you or you go find a judge and ask the judge for permission, giving a darn good reason for him to give it to you. Anything else beyond your very, very limited administrative search lacks probable cause.

You, as a government agent, are required to presume that the traveler in front of you is innocent of any wrong doing. This is not optional. It is the law that governs you, your attitudes and your behaviors. If you find an unlabeled bag of white powder in my backpack while you are clearing your WEI question, you are required to presume, by law, that that bag is legitimate and that my purposes for carrying it are innocent. The only thing you may test it for is that which is within your very limited scope: explosives and incendiaries. Beyond that is beyond your scope and requires a warrant.

I've seen the damage that drugs on the street, illegal and legal alike can do. They destroy people and I support anything within the law to get them off the street. I cannot support illegal and out-of-scope searches that hinder American Citizens as they go about their private business. You suspect a bag of white powder is heroin, write up a report and have the cops go get a search warrant to search that person's home, but in-transit, it's none of your business in your official capacity.

Of course, if the airlines were to take over security once again, and eliminate the TSA, then they could report suspicious substances. They are not government agents, but private actors. Big difference.

I don't know what gsoltso's answer will be, but other screeners have told us they get no training in identifying drugs, so basically it's all a matter of what they think it might be.

Will pass on that, some FAM might have an itchy finger.

I suspect as much so my question goes to how any person might have the knowledge to ID illegal drugs.

The educational requirements to be a TSO are pretty basic. If they have no training provided by their employer giving them the skill to ID drugs then I suggest they do not have said skills to do so. I also suggest they have no reason to suspect an unknown item to be an illegal item unless it impacts aviation safety. This goes also for some legal items like large sums of cash. Clearly these things should not be of interest to TSA.

The problem is that TSA is doing all it can to become a unregulated State Police Force. As it is now we have to have permission from TSA to travel, even within our on state, should we choose to travel by mass transportation.

TSA has secret rules that travelers must comply with yet will not disclose those rules.

TSA will not provide clear information for the new WBI Strip Search Machines they are trying to force on the public.

I fail to see how anyone can support this agency.

West, you didn't answer a single question I asked. Responding to your latest post:

We're not comparing those two things. We're comparing 1) "actively searching" for weapons, explosives, and incendiaries while passively searching for drugs and other possible indicators of wrongdoing, and while ignoring most other possible indicators of wrongdoing, and 2) actively searching for weapons, explosives, incendiaries, drugs, and other possible indicators of wrongdoing, while ignoring most other possible indicators of wrongdoing. I think they're the same. Could you tell me how they differ?

How so? Are you saying that possession of marijuana (or heroin; not sure what you meant by "dope") is a bigger deal than theft? One has a victim. The other does not. One has been considered wrong since before we had any concept of laws, the other has been used by people to make them feel better for thousands of years, then has been illegal for the past 40.

It doesn't matter what you say you're looking for. As you and Ron have told us, if you see something that looks like an indication of certain crimes you report it, and if you see something that looks like an indication of other crimes, you ignore it.

Would you please, PLEASE, tell me what difference it makes if you're "looking for possible threats" or looking for potatoes, when you're going to take the same action if you find weapons, explosives, incendiaries, drugs, or a number of other things?

It seems that your concern is also to keep drugs off planes. If you see something that looks like indication of possession of illegal drugs, you call a supervisor, right? If you see something that looks like indication of possession of stolen cameras, you move on, right?

Do you feel it's acceptable for you to use your search for WEI as a chance to find drugs, credit card fraud, immigrations violations, and other indications of wrongdoing that have ABSOLUTELY no affect on airline security?

Let's try this again:

That's what you said, right? You said that if there's nothing in a bag that looks like a threat or possible threat (such as a bag of plant matter), you take no action and move on, right?


Okay, so this time, you said that those things would not be ignored. Can you please reconcile your two statements?


Do you agree or not that when you look in a bag and ignor everything except for certain things, that's a search for those things?

You treat things that appear to be illegal drugs the same as things that look like weapons when searching people and their belongings, don't you? You alert a supervisor in each case, don't you?

Are drugs on the list of things you ignore when searching someone's things, or are they on the list of things that results in action being taken?


What would you do if were hand-searching someone's bag and you saw three cameras along with photographs of that person smashing a store window, crawling through the hole, and leaving with a bag of cameras?


You disagree with any of that?


Right?

Right?

Prohibition and the black market that it creates do those things. Marijuana has never killed anyone. People kill themselves with alcohol and other dangerous drugs, but people are no longer shooting each other over alcohol sales territory since we made it legal, destroying the black market, and people aren't dieing from poorly-made bathtub gin since we made it legal and began regulating it.

I agree strongly with your statements about scope of searches and thank you for taking the time to add to the discussion.

I am not sure what I can say about that. There are SSI rules that cover all forms of training, or lack thereof, so i am not going to be able to give you a direct answer on that one, sorry.

Any determination as to what the substance actually is, comes at the hands of the local LEO.

Sure, but you and your associates make the initial determination that it is worthy of referral to a law enforcement officer. You look into a bag, either with X-ray or with your naked eyes, and you look at the things in that bag. You decide which things are worthy of further examination and which can be ignored. You never know from sight if something is a toy or a real gun, a bag of cocaine or a bag of sugar.

As Ron told us, whether you see something that looks like a weapon, an explosive, an incendiary, or an illegal drug, you contact a supervisor. No law enforcement determination of what a substance is happens unless you initiate the process. Right?

Its just amazing to me the ability of the TSA to take information its giving and so widely swing and miss...

The TSO's are doing it in this thread with the damn drug issue....

That is a good point, however we do not have the direction, nor a ready way to have the LEO verify the items like we do with certain other illegal items. We do not have a lab with DVD players to ascertain whether the information actually contained on the DVDs is copyrighted material, we also do not have the immediate ability to verify whether the person ahs the express written permission of the studio to reproduce the items (heck I would type one up on the "studio" letterhead and stick it with them just to confuse someone). I understand the point you are making and it is a valid point, the problem is we do not have the equipment nor the localized resources to readily investigate that type of possible illegality. The stuff we are told to report if found are things that an average person finding them on the street would report to a LEO on their own (or at least that is my personal opinion based on what we are to report). There could be counterfeit colognes, tools, shoes, and any myriad other items that are actually illegal, that we would never notice. None of those items are easily resolved at a checkpoint (whereas the items listed for referral are). The kiddie porn thing is fairly obvious, most TSOs are not going to report images of persons with a mature appearance, only those that are pretty young. Drugs (which seems to be a focus of many people here) are fairly easy to remedy in about 5 minutes (as most LEOs have training specified to identify illicit drugs and such, and many of them have testing kits readily available). We also do not have cooperative requests or agreements with the entertainment industry like we do with DEA, local LEOs and other agencies under the federal umbrella.

Are you claiming it is SSI and cannot state if you receive illegal drug identification training provided by TSA?

You need to presume something about the substance before calling the police - absent expertise or testing equipment, you're suspicions are just that - baseless suspicion.

The police are being called without any clear evidence that wrongdoing is afoot - therefore your actions are illegal and the courts should be quashing this evidence if/when it gets to court.

You are trained to identify a gun - you are not trained to identify or verify the contents of a bag containing white powder or a grassy substance.

Thanks. I do agree with your premise concerning the black market and the dangers thereof. We will likely disagree on the above, but this is neither the time nor the place to discuss the virtues of the pros/cons of legalization as we clearly have more important fish to fry. We could meet to discuss the above on OMNI/PR but I think this thread should continue to serve its present purpose: limits on DHS/TSA's evermore aggressive expansion, preferably before they start tattooing numbers on our wrists.