That thumbnail doesn't look like any TSA checkpoint I've ever been through. Ah, the beautiful alternate reality of stock photography.

Highly sophisticated airport technology would read your face and your vitals and scan your bag seamlessly, all without sacrificing safety — the technology would alert authorities to suspicious travelers who need to be pulled aside.

At the same time, data about your whereabouts, your current blood pressure, your body temperature, the number of electronic devices you're carrying (and if one of these devices might be classified as a sex toy) will be stored in a database you cannot check while, at the same time, you have no control over which institutions get access to it. Frequent flyer with regularly high blood pressure? Your insurance premiums might be raised as your insurance company reevaluates the risks it's taking with you.

Oh, and of course you have no idea what actually looks "suspicious" to whatever algorithm is checking on you. Maybe you look just a little Iranian (or, worse, Mexican) to the system, and you get singled out, and you can bet the actual people who pull you aside will treat you with an amount of caution that borders on hysteria - the computer already said you may be trouble, so you can be sure they will try and {i}find{/i} that trouble on you.

Never trust the term "efficient and effective" when it refers to methods of singling out undesirable people. More often than not, it means "err on the side of caution".

Algorithms are written by people and will always reflect the biases of those people (and their bosses). I mean, it's obvious, but you'd be surprised how quickly people forget that and assume that their machine is making unbiased, 'scientific', determinations about travellers. So, it's more than just 'caution', it's often fully biased and, because it's an 'impartial machine' it's much much harder to challenge those biases.

And I think the fact that the TSA is 'still figuring out what privacy means' is fucking chilling, but not overly surprising.

Get rid of the TSA. Problem solved. They've already been proven that they are terrible at finding weapons, during random checks. They only seem great at finding water bottles and subjecting grandparents to full body cavity checks, which is not security.

Grandparents need gentle touching between chiropractic appointments. Think of the TSA as extra-extra soft sex workers for America.