Legal Commentary

Kent Scheidegger on National Opt-Out Day

By Eugene Volokh

From his Crime & Consequences blog:

On the subject of excessively intrusive airport screenings, I agree with Charles Krauthammer. We need to get rid of security theater, get over our problem with ?profiling,? and direct more scrutiny to those likely to be security risks and less to those who are not.

However, the idea of scheduling a gum-up-the-works protest for the day before Thanksgiving is beyond despicable. National Opt-Out Day is a call for large numbers of people to opt out of the scanners and elect the longer manual search, all on the same day. It is a cruel and heartless act of vandalism that will seriously hurt other passengers, not the people at whom it is supposedly directed....

The objection to the protest sounds quite right to me (though ?beyond despicable? might be a bit too harsh).

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on November 21, 2010 (boomark / email).