Constitutional Law

TSA Search Case on CNN

By Rachel Myers, ACLU

On Friday, Steve Bierfeldt, treasurer of Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, and Larry Schwartztol, fearless ACLU attorney, appeared on CNN to talk about our new lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.

We filed the lawsuit on Steve’s behalf after he was detained in a small room at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and interrogated by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials for nearly half an hour for passing a metal box containing cash through a security checkpoint X-ray machine. He was carrying the cash in connection with his duties as the Director of Development for the Campaign for Liberty, a political organization that grew out of Congressman Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.

We wrote about the case on Thursday. The CNN segment further underscores the TSA "mission creep" – using post-9/11 heightened security measures as an excuse to exceed their search authority – to which Steve was subjected. Watch it here:

Full post as published by Blog of Rights on June 22, 2009 (boomark / email).