Until recently, the TSA has been a domestic legal Guantanamo, and the
TSA has treated their domain of “checkpoints” and travel control and
surveillance as a law-free zone where their powers of search, seizure,
detention, and denial of passage were unconstrained by the
Constitution, human rights treaties,
judicial review, or stautory or regulatory standards. As indeed it has
been: Congress has enacted no law specifically defining any limits on
the authority of TSA agents at checkpoints (or elsewhere), and the TSA
itself has never conducted any rulemaking or issued any
publicly-disclosed regulations defining its authority, its limits, what
orders travellers do or don’t have to comply with, and which forms of
“noncooperation” are considered grounds for which sanctions
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