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Introduction
In 2011, the most recent year in which air travel statistics are available from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the number of times an airplane was boarded at any United States airport was 725,262,193.1 On average, the yearly enplanement since 2000 has been approximately 707 million, with significant declines only in 2001 (-6.9 per cent) and 2009 (-5.2 per cent). This amounts to a large number of people who use airports each day. Even if we assume a proportion of these enplanements are the same people, millions of people each year are screened and searched by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers.2 These numbers do not include the hundreds of thousands of employees and contractors who are not traveling, but who may also be searched.
Compared with the number of contacts between citizens and local law enforcement in the United States, these numbers seem staggering. For example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates in 2008 approximately 17 per cent of the population (or approximately 51 million people) in the United States reported having some kind of encounter with a law enforcement official (Eith and Durose, 2011).3 However, many of these encounters do not involve a search of persons or property. We do know for certain that at least 13 million arrests took place in the United States in 2010, which would definitely result in a searchable encounter (US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2011). But both arrests and other encounters with the police are qualitatively different than airport security. Unlike police who stop and search some individuals for selective reasons usually due to suspicion, all traveling passengers (and many airport and airline employees and contractors) are screened by airport security, no matter how much or how little suspicion they generate. Searches by police may be more invasive compared with airport searches. In airport searches, the vast majority of people are never physically touched, and technology does most of the searching. Further, a much greater proportion of individuals who come in contact with the police are arrested or given a citation or warning compared with airport searches. Only a very tiny fraction of individuals at airports are ever arrested, detained or further questioned.
While there are differences in the nature and...