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The Identity Project

Monthly Archives: March 2025

Mar 31 2025

Senators propose to abolish the TSA

[Excerpt from the Abolish TSA Act of 2025]

Late last week Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) announced that they are introducing the Abolish TSA Act in Congress.

If enacted, the Abolish TSA Act would abolish the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in its entirely. Within three years of enactment of this bill, responsibility for securing airline flights, and for the cost of doing so, would be returned to the airlines and whatever private contractors they might hire. Responsibility for oversight over aviation security would be returned to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as was the case before the creation of the TSA in 2002.

It should go without saying that if the new Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is targeting wasteful programs and agencies, the TSA and its security theater should be near the top of the list. DOGE doesn’t have the authority to abolish the TSA, but Congress does.

In and of itself, privatizing aviation security won’t necessarily do anything to improve protection for travelers’ rights. As part of a largely stalled pilot program in privatization of searches of airline passengers, checkpoints at San Francisco International Airport and a few other smaller airports have been operated by private contractors almost since the creation of the TSA. The private contractors at SFO are trained to carry out the same searches of travelers as TSA agents at other airports, with the same intrusiveness.

Although we are unaware of any court ruling on the authority of TSA contractors at SFO or  other airports, the TSA appears to think that these contractors have both police powers and the same “qualified immunity” that the agency has claimed for its own staff.

The Abolish TSA Act wouldn’t just privatize airline security, though. It would also provide, as part of  the ground rules for a three-year transition plan for privatization, that:

The plan may not include… any agency requirement or regulation compelling private contractors conducting airport security screening services to conduct warrantless searches and seizures.

The main activity of the TSA is, of course, conducting warrantless searches. So this clause of the Abolish TSA Act would imply a major change in practices at airports.

We’d prefer that the word “compelling” in this sentence of the bill be replaced with “authorizing”. As introduced, the Abolish TSA Act might leave wiggle room for airlines or their contractors to claim that, even if they aren’t compelled by the government to perform warrantless searches as though they were police, they are still authorized to do so.

At a minimum, though, prohibiting the Federal government from compelling airlines to subject their passengers to warrantless searches would allow airlines to choose not to do so, deprive them of the defense that “the government made me do it”, and remove any basis for a claim of police-like qualified immunity against charges of battery or false arrest.

As of this writing, the Abolish TSA Act has not yet been docketed. We’ll update this article when the bill is assigned a number.

Mar 17 2025

FinCen demands reporting of cash transactions over $200

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the US Department of the Treasury has ordered all money transfer agencies and currency exchanges in seven counties in California and Texas along the US-Mexico border to file reports with FinCEN including the identities of the customers engaging in all cash transactions over $200.

Implicit in this order is that would-be customers who are unable or unwilling to provide sufficient evidence of their identity (and to allow that information and the details of their transaction to be passed on to FinCEN) will be denied these financial services.

The Geographic Targeting Order published by FinCEN in the Federal Register last Friday is effective for transactions with financial services businesses in those counties from April 14, 2025, through September 9, 2025. The Bank Secrecy Act, which authorizes such orders, limits them to 180 days but allows them to be renewed an unlimited number of times.

The misleadingly-named Bank Secrecy Act is already subject to abuse as an enabler and pretext for financial surveillance, and already requires reporting of cash transactions of $10,000 or more. But so far as we’ve been able to determine, this order lowering the reporting threshhold to $200 is, even for a geographically limited area, unprecedented.

Other Geographic Targeting Orders have been issued, but typically with much higher threshholds — real estate transactions over $50,000 in Baltimore, for example. Why Baltimore, with a lower threshhold than anywhere else in the US? FinCEN didn’t say.

The new order goes against growing bipartisan calls in Congress to repeal the Bank Secrecy Act or at least raise the threshhold amounts for for customer identification and transaction reporting.

Nothing in the order gives any real justification for its geographic boundaries.  More than a million people live in the area covered by the order, but it will actually affect a much larger number of people. Many travellers stop at “Casas de Cambio” on their way to and from border crossings in these counties to exchange cash dollars for pesos and pesos for dollars.

It’s unclear whether the goal of the order is primarily harassment or surveillance. The costs of completing the extra paperwork will undoubtedly drive up currency exchange and remittance fees and waste time for financial service businesses and their customers.

Mar 12 2025

State Department puts “X” passport applicants in limbo

The US State Department is withholding passports from some US citizens, effectively denying them the ability to leave or return to the US, without any basis in law or regulations.

Multiple news outlets have reported that the State Department has ordered its staff in the US and abroad to “suspend” processing of all pending applications for new or renewal US passports or passport cards with an “X” gender marker.

A new page of the State Department’s website suggests that each of these passport applicants will (eventually) be notified that their application has been “suspended” and will remain “suspended” (i.e. that they won’t be issued a passport) unless and until they provide “certain documents and records to help us establish your biological sex”.

Read More →

Mar 03 2025

Treasury Department says it won’t enforce ID requirement for corporate principals

The US Department of the Treasury has announced that it plans not to enforce the provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) that were to go into effect next month requiring owners and principals of all corporations to file copies of government-issued ID credentials, including photos, with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The Treasury Department also says it plans to propose revisions to the CTA regulations that would limit the ID-filing requirement to principals of “foreign reporting companies”, a term that doesn’t appear in the statute and isn’t defined in the announcement.

We don’t want the government to try to enforce the CTA reporting requirement. But if the law isn’t going to be enforced, it should be repealed, not left on the books as a Sword of Damocles available to prosecutors to threaten or persecute disfavored businesspeople. And the proposed regulations, redefining which entities must file CTA reports, would appear to be contrary to the explicit language of the CTA statute as to who must file.

Press releases like this one form the Treasury Department aren’t binding on Federal prosecutors, even now, much less in the future. Regardless of this announcement, nobody subject to the CTA is safe from prosecution if they don’t file the reports required by the law.

There are few legal constraints on prosecutorial discretion. Many laws — including those that impose reporting and filing requirements — are routinely ignored and unenforced. Police and prosecutors, especially those with malign intentions, love to have laws like this on the books that everybody violates. That allows anyone to be prosecuted at any time, with the government claiming truthfully that it is merely “enforcing the law”. Only in rare cases is the government required to explain the real reasons why some people are prosecuted while others who are known to have violated the same laws are not.

To word it a little differently, the combination of unlimited prosecutorial discretion and universally violated laws is central to the phenomena of pretextual police action and pretextual prosecution. An essential part of the solution is the repeal of unenforced laws.

We welcome, in the short term, the nonenforcement of CTA reporting rules. And we urge Congress to address the problem, promptly, by repealing the CTA in its entirety.