BarlowFriendz: A Taste of the System

John Barlow writes about his arrest after a Burning Man event. His case is important both because of the ever-broadening search procedures at airports that are including drugs and contraband and not just explosives (and are abhorrent to the 4th amendment). It's also interesting in its details about the change cell phones have made in being imprisoned. With jail phones only allowing local calls and collect calls, anyone arrested outside of their local stomping grounds is incommunicado if their friends and family have transitioned from land lines to cell phones.

BarlowFriendz: A Taste of the System
Finding rescue was tricky. The "phone" in my cell could only make local or collect calls. I didn't know anyone in Redwood City and cell phones won't accept collect calls. Furthermore, they'd taken my address book and my cell phone and calls to directory information were not permitted. I was left with the few land line numbers I still keep in my head.
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Eventually, I was able to get through to my daughter Leah, who called John Gilmore on my behalf. John is one of the co-founders of EFF and is, in addition, the peskiest and most obdurate defender of the Constitution I know. Accompanied by journalist Ann Harrison, John came down and went my bail in cash, though that transaction very nearly turned south when he would not produce a government-issued ID for the deputy at the desk. As a matter of characteristically flinty principle, he doesn't carry one. In fact, there is no legal requirement that someone posting bail identify himself. Eventually, the deputy grudgingly accepted John's cash while letting him keep his official anonymity, noting in his log that the bail was posted by an unknown person and therefore constituted suspicious activity. Weird is bad.
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We then set about to mount what appears to be the first serious contest of TSA's routinely over-broad searches of checked bags. ...
Fortunately, precedent appears to be on my side. The controlling Ninth Circuit case in such matters is US v. Davis (482 F.2d 893) which authorizes warrantless airport searches only for the purpose of detecting weapons and explosives.

There is a lot at stake here. Although, as I say, the 4th Amendment is in rough shape, it remains quite clear in its prohibition of "general warrants," which are searches of unspecified members of the public for evidence of random illegal activity. But, whether by design or "mission drift," this is what TSA's checked baggage searches increasingly resemble. They're not just looking for explosives, folks.
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In general, the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have been extremely unresponsive and have instructed Covenant Security to stonewall us as well. We have asked them whether they knew who I was when they searched my bag and whether my identity had any bearing on the exquisite granularity of their search methods. They've refused to answer on grounds of national security. We have asked them for the training manuals and search guidelines under which Covenant Security was operating. No dice. We asked whether their x-ray machines were tuned to identify drugs as well as explosives, a technical capacity some of these units possess. Sorry. That would be SSI (or Sensitive Security Information.) We have inquired whether Covenant Security had any incentive program which rewarded its employees for discovering evidence of illegal activity. Again, preserving the safety of all Americans prohibits a response. At one point, they were even insisting that it would be threat to national security if the Covenant Security employee who allegedly discovered the purported contraband were called upon to testify, thereby abrogating my constitutional right to confront my accuser, but they seem to have relented on this point.
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