Articles by Tim Lee

What Tom said:

The Registered Traveler program, you might recall, is a fairly new initiative by which air passengers can pass through expedited security lines by paying a $100-ish yearly fee to one of several private firms that then run regular background checks. If enroll you pass through faster lines, and eventually you may be allowed to do things like keep your shoes on or your laptop in your bag. It’s meant for frequent travelers, and we, the public, are assured that the fees will provide additional lines and personnel — there should be no effect on those who don’t enroll.

This was not our experience. The young woman brought by the TSA employee was allowed to cut in front of us, and was then personally led through the security process like a blind baby kitten. That was irritating, but not a particularly large inconvenience — like I said, the lines weren’t long. But there also wasn’t much of a point to plopping that lady’s patrician ass in front of us and escorting her through — it probably made her feel special, and us less so, but nobody was saved or cost any meaningful amount of time. Still, if this is the system they use during busy periods, it really is going to make air travel worse for everyone who doesn’t pony up $100/year to gain entry into the program.

Now of course there’s nothing wrong with charging more for better service. But I think there’s at least a little something wrong when that service is a government-mandated barrier to travel, and more so when it’s one powered by secret lists and standards about which appeal is nearly or completely impossible. It also seems like a bad idea to give richer — and therefore more influential — passengers a way out of a system that, without some sort of opposing pressure, will inevitably become more and more irritating and inhumane as bureaucrats try to save their jobs by figuring out up ways to prevent plots that no one can anticipate.

It has crossed my mind that the liquid ban probably improves sales at concession stands inside the security perimeter. I’m not quite cynical enough to think that there’s a concessionaire’s lobby that pushed for the liquid ban, although I wouldn’t be shocked to learn some vendors are subtly encouraging TSA not to lift the ban.

But it’s much easier to imagine how a program like RT could be corrupted. The value of RT flows directly from the inconvenience imposed on non-customers, and revenue from the RT program apparently helps hire more TSA agents. So the net effect is to give the TSA both a vested interest in making the inspection process more obnoxious and a cluster of private interests with the same incentives. If the revenues become significant, it’s not hard to imagine a revolving door between mid-level TSA officials and the private company who administer these programs.

And the point about opting out is the most important one, in my view. Our only hope of someday having a sane airport security system is that the system inconveniences a significant number of wealthy, well-connect people. If those wealthy, well connected people are allowed to buy their way out of the system, it will be that much harder to fix things.

Of course, the really rich and influential people are flying on private jets, and not surprisingly, they’ve already arranged to bypass airport security entirely. So we may already be out of luck.

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I haven’t had time to read it yet, but Princeton’s IT Policy Center has a new paper out about open file formats and government transparency that’s worth checking out:

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

In the current Presidential cycle, all three candidates have indicated that their think the federal government could make better use of the Internet. Barack Obama’s platform explicitly endorses “making government data available online in universally accessible formats.” Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, remarked that she wants to see much more government information online. John McCain, although expressing excitement about the Internet, has allowed that he would like to delegate the issue, possible to a vice-president.

But the situation to which these candidates are responding — the wide gap between the exciting uses of Internet technology by private parties, on the one hand, and the government’s lagging technical infrastructure on the other — is not new. The federal government has shown itself consistently unable to keep pace with the fast-evolving power of the Internet.

In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

The paper cites our own Jerry Brito, who has done some great work in the same vein, in several places.

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