The Transportation Security Administration has taken quite a beating in the news cycle so far this year. In late April, screeners were caught taking bribes to allow drugs to pass through Los Angeles International Airport. Recently, a 4-year-old was detained, yelled at, patted down and otherwise terrorized for hugging her grandmother, who hadn’t completed screening yet.

In April, the TSA made us safer by terrorizing a 7-year-old with cerebral palsy. CBS DC reported that Dina Frank cannot use metal detectors because she walks with crutches and leg braces. The thorough pat-down of the 7-year-old caused the family to miss their flight.

No doubt such incidents will prompt people to call for the TSA to be streamlined, for the administration to adopt “new procedures” or for other Band-Aids that will create the illusion of decisive action.

This is insufficient. The TSA should not be streamlined. Administrators should not “review screening procedures.” Screeners don’t need additional training. The TSA doesn’t need to be tweaked. It didn’t “go too far” in these specific instances. Its very existence goes too far. The TSA never should have been created in the first place, and it should be abolished now. Immediately. Without hesitation.

The TSA’s existence is an assault on American liberty and simple human dignity, as anyone who has had his or her genitals touched during an “enhanced pat-down” can tell you. Some still say we should be willing to trade off a little bit of liberty in order to get security, but this is a false trade-off. The TSA does not provide security. It provides what security expert Bruce Schneier calls “security theater.” The TSA only exists in order to give people the illusion of safety. Someone in an airport somewhere in the U.S. is being subjected to an unreasonable search by a gloved TSA screener right this minute. The cruel irony is that he or she is being stripped of liberty and dignity and is being made no safer for it.

As security experts John Mueller and Mark Stewart have estimated, the entire Homeland Security Department infrastructure fails on cost-benefit grounds. In order to justify the costs, Homeland Security would have to stop about four and a half attacks on the scale of the failed 2010 Times Square bombing every day.

On my last flight out of Memphis, Tenn., I noticed TSA “Customer Service” comment cards available after I got through the screening. After opting out of the scan and getting the Champagne Room Treatment from a gloved gentleman who saw no problem with being paid to touch me in ways that would have gotten him arrested for sexual assault in virtually any other context, I decided to fill one out.

I wrote the following:

• “I am not your ‘customer.’
  
  
• “What you’re doing isn’t ‘service.’
  
  
• “‘Subject’ is a more appropriate term than ‘customer.’ I am a “customer” of the airlines I fly. The TSA stands between me and the airline with a credible threat that they will not let us conduct business unless I go through a ludicrous song-and-dance routine that involves partially disrobing and then either being subjected to nude imaging or a full-on groping that involves hand-to-genital contact.
  
  
• I can think of a lot of words to describe the whole experience. ‘Service’ isn’t one of them.

I have two small children, and a third on the way. Fortunately, in the times we’ve flown with them, the worst thing we’ve dealt with is a few seconds in which my son was unsure what was going on when his teddy bear had to go through the X-ray machine. I hate to think about the nightmare some parents have gone through with how their kids have been treated by TSA screeners.

The TSA embodies a resource-wasting assault on liberty. The kicker is that it makes us no safer, so we aren’t even getting the extra security that supposedly justifies the indignities the TSA inflicts upon us. No review of TSA procedures will make a meaningful difference, nor will firings. The TSA never should have existed in the first place. It’s past time for it to be abolished.

Art Carden Send email Art Carden is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and Associate Professor of Economics and Business at Rhodes College. Full Biography and Recent Publications

We carry our lives on digital devices. For most of us, the information they contain is perfectly innocent. But digital forensics as it’s practiced today can make innocent information look incriminating. That means we may be putting innocent people in jail and letting criminals off.

While other forensic science disciplines have come under harsh scrutiny lately, the problems with digital forensics have not received enough attention.

A 2009 study by the National Academy of Sciences sounded the alarm on faulty forensics. The report said most methods of analysis have not been “rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.” The report challenged the reliability of ballistics (“toolmark and firearms identification”), bite mark comparisons, blood spatter analysis, handwriting analysis and even fingerprint examination. The report said little about digital forensics, however, because it is still an “emerging” discipline.

It’s time for a critical look.

There is solid science behind much of digital forensics. We know, for example, that computer hard drives must be copied without altering the contents of the disk. Best practices in digital forensics also are solid. But digital forensic analysts don’t always follow best practice.

Consider some of the following examples, which we have witnessed in Connecticut and nearby jurisdictions.

A police officer “expert” found images from “unallocated space,” the part of a hard drive the computer isn’t using, which may contain deleted files. The officer asserted in an examination report that images retrieved from unallocated space were downloaded by the defendant and deleted.

But such an assertion is not supported by fact. Data can get into unallocated space on a hard drive in a number of ways. In this case, the only appearance of the data was in unallocated space. There was no basis for the examiner to assert that the images had ever been “files” that were subsequently “deleted.”

Here’s another example: A computer’s operating system creates hundreds of copies of the same images, which are called “restore points.” A police officer “expert” recently recovered restore points on a defendant’s hard drive that contained the same two child-porn pictures. The officer duplicated the pictures so many times that he recommended charging the defendant with possession of more than 600 images, nearly all of them the same.

Another police officer “expert” violated a court order when he searched for privileged attorney-client documents on a defendant’s computer, and then handed them over to the prosecutor.

Examination reports often include conclusions from examiners that items were “intentionally downloaded” by the defendant. But it is impossible to arrive at such a conclusion without being present when the defendant actually downloaded the material, or without a videotape of the event.

Poor training is a big part of the problem. Thousands of police officers have been trained to perform digital forensics under federal grant programs. But these police officer examiners are not required to possess any special training or education beyond a minimum level. The 40 hours or so of training they receive in the forensic software they use is typically the extent of their computer science background prior to their first case assignment.

Despite the minimal training of many digital forensics examiners, their findings are often unquestioningly accepted as fact.

Digital evidence can be compelling and it is often unambiguous. In too many cases, however, digital forensics experts make assertions about a defendant’s actions that are not supported by fact. Such errors create the risk of false conviction of the innocent and a free pass for the guilty.

We need higher standards and more professionalism in digital forensics. And we need to give digital forensics the sort of close scrutiny that all the other forensic science disciplines have been getting in recent years.