Want to Talk to TSA? They're Listening

The Transportation Security Agency has come under significant and ongoing criticism. One major source of concern and irritation are the No-Fly lists, which contain tens of thousands of names and has generated a lot of negative press when U.S. senators, famous musicians and others have been kept off of flights. There are even those who say that TSA is largely engaged in "security theater," meant primarily to psychologically reassure travelers while doing little to actually improve the security of goods and travelers. Luckily, the criticism has not kept TSA from starting a blog, called Evolution of Security. The rather amazing thing — it's open for comments.

Evolution of Security is described as "sponsored by the Transportation Security Administration to facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process." The blog team includes five TSA workers, but none appear to be senior leadership. The "Welcome" post is a message from TSA Administrator Kip Hawley, and includes the following:

Our ambition is to provide here a forum for a lively, open discussion of TSA issues. While I and senior leadership of TSA will participate in the discussion, we are turning the keyboard over to several hosts who represent what's best about TSA (its people). Our hosts aren't responsible for TSA's policies, nor will they have to defend them — their job is to engage with you straight-up and take it from there. Our hosts will have access to senior leadership but will have very few editorial constraints. Our postings from the public will be reviewed to remove the destructive but not touch the critical or cranky.

There is also a comment policy, alerting readers/potential commenters that comments are moderated and that blog should not be used to report criminal activity, start or follow up on official inquiries or address questions by the media.

BoingBoing notes that the welcome post received 270 messages. Both BoingBoing and Daniel Terdiman of Geek Gestalt have remarked on the number and vehemence of critical comments already posted. Is the blog merely an attempt by the most hated government agency to generate some good PR, or will it really be a dialogue on the efforts to keep travel secure while balancing the privacy, speech and autonomy rights of travelers? It's far too early to say ... but it's not too late to have YOUR say, directly to TSA.