This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 6, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We now know the Transportation Security Administration plans to reject licenses from several states for the purposes of air travel and opting out of a naked

body scan at the airport will soon be more difficult.

Jim Harper, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses some of the law and politics of the TSA's gifts

to holiday travelers.

Two odd pieces of news came out over the Christmas holiday and I wonder why the agency either decided to have this information come out or I

understand why a news agency would want to put it out around that

a new screening under screening for airline passengers TSA will now

apparently require that some people go through a full body scanner

even if they opt out some people and then the TSA may be

rejecting driver's licenses as acceptable forms of ID for travel in sometime in the future because they're not in compliance with real ID.

Thematically these two news stories tie together as an agency that does pretty much whatever it wants despite what the loss is.

The first item you mentioned is that TSA awarded itself the authority to require people to go through the strip search

machines mandatorily. Up to this point it's been an option you can refuse and

people like me do refuse it. I've never been

through one of those machines but they announced right ahead of the Christmas

holiday that they now have the power to make it mandatory. Are they doing that

yet? We haven't seen it.

Has it come to the point where they've refused someone travel because they won't

go through that machine? We haven't seen it. But it's interesting because the

TSA is currently under a court order to finalize the regulation by which it made those machines primary screening devices in the first place.

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