TSA issues new warning for airport travelers

With the busy summer travel season underway, the Transportation Security Administration is warning globetrotters about the dangers of using USB chargers at airports.

According to a Facebook post from TSA, travelers should avoid charging devices via USB ports that are commonplace at airports because of potential malware the ports may contain.

According to TSA’s advisory : “Hackers can install malware at USB ports.” “Bring your TSA-compliant power brick or battery pack and plug in there,” the advisory says.

The same advisory contains a warning from the agency about free public WiFi available at airports. Here too, the concern is hackers can access your personal information .

The TSA Facebook post states: “Don’t use free public WiFi, especially if you’re planning to make any online purchases.”

The post goes on to warn “Do not ever enter any sensitive info while using unsecure WiFi.”

Meanwhile, privacy experts have issued warnings of their own. Travis LeBlanc, a lawyer and former member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, told the Mirror travelers would be wise to opt out of the facial recognition the TSA has begun using at security checkpoints over the past year or more.

“You don’t have to submit your picture to the government for the government to scan it and store it under their rules,” LeBlanc, the Mirror reported.

Separately, privacy and data policy expert Jennifer King told the publication: “I’m sure that the dream of enforcement agencies would be to be able to track people in real time based on something like facial recognition.” However, according to King, TSA has been “a little vague” about what they plan to do with the photo data now being collected.

TSA meanwhile, has said that any data collected is not used for surveillance. Additionally, the data is not stored.

A TSA agent previously told the HuffPost: “Photos are not stored or saved after a positive ID match has been made, except in a limited testing environment for evaluation of the technology’s effectiveness. A real-time picture simply means that an image is taken at the kiosk and that ‘live’ photograph is matched against the image on the identification credential.”