Nearly a year after it went into effect, the Transportation Security Administration’s ban on liquids and gels in containers larger than three ounces on aircraft remains in place, and TSA head Kip Hawley said it could be at least another year before the restrictions are relaxed. The government is taking that long to get explosives detection devices which can screen liquids. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) has ordered an investigation into what’s taking so long.

The National Transportation Safety Board has released its report on the July 11, 2006, accident in Boston’s Big Dig tunnel in which a falling section of concrete ceiling killed one person and injured another. The NTSB found that the epoxy used in the ceiling wasn’t resistant to creep. The epoxy deformed and fractured over time, which allowed the support anchors to pull free. Turnpike authority head Matthew Amorello still hasn’t been charged with negligent homicide for his role in the $14 billion boondoggle.

Hurricane Katrina was an even worse disaster, striking New Orleans, La., on August 29, 2005, and overflowing the levees which helped to keep storm surge out of the city. As it turns out, when the levees were built, the Army Corps of Engineers didn’t want to build them in the first place, preferring floodgates on Lake Pontchartrain which they had said would be more effective, but Congress ordered them to build the walls after a so-called environmental group filed a lawsuit to stop the floodgates from being built. The Corps cut corners in their construction, not because they wanted to build shoddy levees, but because the government didn’t give them enough money.

In a bizarre public-private partnership, New York City is moving ahead with a $90 million plan to place over 3,000 surveillance cameras in downtown Manhattan, most privately owned, to monitor virtually everything they can record that happens on the streets, a plan they modeled in part on London’s so-called Ring of Steel. Officials say that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from being constantly monitored.

But George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove says that law-abiding citizens do need to fear. The nothing to hide argument and its variants, Solove says in his new essay, are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In “‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy,” Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.