“But what’s your alternative?” That’s the cry I hear from defenders of TSA’s body snatching program. Don’t you want to be safe?
At what cost?
It’s time to re-think our strategy for stopping terrorists. Searching innocent people as if they were criminals is obviously not the answer. So what is?
I’m a little alarmed that supposed liberals and progressives would so easily give up their rights. I actually heard someone say that it’s only one or two percent that are being taken aside and subjected to intrusive searches, as if this made it okay. It’s hard to believe people on the left would defend body snatching at airports—random groping and nude scans. What’s with you folks? Are you people or sheeple? If Bush had tried this three years ago, I’m certain there would have been armed rebellion. And, not from the militias.
I’m sick of hearing that we have to keep giving away our freedoms for security. I’m not that insecure to begin with. It’s particularly irritating to hear people like John Gage, President of the TSA Union, opine we have to give up our freedoms because no one has any alternatives:
I hear this strong criticism but very weak alternatives.
(MSNBC’s The Last Word, 24 November 2010.)
I’ll give you strong alternatives, John. That’s the easy part. It’s just that none of them get through to the TSA because it’s deficient in creative thought. Instead, we’re fed a steady diet of wieners by the security-industrial establishment. We get a high-calorie diet with no nutritive value. Well, I’m going to touch their junk food right here. Hold your nose and let’s take a look at airline security.
What are we trying to accomplish? What are we really afraid of?
We are not afraid of people hijacking planes. A hijacked plane, by itself, is not a national security threat. It only becomes a national security problem when that plane can be turned into a guided missile and used to attack military or strategic targets, as we saw on 9/11. In this sense, the problem isn’t the terrorists or hijackers, it’s the plane. If we want to eliminate this threat, then we should fix the problem of planes being flow into targets, not just shake down all passengers on board.
To do that, we need remote override and control. We need to be able to take control from the ground and fly each airliner to a secure location if that plane deviates from its flight plan or the pilot cannot be contacted. The plane should simply be flown to a place where it can be surrounded and taken over by ground troops.
This eliminates the national security threat of planes being used as bombs, and any system for doing this would be vastly cheaper than the current system of scanning people and violating their civil rights. We spend about $5 billion a year on “airline security”. For $4 billion I guarantee you I could put in place a system that would ground any large plane that went astray, and have money left over. (I don’t think I’m giving away any state secrets to say that I’d start by taking the systems used for pilotless drones and adapting them.)
Should we also deal with hijackings? If we can ground a plane at will then that alone would act as a deterrent. But that doesn’t mean we want to allow people to carry guns and possibly bombs on board airliners. Nevertheless, the kind of searches and other deterrents we had before 9/11 were generally successful in reducing hijackings in this country to a very low level. To a certain extent, they were infrequent enough that Al Qaida could count on us being rather lackadaisical about them in making their plans.
I would just make these searches legal by getting a constitutional amendment passed that cleans up the terms. We should be clear that we will scan for bombs and other weapons using a non-invasive procedure in those situations that pose a threat to a large number of people. The beauty of the amendment process is that it clarifies the purpose and the means. As it is, there is no defined purpose for airport security. (Is it to prevent hijacking? Is it to keep the passengers safe? Is it to look for drugs? Is it to intimidate the public?) There is no limit to the means. (Is it okay to touch the genitals through the clothing? Is it okay if you use the front of your hand? How hard can you press? Can you randomly conduct body cavity searches?) The current system violates many constitutional provisions. We should make a very narrowly-defined exception consistent with our real security needs, and write it into the Constitution. There’s no excuse for delay. This is not a problem that is going to go away overnight.
Of course, technology marches on and bombers have much more sophisticated options now than they did before 9/11. But once we get the legality straightened out, there are far better options than body snatching. For example, the Germans are developing scanners that don’t use X-rays and don’t produce naked body pictures. (See below.)
And anyway, many of things hijackers would try are prohibitively expensive or prohibitively difficult for someone without state backing. One thing we have to be on the lookout for is that connection with a foreign government or other organization that would do us harm.
We also have to create a zone of freedom, like the one we had before everyone threw up their hands and said we’d have to live in tyranny because we can’t trust anyone. I doubt we’ll ever go back to the days when I took my first air trip, which involved nothing more than buying a ticket and taking my seat. But, shouldn’t citizens of the free world be able to travel without being frisked?
To get there, we must acknowledge that there is a real difference between passengers originating in the U.S. and those originating on flights from remote parts of the world. This difference isn’t the people; it’s the location of their origin. As they move from areas without stable and effective governments they need to pass through effective security that looks for dangerous items. But people that are flying from, say, New York to Washington do not need to be examined so closely.
I want to draw a sharp line between the “secured” world and the “lawless” world. What I mean by the secured world is the set of countries where the central government has complete control of its territory and can generally go and find a criminal within that territory if it wants. Further, that to be part of the secured world, that government is also willing to extradite dangerous criminals to other countries if there’s evidence that they have committed a serious crime there.
Let’s look at some examples. There’s pre-invasion Iraq. Before the U.S. invasion, Iraq was capable within some reasonable variance to find and apprehend a terrorist within their borders. They might have even been good at it. The problem was that they were not willing to extradite that terrorist to another country. In that sense, they were not part of the “secured world”.
Today, the situation is largely reversed. Their government is probably more than willing to turn over purported terrorists, but they probably don’t have the ability to catch them in many parts of the country.
There’s pre-invasion Afghanistan. Before the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan was not even capable of apprehending a terrorist with any degree of certainty, let alone being willing to hand them over to another government for prosecution. They were not a part of the integrated core, and they still aren’t, even with NATO there.
I guess, don’t ask me about the United States, which does not appear to be willing to extradite known terrorists to other countries. I’m not sure what the new normal is. Prior to 9/11, I would have sworn that we’d send any international war criminal to The Hague for trial, but today I’m not so sure. But, since we are talking about security at U.S. airports, let’s leave that aside.
The “secured world” distinction is important because we need to evaluate whether harm done by someone can be redressed. In our society, we have the principle that people are generally unrestrained but with the understanding that if they do harm they will be caught and punished. We use this threat of (pretty) certain punishment as a deterrent. The deterrent value breaks down to the degree that the culprit can escape punishment, which is proportional to whether they are in the secured world or not. If they are in the secured world—that part where a government has control of whatever territory they might be in and is therefore able to apprehend them, and is also willing to turn them over to a competent authority for trial—then we have a presumption of innocence and we generally give them freedom to do what they want.
In terms of air travel, this generally means that we are not going to take any extreme measure to try to prevent them from doing harm to the people on their flight because they aren’t likely to. We know that they will most likely be apprehended if they do and will suffer the consequences. We can therefore reduce the amount of scrutiny accordingly. We have a much freer society as a result. We do not have to give up many liberties to travel, since we are using the deterrent effect of catching and punishing criminals rather than using a kind of tyranny to ensure safety. If we don’t have to worry about the plane being turned into a weapon of mass destruction (because we can safely ground it at will), then we don’t need to have any excessive amount of airport security. We get our freedom back, and as a bonus it costs a lot less.
Flights originating within the secured world should be treated differently than fights coming from other parts of the world. If a flight originates outside the fire wall, then its passengers should be treated with a good deal more care than one from inside the wall. We should carefully examine any objects coming along with those passengers or cargo coming in on those flights.
But what of people here that are taking their orders from there? Can we depend on the deterrent effect of catch-and-punish if people already inside the security perimeter can be influenced from those outside? I think we can for airline travel if we take away the means for them to carry out irreparable harm.
In any case, at some point we have to look beyond the static defenses of searching people when they travel. There’s a reason there are many prohibitions in the Constitution against violating individuals’ rights. Those protections are what allow us to live in a free society. We should not give them up easily.
This is where we have to depend on intelligence work. We actually have a huge and expensive intelligence apparatus in place. Perhaps that’s as it should be. This is a much more intelligent place to put our money than into trying to perfect security at our airports.
Still, no matter how many people we put on it, we will never be able to prevent all attacks. That’s no worse than what we have now in TSA. We were searching travelers on 9/11, but it didn’t prevent almost 20 men from boarding planes and hijacking four of them. There is no scenario in which searching airline passengers can prevent all attacks. No matter how much money we were to spend nor how intrusive the searches, there will always be ways to hijack an aircraft. The end result of our current policy is the destruction of civil rights, not the prevention of terror.
What we need to do is stake out a territory of freedom, the secured world, and defend it. We should attempt to expand that world until we bring freedom everywhere. Within that world, we should insist on our freedom, but also demand that sensible action be taken to end the threat of using planes as bombs. This is not an unreasonable demand, and it is a patriotic one.
More on Scanners
One of the other “alternatives”:
Researchers from the Institute of Photonic Technology in Jena are developing a camera that performs the screening passively by tracing the shadows of suspicious objects on a person’s terahertz radiation, which the human body emits naturally in the form of heat. This eliminates the exposure to radiation and the naked appearance of the recorded images.
(“Germany Inspires Innovation”, printed in Scientific American, December 2010.)
There are many good alternatives. The primary reason we don’t have them is because the people in power are not sufficiently motivated to protect our freedoms. Only the American people can demand that. Perhaps the new TSA body snatching program will finally get enough of them to squeal when they’re touched, and we’ll see some of those alternatives.
Update:
Be sure to check out Had enough? TSA gropes menstruating women by Cartoon Peril. It will make your hair stand on end, if it's long enough.