Sliver by sliver, the Fourth Amendment is whittled down on a pretextual basis. The direction of movement is toward a new principle: that this Amendment does not apply when traveling by common carrier of any kind.
This morning WTOP reports that police in the Washington D.C., area will now make random searches of both Metro subway and bus passengers' bags. Officials admit:
there is no specific or credible threat to the system
What prompted subjecting thousands of bus and subway passengers over this wide area to random searches (in addition to the pre-establishment of "successful" search programs in New York and Boston)?
A bomb plot targeting the Metro system that became news in October.
Funny thing, though: the instigator of the plot to bomb the Washington Metro was the FBI.
The FBI knew in January that the...man busted for plotting to bomb the Washington subways was telling people he wanted to give his life to kill Americans overseas. So they set up an elaborate plot to snare Farooque Ahmed...Posing as al Qaeda terrorists...the FBI... offered him a chance to help gather information for a spectacular subway attack.
WTOP explains:
Metro's Board of Directors has been very hesitant to allow the bag search program to go forward in the past...After the terror threat was exposed, Metro Police Chief Michael Taborn told WTOP he was going to push hard for the program to be implemented.
Therefore:
[Washington, D.C. area] Metro Transit Police will randomly identify carry-on items for inspection at station entrances," Metro says in a statement...Police will randomly select bags or packages to check for hazardous materials using special technology as well as K-9 units...Metro bus riders are also fair game.
At least Washingtonians don't have to strip naked to get on the bus, so they should be grateful, eh? (Gosh, that would be a chilly experience today.)
And anyway, if Boston and New York have been putting up with something similar, it must be all right.
Besides, we should be glad to cooperate with anything at all that purports to make us safer. Shouldn't we?
But does it make us safer?
Random checks make sense in a production situation where checking, say, every 100th item produced allows a manufacturer to discover quickly if a process is straying from benchmarks.
But rare and isolated events are extraordinarily unlikely to be detected by random searches.
Example: Suppose 1,000,000 people travel by the bus and subway on any given day, and on any given day 1 of them is there to commit a terrorist act. (Obviously the number of persons taking Metro in order to commit terrorism is usually zero, but just for the sake of illustration!) Now suppose police conduct 1,000 random searches among the 1,000,000 passengers -- searching one passenger in 1,000. There is only a 0.1% chance that they will identify the lone terrorist. The odds are 99.9% that police will harrass 1,000 innocent travelers and completely miss the one dangerous character in the crowd. Search one passenger in 100, and the chance of actually catching the terrorist is still only 1%.
Random searches can, however, help condition a population to being searched for no probable cause. They may catch evidence of other activity, e.g., carrying drugs. And random searches may be, in some people's eyes, good PR.
...this inspection program...and adds another type of visible protection on our system," says interim Metro General Manager Richard Sarles.
So if it doesn't actually make us safer, it may make some people feel safer. How nice for them.
I cannot helping noticing that we as a nation have thrown exceedingly large sums of money at security and law enforcement in recent years, and perhaps some people simply do not have enough meaningful work to do.
Budgets should be secure in the future, though, as someone is sure to come up with a new plot device that will require naked scanning machines at every bus stop for 50 miles around the city.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin again, ad nauseam it seems these days: "Those who give up essential liberty to achieve a little marginal safety will end up with neither liberty nor safety."
Note: Yesterday evening's version of the story referred to a single alleged terror plot as described above. This morning's version mentions plural plots...but a link attached to "recent terror plots" is broken at present, so I am uncertain what -- if anything -- the plural refers to.
Second note: These searches raise an issue of whether passengers give up their Constitutional rights in exchange for the "choice" of taking public transport -- the exact same issue as to whether naked scans and intimate gropes in airports are voluntary because people can "choose not to fly." For thousands who depend on public transport to get to work or for other purposes, and for whom driving is not practical, there is no "choice" involved. Taking public transport has long been a normal part of everyday life and should not entail abandoning Constitutional protections. That said, apparently those who refuse a Metro police search will at least be alllowed to depart unmolested.
Third note: Sorry, New York and Boston. They "came for" you with these random passenger searches and I thought it was wrong but didn't speak up because I lived in the Washington, D.C., area. Mea culpa.
Update: The New York chapter of the ACLU challenged random bag searches back in 2005. Later that year, a single judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York upheld the random searches on the grounds that:
[I]t would be inappropriate for courts to second-guess the judgments of law enforcement and other public officials who are charged with protecting the public and making difficult choices of resource allocation.
One court decision by one judge, however, need hardly be taken as the final word.