NYT:
Administration to Seek Balance in Airport Screening
Caught between complaints that airport screening has become too intrusive and threats of new terror attacks on aviation, the chief of the Transportation Security Administration said on Monday that the agency would consider changes to its new security measures if it found that the measures went too far.
John S. Pistole said on the “Today” show on NBC Monday morning that his agency was willing to rethink its policy on the physical screenings that have become a flashpoint of anger among travelers. “We’re going to look at how can we do the most effective screening in the least invasive way, knowing that there’s always a trade-off” between security and privacy, he said.
But he said on CNN’s program “American Morning” that “in the short-term there will not be any changes.”
Previously, Mr. Pistole had insisted in a statement issued on Sunday that the measures the agency had put in place were justified by the risks, and he had given no indication that the agency would reverse its move to using full-body scanners, now installed in 70 of the 450 airports in the United States, with physical pat-downs for passengers who object to the scans.
Most of what's driving this story is concern over what happens when you receive a pat-down, either because you opted out of the new imaging scanners or because the new scanners flagged something that needs a closer exam. Fear of the pat-down is driven mostly by videos of the new searches showing TSA agents getting uncomfortably close to private parts. Those are reasonable concerns, and resolving them requires a combination of education about why the new screening policies are being used (short: answer, to detect non-metallic threats like the one used in the failed Christmas Day attack last year) and a willingness to tweak the implementation of the policies to achieve their intended goal.
But while there is plenty of legitimate concern about the new policies, the right wing fauxtrage machine is latching onto those concerns as an opportunity to underscore two of their central narratives against President Obama: (a) that he is he is expanding the power of the Federal government to take over literally every aspect of daily life and (b) that he's a stealth Muslim hell-bent on turning America into an Islamic nation.
Obviously, it's absurd to argue that the new TSA procedures represent some massive expansion of Federal power. Sure, these new security protocols are more rigorous than the previous ones, but TSA control of airport security is not an Obama policy. This doesn't represent some new sphere of government influence in daily life, it's just a new security protocol. But even though it's absurd to argue that TSA's new screening procedures exemplify Obama's commitment to giving government dictatorial power (after all, they were initially developed under Bush), the right-wing media machine is already convincing its audience that this is part of Obama's secret plan to dominate America.
The more insidious argument being pushed by the right-wing noise machine is that the only reason why we need these new procedures is that Barack Obama won't allow racial or ethnic profiling of Muslims, who 'everybody knows' represent the real terrorist threat. Why should an American citizen (especially a white Christian one) receive the same pat-down or security screening as a foreign exchange student from Yemen who has been trained by Al Qaeda, they ask.
Of course, that's a loaded question, designed to evoke mental images of Grandma Betty getting the same level of scrutiny as the Christmas Day bomber, images that are meant to provoke anger and resentment at Barack Obama for protecting "the other." Moreover, the truth is that Grandma Betty and the Christmas Day bomber don't receive the same screening, because screening begins before you even get to the airport.
Remember, our intelligence services had all the information we needed to identify that the Christmas Day bomber was a threat. If the system had worked perfectly, he'd never have made it as far as a security scanner in the first place. But sometimes systems have bugs. They don't always work perfectly, and screening devices are a failsafe, designed to catch whatever slips through the cracks.
It's worth debating how extensive the screening procedures ought to be, but the right-wing proposition that the real answer is racial or ethnic profiling is foolish, impractical, and un-American. It's foolish because if you create broad categories of people that are exempt from screening (for example, white Christian men), all you're doing is telling would-be terrorists what they should look like if they want to be able to sneak something on board. It's impractical because in order to develop such a profiling system, you'd have to create a whole new Federal bureaucracy dedicated to tracking private information about individuals, including their race, religion, and travel habits. And it's un-American because in America everybody should be treated equally under the law -- nobody should have special advantages because of their race or religion.
So while it's good that TSA is opening itself up to making changes in its system, it's going to be important to make sure that the changes it makes are in response to legitimate concerns that its procedures are too invasive, not the trumped out right-wing storyline that the solution is to put in place a system of racial and ethnic profiling. And as TSA explains the thinking behind its policy changes, it needs to be aware that in addition to real concerns of the traveling public, it's also being attacked by conservatives who are more interested in destroying President Obama than they are in protecting our security.