TSA: Touching Sensitive Areas -- My Two Cents on Terrorizing Passengers

Spare Change | 17 November 2010 | David J. Aland

[SpareChange]

TSA: Touching Sensitive Areas -- My Two Cents on Terrorizing Travelers

By David J. Aland /// 19 November 2010

In the classic joke, the mother tells the teacher: “If my son acts up, don’t punish him. He’s sensitive; punish the kid next to him and he’ll get the message.” Apparently, the folks at TSA think the same way – to dissuade terrorists, terrorize passengers and the bad guys will get the message.

Janet Napolitano went for the “Obama Defense” the other day when faced with mounting outrage over the growing intrusiveness of airline passenger screening: people would understand that this is for their own good if they just listened better.

The problem is neither the explanation nor the listening. Americans have a great track record at making sacrifices for the common good in times of crisis. The problem is that the people can neither see how all this serves the common good and the government continues to deny there is a crisis.

The current regime of airport screening is based on two false assumptions: all passengers are equally suspect, and screening should eliminate dangerous objects but not dangerous people. Reductio ab absurdum: attempting impartiality, TSA has only achieved imbecility.

The common good is best served by making travel safe. Frisking three year olds does not accomplish this, nor does running flight crews and other trusted fliers through repeated X-Ray exposures. Let’s face it, if a pilot wanted to crash a plane, it wouldn’t take a box cutter.

The new body scanners might identify a knife, they are not effective with explosives. The infamous Undie-Bomber would not have been caught – the scans cannot differentiate det-cord from Depends. And neither can a pat-down.

The common good is clearly not served when passengers distrust the TSA more than they distrust other passengers. In Boston, a TSA screener who passed the agency background screening was found to be a sex offender. Elsewhere, illegal aliens made it past the background screens to service aircraft.

This administration has been careful to avoid calling the terrorist threat a crisis, or even calling it a terrorist threat. Why should passengers accede to sacrifices simply to prevent “man made disasters?” Recently, the Council on American Islamic Relations advised Muslim women to refuse body scans and pat-downs, a religious exemption that DHS is reportedly examining. How much more absurd can it be to ask Americans to equally shoulder sacrifices when members of the demographic most often associated with man-made non-crisis activities are now exempt?

A European friend once commented that the unique genius of America was the ability to logically extend an idea to its most absurd extreme, and this is no exception. In trying to avoid all appearance of “profiling”, our government may consider excluding the most likely groups.

The Shoe Bomber resulted in bans on fluids. The Panty Bomber resulted in more intrusive pat-downs. Where will it all go next? In September 2009, an al Qaeda operative tried to assassinate a Saudi prince using a bomb in his rectum. None of the screening now in place would have detected that – does that mean that body cavity checks are next? Will baby’s diapers get checked for loads others than yesterday’s strained carrots? Are feminine hygiene products next on the list?

I travel frequently – boarding 25 planes last year alone. By all accounts, that means I could have only accumulated as much radiation from body scans as a single chest X-ray would afford. While that doesn’t seem like much, even my doctor doesn’t have me do an X-ray every year. Furthermore, as a security professional, I hold a number of clearances which putatively certify me as trustworthy. Still, I am apparently considered equally untrustworthy to TSA as some newly arrived fellow from Yemen.

This, perhaps, is the most egregious untruth underlying the screening process currently in use. Not all passengers are equally dangerous, and random screening is not uniformly effective. Profiling – not the crude but popular mischaracterization as a means of ethnic discrimination – is effective. Effective profiling involves physical features, behavioral markers, travel patterns and other factors.

This is an issue that touches a lot of sensitive areas, and not all of them are physical. Crotch-groping is not just a Muslim taboo – a lot of Baptists don’t like it either. Our security has to depend on keeping bad people off of planes, not just preventing everyone from bringing potentially bad objects. Box cutters don’t hijack planes – terrorists do.

It’s time DHS put a new move in the TSA playbook to replace touching sensitive areas – Taking Some Advice. A few million pilots, flight crews, and passengers can’t be all wrong.

Nor can they all be suspects.

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David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College.

[NTHockey]

>>But we’re nice people and we wouldn’t do that. So we’ll let Janet Napolitano grope us.<<

Now THAT’s an image I definitely do not need before breakfast!

I like your idea of the plastic chepper. Then there’s the “Pershing method: Soot the terrorist with a bullet dipped in pig excrement, bury him head down in same pig excrement and facing away from Mecca. Then, there’s always “Apache justice”.

[NonValueAdded]

Very well written, perhaps the best I’ve read.