TSAFAIL, Fail
The winter of its discontents.
I don't really have standing to write about air transportation security. I don't fly. Hell, I don't drive, never have. People like me don't travel anymore. But the buzz on this subject was loud enough that I've reflected on it some "Porno-scanners": At last, the public objects - Dan Gillmor - Salon.com. First of all, emotional identity politics and ideology ought have little place in this National Outcry Over TSA Body Scanners and Invasive Pat-Downs. It is a cold matter of Risk Assessment and should be handled with all possible mathematical objectivity Are TSA pat-downs and full-body scans unconstitutional? - CSMonitor.com. In simplified terms the components of risk are: Risk = Consequence x Likelihood x Vulnerability Security risk - Wikipedia. 769 million passengers enplaned in 2007 in the US alone. Which equates to somewhere in the ballpark of 5 million flights annually. Following this trail of numbers I'd guess that the smaller regional airports might be handling 20,000 flights a year, the larger international airports upwards of 175,000 flights per year. That's the size of the vulnerability, the bushel the basket has to fit around. If your aim is terrorism, to cause politically directional fear. All you have to do is get one of those enplanees past security, get a gun, knife or inflammable device onto one of those flights and you have a tragedy that will depress commerce and reverberate in the public consciousness for years TSA boss: Our pat-downs turn up "artfully concealed objects". That's the consequence. Additionally the public will demand change. And we will change, change our policies as a state, change as a people, change as a culture. The likelihood of a terrorist catastrophe without security is with little dispute one hundred percent. Receding towards a fixed point, never as low as zero, with precautions. Al Qaeda still clings to the notion that a sharp strike against the far enemy (us) will defang their near enemy (strongmen of the aristocratic elites) and leave them in charge of their home countries. Airplanes are the preferred choice for the "big gesture" minded anarchist. The list of anthropocentric air disasters and hijackings is a very long one; Pan Am 103, KAL 858 notably, but others as well. In 1972 extortion minded hijackers prepared to fly a plane into a nuclear power plant List of aircraft hijackings - Wikipedia These ideas are not new. Security for airlines is not about absolute prevention, but limiting these incidents of mass destruction to one or two per decade. A question I ask myself: what would I do if this were my responsibility? The more descriptions I read the more comprehensive and sophisticated I took the security plans to be. In place was a total airport and plane security, with a degree of triage, sequestering, clean areas etc. Not just a single queue at the check-in window. They employ a mix of bomb sniffing dogs, metal detectors, baggage x rays, and backscatter x rays. In the background no fly lists, red flag lists. All this creating a membrane between the raw slow and uncontrolled world outside, and the brittle artificial appointment-based identity-specific engineered world of jet-streamed commerce. There is a value bias in this business of undervaluing the unobtrusive. In much of airport security, not just the TSA but security regimes around the globe that involve the public directly, there is the sense of show. Of brightly painting a sense of safety, of effort onto proceedings. To the extent that these activities perform even some limited function forcing antagonists into narrower and more expensive channels of endeavor, it is partially worthwhile. To the extent it does not, it earns the opprobrium "Security Theatre" The other thing a public bureaucracy will manage to achieve is overreaction and callous institutional inconsideration. Titicut Follies in a phrase. An example of this is the enhanced pat-down rollout. Part of a series of responses to last years lethally comic underwear bomber. It seems to have been perceived as a back-up procedure and mechanism for gaining compliance with other preferred methods of detection; X-ray backscatter, and trace element detectors. They seem to have never given much thought to how it would go over with the public, despite it being the procedure to follow anytime a detector buzzed or someone wouldn't walk through the clothing B'gone machine. The difficulty some seem to have with this backscatter machine is that it rattles elections off the atoms in what it is imaging so that they are delivered to a sensor. Electrons from clothing, fine. Top dead-cell skin layer, ok Below that this is aiming ionizing radiation at living tissue, a potential health issue, not so good. It is pointed out you receive much more radiation flying in an airplane that has risen 8 miles above the thick protective part of the atmosphere The physics and biology of the TSA's backscatter security scanners . This illustrates another increasing problem of transportation security; over-reliance on technological fixes. The expensive gizmo syndrome. See-thru-specs? Yeah there's an app for that. All of this effort is undercut by poor training, low pay (there are; however, few in the incoming congress who would be willing to pay more to deal with those issues). Exacerbated by being in its current incorporation a new organization with little past or tradition to draw on. There is also the sense that positives and false positives alike interrupt the process to the point of breaking it. Like an iceberg the bulk of airport security protocol should remain out of sight filtering diffuse threats, leaving point of departure security the smaller and more delicate problems of direct or disguised threats in the passenger cabin Administration to Seek Balance in Airport Screening - NYTimes.com. It is at this point that people usually bring up the Israeli Solution The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - thestar.com as an all encompassing panacea RealClearPolitics - Psychology, Not Just Technology for Airport Security. The security apparatus at Ben Gurion operates under an entirely different legal regime of course Israeli air security is easy on most, intrusive for a few. Equal treatment under the law is an absolute mandate under US law. Any roadblock, bolo, or drunk driver check point must adhere to probable cause, randomness or all or nothing procedures. Israeli security, its psychological micro-interrogations, and discriminations rely almost entirely on clearly defined highly-pressurized pre-judgment's Some Israelis doubt their airport security travels | Reuters.
The puzzle in the enmity directed at the TSA is what was the desired outcome of all this. Some of this became a little clearer as the great opt-out days of the Thanksgiving weekend came and went without much ado T.S.A. Furor Gives Media a False Positive - The Media Equation - NYTimes.com:, and the press which did not cover this well ventured some analysis Protests of TSA airport pat-downs, body scanners don't delay Thanksgiving travel. I love real journalism for its consummate if somewhat tardy professionalism. Prior to this it was all astro-turfing with the outraged The Misplaced Outrage Over the TSA Pat-Down. It was clear early on this mostly was a right wing issue. Drudge was all over it. Web log aggregators like memeorandum, and megite illustrated how starkly the usual suspects were lining up on it. Not much surface scratching on heralded, and occasionally untrue horror stories, was needed to reveal underlying colors. Vaguely libertarian or not, it was shot through with hypocrisy and double standards. A lot of this came from people who were four square for Patriot act 1 and 2, and similar less-heralded initiatives. From people who were outspoken that the press was treasonous for stories outing warrant-less wiretaps, CIA black sites and other dissolutions of personal liberties. People who can't round-up and hold Mexican families in enough Arizona desert concentration camps. The pervading rhetoric that the TSA was taking things a step too far, could raise doubts about actual republican belief in a threat from Islamic extremism. Which otherwise they never stop talking about.
In the background of all this is a call from this quarter to begin profiling With TSA Under Fire, Is Racial Profiling on the Table? - Political Hotsheet - CBS News. For a change in the prevailing laws and constitutional protections. Profiling can take the form of Racial Profiling deliberately selecting individuals for screening or additional procedures based on on perceived external racial characteristics. Psychological Profiling can be as simple as walking up and down a line of people looking for tells, signs of psychological distress or deception. Or Behavioral Profiling which depends on databases, and data-mining to a significant degree, as it looks for patterns, statistical or logical anomalies in everything about a passenger. Who he or she is, where they are coming from where they have been what they have with them. It has the potential to be at least as intrusive as any pat-down you can possibly imagine Airport passenger profiling -- not so simple - CSMonitor.com. Some of the commentary I've seen seem to be suggesting in a veiled fashion, that the real problem with the TSA is that it is a Federal Government program, that you'd see more efficiency, bang for your buck, a better class of people running it, if it were privatized. Run by Aqua-Noir, say. This is probably not coming from old line libertarians who will generally cede national security matters to the state, but by those who look at the state the way privateers used to look at a Dutch East Indiaman.
The greatest problem with profiling is that it is a soul destroying embrace of otherness. The division of identity into a brute dichotomy of us and them, with all disturbance laid onto them and driven into the wilderness. This cause seemed to select to its side, as some pointed out, those unused to suspicion . In this I often feel I see a undercurrent desire for licensed liberty for a state of affairs where ones regime attachment, ticket of belonging, club card of privilege, stand in for and replace promiscuous true liberty. Certainly liberty cannot not survive Panopticonism. The security state always a lurking de-evolutionary path for democracy . If for little expense or organizational risk to themselves Al Qaeda and similar organizations are able to place an enormous surcharge on a critical portion of the transportation industry prevention will be a pyrrhic victory. Even if security industries willingly form around the airline industries, and the public in due time comes to accept them, it will never be less than a burden and an inefficiency and a path to further restriction.
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