“There’s no bright line to indicate where our quest for security becomes intolerably invasive of our privacy,” write the editors of the Los Angeles Times (“Shut up and be scanned,” Nov. 17), “but we’re still pretty sure the TSA hasn’t yet crossed it.”
I could probably turn that sentence into a pretty good riff on the need for a remedial session of Composition 101 in the Times‘s editorial offices, but I’ll stick to “bright lines” instead. Here’s one:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …
Ring any bells? It’s from the Fourth Amendment to the “supreme law of the land”: The US Constitution.
As an anarchist, I naturally find even that unsatisfactory. It assumes too much (the need for and existence of even an activity-restricted state). Here’s another “bright line” worth taking a look at: The line that use of the word “our” crosses.
Who’s this “we,” and what tortured logic puts TSA (or, for that matter, the Times editorial board) in the driver’s seat for all of us?
Is it just possible that among the thousands of US airports — around 15,000 of them including hundreds of “primary airports,” i.e. airports with scheduled service and more than 10,000 annual passenger boardings — there’s room for experimentation in best security practices?
Given that we still enjoy the services of multiple airlines — fewer than we once did, largely due to the tender ministrations of state intervention in the industry, but still several major carriers and many smaller ones — and that these airlines tend to work through separately assigned gates at the airports they serve, is there any particular reason why we shouldn’t also enjoy competition among those airlines in balancing security with customer satisfaction?
Devolving security to the airport or airline level would accomplish several worthwhile goals.
First, it would make the US air travel system a harder target from the get-go. Uniform security practices mean uniform holes in those security practices. If every airport and every airline does everything the same way, whatever gets missed at LAX will also get missed at JFK and O’Hare. Or, to put a finer 9/11-related point on it, what gets missed at Logan will also get missed at Newark Liberty International.
Secondly, it would improve the overall security of that system over time. The current system imposes “one size fits all,” and as 9/11 demonstrated, that leads to catastrophic, rather than isolated, failures. In a decentralized system, more ideas would be tested. Successful approaches (“we detected and stopped a bombing attempt this way”) would propagate through the system quickly. Failed approaches (“the hijackers made it through our screening procedure”) would disappear just as quickly.
Finally, it would allow America’s millions of travelers to decide for themselves how much privacy they’re willing to trade for how much security.
The passenger who’s willing to submit to a cavity search (and pay the higher ticket price that a stricter security regime requires) to feel “completely safe” can fly on Airline A.
Her less math-challenged counterpart (even before TSA, airline travel was statistically one of the safest activities an American could engage in) can fly on Airline B, which has reverted to the old metal detector/bag X-Ray way of doing things.
And their wild-eyed cousin, who believes that a diffuse threat requires a diffuse defense, can fly on Airline C, which requires only that its armed passengers limit themselves to frangible bullets in the .38, .45 and 9mm pistols they carry, openly or concealed, when boarding.
The important thing to remember is that the weak point in American air travel safety is government.
In the near term the state’s screwed-up air security schemes have driven airlines to the edge of bankruptcy (and sometimes over that edge) and, at last, passengers to the point of full-blown rebellion.
In the long term, it’s the state that makes us targets for terrorists in the first place.
Al Qaeda didn’t hijack those planes because Osama bin Laden got an undercooked hamburger at a fast food joint, or because some big box chain store sold him a defective lawn chair.
They hijacked those planes by way of attempting to blackmail powerful politicians into doing things they don’t want to do by scaring their constituents into demanding it. Take the power away from the politicians and the tactic goes away with it.
Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, Dim Bulbs Seek Bright Lines: The LA Times vs. American Travelers, Carroll County, Maryland Standard, 11/23/10
To save Tom the trouble, I did the search. I even clicked on the top link, a blog which I will not link here, and read the whole thing. I also looked at some of the other sites that came up in the search.
Their overall gist seems to be "the JEWS did it!". The blog site even goes as far as to claim the reason Noam Chomsky doesn't buy the remote control theory is simply because he's Jewish.
Art Totelle sez:
Those planes were not hijacked, they were under remote control. Google: Dov Zakheim, 9-11, remote controlled airplanes. Connect the dots, it’s easy.
D'AHH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAHHH.
Ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Let me guess… the plane that hit the Pentagon wasn't actually a plane at all, but a cruise missile, in spite of eyewitness reports of local residents (including a friend of mine) — not to mention the surveillance camera footage — and that flight was actually diverted to an undisclosed location, where the passengers were killed and buried in an unmarked mass grave to keep them quiet.
You need to readjust the fit on that tinfoil hat, man; it's cutting off the blood circulation to your brain.
PS: We also landed on THE FUCKING MOON, man. Get a goddamn grip.
First, it would make the US air travel system a harder target from the get-go. Uniform security practices mean uniform holes in those security practices.
This is irrelevant. Terrorists only need to be able to get through one specific airport, not every airport. Nonuniformity just means that they have more potential weak links to exploit.
Successful approaches (“we detected and stopped a bombing attempt this way”) would propagate through the system quickly. Failed approaches (“the hijackers made it through our screening procedure”) would disappear just as quickly.
Unlikely. First off, there aren't enough terrorist attacks to fuel such an adaptive algorithm. Second off, airports would care more about the illusion of security than actual security (even if we hold them responsible for damages from hijackings, since then their goal would be more to convince an insurer that they're safe than it would be to actually be safe).
Art,
It's now been nearly a decade since the 9/11 attacks. For the entirety of that near-decade, I've been asking supporters of the "inside job," "remote control planes," etc. theories to provide evidence — any evidence at all, even a relatively insignificant crumb — to support those theories.
So far, not an iota. Not an ort. Not an atom. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. Still waiting.
Miko,
You write:
"This is irrelevant. Terrorists only need to be able to get through one specific airport, not every airport."
This assumes two things:
– That terrorists will never again attempt multi-airport operations, even though their most dramatically successful previous attack was a multi-airport operation; and
– That terrorists don't take advantage of intelligence symmetry, i.e. "if X is true of this airport, it's also necessarily true of that airport; therefore we can apply intelligence gathered at JFK to an operation targeting LAX," for both operational convenience ("our best intel workers operate on the east coast") and counter-intelligence ("if we're sniffing around JFK and are detected, they'll assume JFK is the target") purposes.
Insofar as the number of terrorist attacks relating to adaptive algorithms, that's certainly been the case with TSA, so why wouldn't it be with the airlines (albeit mitigated by customer satisfaction concerns)?
Great article, except for the part about the planes at 9/11. There weren't any. But I know that myth is too deeply entrenched to argue against at this point. This was a psyop extraordinaire and it has suckceeded spectacularly. Logic will avail nothing, sadly.
But for anyone who cares to examine the data, there is much to peruse. Google "no planes" for a start. Look at the conflicting data, not at the rants of lunatics and plants, of which there are more than too many. Ace Baker did some excellent examination of the "video evidence" from that morning. More data.
– NonE
They hijacked those planes by way of attempting to blackmail powerful politicians into doing things they don’t want to do by scaring their constituents into demanding it. Take the power away from the politicians and the tactic goes away with it.
Those planes were not hijacked, they were under remote control. Google: Dov Zakheim, 9-11, remote controlled airplanes. Connect the dots, it’s easy.
Wow, two troofers in one thread. Get a life. Seriously, a life; if both of you pooled your resources, you might be able to scrape together one complete life. Maybe you could trade it off every week.
Doubting Thomas uses the word “ort”. Good for Scrabble, good for the crosswords. Nobody notices. Shame, that.
Mike Flugennock wrote
As Mad magazine put it, what’s this “we”, white man?