Security Theater & Security Fantasy

Assuming that most people have heard about the brilliant (not) TSA who searched the adult diaper of a 96 year old woman besides sexually molesting babies and children we need to ask — Where will the intrusion into our personal space stop? Will Gate rape intrude into any place more than 5 or 10 or 100 people gather?

Since I’m not the only one who is questioning — where will TSA put their hands next — here’s another common sense view of follow the dots to what TSA rapists might do next.

“Profiling” is a security fantasy, just like “sticking your hands down an elderly woman’s diaper” is a security fantasy–both amount to some kind of neo-pagan pre-flight prayer ritual. What’s rational is competent intelligence work of the kind the FBI actually does pretty well, to judge from the number of terrorist attacks that have been interrupted in recent years. What’s rational are locked and hardened cockpit doors, and making passengers fully aware that if the plane is hijacked, you rise up as one and kill the hijackers. Metal-detector screening–for firearms–is reasonable. Looking for tweezers and liquids is not. Indecent bodily searches are not. Making people take their computers out of their bags is not–that’s an X-ray machine, for goodness’ sake.

The fact that Americans don’t want to face is that you just can’t take all the risk out of flying. We’ve done all we reasonably can. Anything more is a waste of time and resources, and the overwhelmingly nonsensical part of this is the exclusive focus on airplanes: You don’t need to be in the air to be the object of a terrorist attack, do you? Just ask the Israelis (or the Turks, for that matter).

Once you say, “We’ll put up with anything to make sure terrorists can’t kill us,” the logic is inescapable: Some government official should be sticking his hand up everyone’s pants everywhere human beings in America gather. I would have thought that impossible, but I would have thought it impossible we’d put up with this, too.  (author: Claire Berlinsky)

Pasted from <http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Airport-Security-and-Common-Sense>