A couple of interesting articles, showing that we have allies out there:
by Gene Healy
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
This article appeared in the DC Examiner on November 23, 2010.
Last fall, flying out of Chicago O'Hare, I ran into that rarest of breeds: a Transportation Security Administration agent with a sense of humor. In her "Da Bears" accent, she moved the line along with a good-natured, "awright: who's my next victim?" At least they're allowed to joke about it. If a rubber-gloved fed cups your — er, I prefer the term "treasures" — just turn your head and cough politely. Don't dare try to ease the awkwardness with a wisecrack, lest you get arrested under the TSA's no-joking policy.
Sometimes, when I manage to pull my eyes away from my twinkly smartphone and look around, I think, "Wow, if you squint a little, this could be a sci-fi dystopia!" (It happened again just recently, as I was passing through the gates at my local Metro station, and Janet Napolitano's voice boomed ominously from the loudspeakers, ordering me to say something if I see something.)
Thankfully, the growing anti-TSA backlash shows that for many Americans, there isn't a Soma dose high enough to get them to grin and bear the bureaucratic feel-up.
Like it or not, we live in the world the alarmists have made.
In fact, even some of our most rabid terror-warriors, like former Sen. Rick Santorum and neocon stalwart Charles Krauthammer, now say they've had enough.
Santorum and Krauthammer blame a politically correct mentality that prevents profiling. But the Christmas bomber was Nigerian; the shoebomber, a Brit with a Jamaican father. Should we just give the "freedom fondle" to anyone vaguely swarthy?
I have a different explanation for how we got here.
For nearly a decade, Krauthammer, Santorum and too many others on the Right have relentlessly hyped and politicized the terrorist threat. But when every bungled attack — no matter how inept — gets the screeching siren treatment on Drudge, what do you expect that political dynamic to produce? Sober, sensible policy?
Conservatives could stand to think more clearly about ideas and consequences, cause and effect. Take last week's comments from Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., a congressional father of the agency: "When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy."
Really, who could have known?
And when prominent conservatives brush off constitutional concerns with the bromide "the Constitution is not a suicide pact," (or, as Mitt Romney put it in 2007, "Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive") is it so surprising that liberty and dignity get sent to the back of the line?
Like it or not, we live in the world the alarmists have made.
Yet, in reality, we're remarkably safe. In 2009, terrorists caused just 25 U.S. noncombatant fatalities worldwide. That's 25 too many, but "existential," it's not.
My colleague Jim Harper points out that, since 9/11, "in 99 million domestic flights, transporting 7 billion people, precisely zero domestic travelers have snuck an underpants bomb onto a plane. (The one that we have seen — which did not work — came from overseas.)"
Surely the existence of the TSA — hapless and bureaucratic as they are — deters some potential bombers. Even so, the agency won't — likely can't — identify a single genuine terrorist they've caught, and it's not at all clear, according to the Government Accountability Office, that even the nude machine would have exposed the Christmas bomber.
We're safe — but not perfectly safe. Hyping and politicizing the terrorist threat won't deliver us perfect safety. Nothing can. But, as we're learning, it can put us on the path toward a society that no longer looks like America — one where you're endlessly prodded and poked — and ordered not to joke about the poking.
That's something worth being alarmed about.
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
Body Scanners: The Naked Truth
by David Rittgers
David Rittgers is an attorney and legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
This article appeared in The New York Post on November 17, 2010.
The body scanners coming to your local airport provide marginal benefits — if any — in detecting weapons and explosives hidden on travelers. They aren't worth the cost in money — let alone in civil liberties.
The Transportation Security Administration has put these machines — X-ray and radio-wave booths that look beneath clothing to perform virtual strip searches — across the nation and around the world. Industry advocates claim the technology's needed to stop terrorists with explosives hidden under their clothes like Christmas bomber Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Yet the public is justifiably skeptical. Pilots and passengers are "opting out" and taking the alternative screening method — a run through a traditional metal detector and an all-too-intimate pat-down. Cell-phone videos of encounters with TSA screeners are going viral.
If the ineffectiveness of body scanners is not enough to give the public pause, the cost ought to be.
Air travelers now face a few bad choices: Submit to the body scanner, endure an invasive manual pat-down or accept an $11,000 civil fine. This is security theater at its finest. Congress needs to revisit these protocols completely — starting with a total halt to the obscenely expensive and jarringly ineffective full-body scanner.
Despite what their proponents would have us believe, body scanners are not some magical tool to find all weapons and explosives that can be hidden on the human body. Yes, the scanners work against high-density objects such as guns and knives — but so do traditional magnetometers.
And the scanners fare poorly against low-density materials such as thin plastics, gels and liquids. Care to guess what Abdulmutallab's bomb was made of? The Government Accountability Office reported in March that it's not clear that a scanner would've detected that device.
Even if the scanners did work against low-density materials, the same group linked to the Christmas bomb, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has already found another way to defeat the technology: hiding bombs inside the human body: A would-be AQAP assassin tried to kill a senior Saudi counterterrorism official with a bomb hidden where only a proctologist would find it.
That bomb wound up killing only its carrier. But a more enterprising terrorist could go to the plane bathroom to remove bomb components hidden in a body cavity, then place them against the aircraft hull — and the results would be far different.
Terrorists already know how to beat body scanners with low-tech (really, no-tech) techniques, but the federal government still spends billions on this gadget.
If the ineffectiveness of body scanners is not enough to give the public pause, the cost ought to be.
An army of executives for scanner-producing corporations — mostly former high-ranking Homeland Security officials — successfully lobbied Congress into spending $300 million in stimulus money to buy the scanners. But running them will cost another $340 million each year. Operating them means 5,000 added TSA personnel, growing the screener workforce by 10 percent. This, when the federal debt commission is saying that we must cut federal employment rolls, including some FBI agents, just to keep spending sustainable.
Why cut funding for the people who actually catch terrorists to add more pointless hassles at the airport? (Going through a body scanner also takes longer — the process is slower than magnetometers.)
Scanners clearly fail an honest cost-benefit analysis. Yet it's privacy that has the traveling public up in arms. Understandably so — the message the TSA is sending us is: "Be seen naked or get groped."
We tell our children not to talk to strangers, but now a government functionary gets to fondle away just because he has a badge?
Thanks, but no. Policymakers should rethink this move toward ineffective, expensive and unnecessarily intrusive aviation security.
David Rittgers is an attorney and legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute.