First Principles

Tomorrow my family and I will be flying to see family for Thanksgiving.  So I’ve been following the new TSA porn-o-scanner/crotch-grope policies with some personal interest.  I’m unimpressed.

The purpose of government is to protect, promote, and advance individual liberty.  Public safety is obviously a part of this – if you’re dead, you can hardly pursue happiness or exercise any other personal liberty.  So I’m fine with reasonable impositions which will ensure that safety.  The more certain I am that they’ll actually keep me safe, the more intrusions I’m willing to tolerate.  For example, I have very little problem with wiretaps – even warrantless ones – for overseas phone calls, especially to countries known to harbor terrorists.

But there must be some sort of value added, or it’s just a meaningless loss of liberty no American should accept.  And there is zero value added when it comes to the current TSA policies.  In fact, I think they make us significantly less safe at the end of the day.

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I’ve seen polls which suggest people actually support the new procedures.  There are some liberal Obamaphiles (who no doubt saw fascism around every twig when Bushitler was in office) who are now accusing the growing opposition of throwing a “childish tantrum.”  (No out-of-touch elitist condescension there…)

I’m not buying it – I don’t think enough people have experienced it.  The concerns are absolutely legitimate – mine follow below.  And the procedures have only been in place for a few weeks – wait until we have several months worth of stories of abused crippled children, humiliated cancer survivors, and burst bags of urine.  Wait until Little Billy’s Christmas presents start getting tossed and destroyed all over the country.

I’m not hugely worried about the cancer-causing radiation, although I’m not thrilled about it.  I read an interesting post the other day which noted that the risk of cancer from the radiation is about the same as… being killed by a terror attack.  Talk about spending a lot of money going nowhere!

But what good do they do?  Every terrorist knows about the patdowns, and where they will – and won’t – check.  Drug smugglers great and small have been hiding their contraband inside their bodies for years.  Does anyone seriously think the reaction to these “screenings” isn’t going to be the new al Qaeda KY bomber?  And if the crotch groping is supposed to be a reaction to the underwear bomber from LAST YEAR, well, the Homeland Security Department’s ability to react in a timely manner to new intelligence is hardly filling me with confidence.

So at best, it’s useless.  But it’s worse than that.

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We were assured that there was no way these images could be distributed or made public, but it turns out that’s not only theoretically false, but that it’s already happened.

Lest anyone think no one would bother, or that the images would never go anywhere, I happened across this story in the local paper about a Fallon child-pornographer headed to federal prison.

He had a day job when he wasn’t surfing the web for kiddie-smut – he was an X-Ray technician who liked to mix business with pleasure.  According to the RGJ:

Williams was caught through the FBI’s task force that investigates Internet child pornography. Local task force members had searched Williams’ trailer, and besides finding the computer images, they found that Williams had taken home hospital 3-D X-rays that he performed on adult and child patients so that he could look at the outline of their genitals, court records show.

Authorities said that Williams had been fired from his job at a Churchill County hospital, where he said he also took X-rays dating back to 1995 that the hospital wanted to destroy.

But I’m sure nothing like that could ever happen with those highly trained TSA folks.  Nah.  Not a risk at all.

I’ve had to deal with several child porn cases in the last several years, and not one of them had any kind of arrest record until the forensic geeks caught them file sharing this sort of filth – that means no criminal background check would have uncovered them or their predilections.

And again, we’re asked to accept this risk for absolutely no value added to the security equation.

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One of the articles of faith of the College Know-It-All Hippy is that judgment in and of itself is bad.  We are told c0nstantly that we should pay no attention to how people choose to dress, carry themselves, or act.  We are told that all religions are essentially the same, and that all cultures are inherently good, and that all nations of the earth and their governments are morally similar, distinguished only by slightly different accents and cuisines. The only exception to this is the United States (and really just its more Christian citizenry), which all right thinking people know shoulders the blame for pretty much all the world’s troubles.

This is, of course, an absurdity to any thinking person.  But this suicidal mentality pervades among people who are now running out country.

The hope behind the scanners is to remove the need for screeners to make independent judgments.  If a machine incapable of emotion or bigotry can make all the decisions, then none of the responsibility falls on people (or their political supervisors) if anyone feels offended.

But we’re hard-wired to make those judgments.  We need to make them, and we make thousands of them a day to safely navigate through the world we live in.  When it comes to public safety, good detective work relies on both intelligence (the information gathering kind as well as the gray matter kind) and the intuition we use to make coherent pictures out of multiple sets of data.  And it’s good detective work – not machines – which will keep us safe.  Machines aren’t bigots, but they are slow, dumb, and predictable – hardly a match for a determined suicide bomber with Allah on his side and visions of 72 virgins dancing in his head.

By training TSA agents to pay attention to computer screens instead of people, we are actively reducing the amount of information they have available to them.  We are training them not to be alert to their gut instincts or (gasp!) profiles based not on skin color, but on nations of origin, dress, and behavior.  And by reducing the amount of data in, we’ll predictably get less accurate analysis out.

In other words, we’re spending a lot of money making federal agents with millions of lives in their hands dumber.  Brilliant.

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And then there is the threat inherent to any job with a uniform and power – some of those people are just going to be jerks.  We’re giving what are in essence mere security guards with minimal training near carte blanche to grope, harass, and molest pretty much anyone they want to.

I’m not bagging on security guards – that’s how I made my beer and pizza money through college, and most of the people I worked with were great.  But we all knew a couple of folks who didn’t have any business with that little badge, much less rubber gloves and x-ray vision.

What do you do when that person crosses the line and cops a feel?  Call the police?  Slap them and say, “Well, I NEVER!”?    Go to your happy place and pretend you like it?  Complain loudly and miss your flight to Grandma’s house?  There is no satisfactory remedy for this kind of abuse of power, and that means there’ll be no check on it.

And there will be milder forms of this – comparing and commenting on the sizes of various parts that day after their shift, or how they made some spoiled rich woman cry, or how showed that guy he’s not so tough after all.  And I can see the side-income gigs now – “Come visit www.celebrityTSAjunkshots.com today!!!”

No added security is worth this.  And in this case, we get nothing for exposing ourselves to it.  Nothing but dulled senses on security personnel and an accumulation of rads in our skin.  Oh, and more debt – those machines aren’t free.

Good thinking.

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If the Obama Administration were serious about airline security, we’d have well trained plainclothes federal air marshals on every flight, tasked not just with fighting off box-cutter wielding would-be hijackers, but spending their time in the boarding area people watching with a passenger list while the aircraft is still being fueled up at the jetway, and a few more non-flyers doing the same as they patrolled the airports.

But they aren’t serious.  They’re dedicated to dorm room bull session bromides instead, and are acting accordingly.  And as a result, we aren’t even having the very necessary debate over the right balance between liberty and safety.

We’re just losing them both.