The TSA recently introduced a behavioral screening pilot program at Boston’s own Logan Airport. Known as Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), it involves agents asking all fliers three or four questions, such as where they have been, where they are going, or whether they have a business card, and pulling over suspicious people for additional screening.
This is definitely a better method than physically preventing people from bringing anything that could be used as a weapon (e.g. naked machines and pat-downs), because it is not as harmful to privacy and dignity. But right now it is being used in addition to these degrading measures, not instead of them.
Two letters to the editor in today’s Boston Globe hit the nail on the head. Paul Shannon writes, ”it seems that Americans are perfectly happy to put up with anything.” David A. Mittell shares a pretty horrible TSA experience and calls the questions “a government assault on our people’s free coming and going.” I am always heartened by people who criticize and fight back against security procedures instead of submitting to anything that is purported to increase safety.
Here’s a roundup of TSA/strip-search machine/pat-down news and opinion articles from the past couple days:
- George Naccara, the security director at Boston’s Logan Airport, says that the strip-search machines will be replaced by scanners that only show a stick figure outline, with little “blocks” around any anomalies. Logan is scheduled to be the first airport to get these in late winter. This would be a HUGE victory for liberty! Although I am elated that I and other people who care about modesty might be able to fly again, I am kind of furious that they didn’t make the scanners like this to begin with. They better roll out the new scanners ASAP, because thousands of people are losing their sexual innocence every day that they wait.
- David Rittgers of the Cato Institute calls the scanners “pointless and intrusive.”
- EPIC president Marc Rotenberg wrote a great opinion piece for CNN.
- A grandma from New Hampshire described her horrific pat-down experience.
- Some New York City Councilors want to ban strip-search machines in their city.
- Even the Globe’s Tom Keane opposes the TSA’s policies.
- Another article about the non-naked scanners tells a lot about other countries’ (sometimes also heinous) security policies.
- Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) said on Tuesday that the strip-search machines violate the Fourth Amendment and that “there must be a better way to have security at airports than taking pornographic photographs of our citizens.” (Watch on YouTube)
- The senior vice president of operations at Southwest Airlines described the pat-downs as “people getting partially molested.” In the same article, TSA chief John Pistole asks, “If you have two planes, one where people are thoroughly and properly screened and the other where people could opt out of screening, which would you want to be on?” To which I reply, the second plane. A million times over.
- Amazing opinion piece by MeganMcArdle of the Atlantic, who writes, “From the perspective of a passenger, there’s no attempt to achieve balance. There’s simply a progressive ratcheting of our liberty ever downward.”
- The DC Post has a petition to stop the use of strip-search machines and pat-downs. Please sign!
- Some airports, including Orlando Sanford and Orlando International, are considering Rep. John Mica’s suggestion that they opt out of the TSA altogether and use private contractors instead.
- Penny Young Nance of Concerned Women for America says she would fight back if the TSA tried to pat down her kids.
- There are many articles about sexual assaults (passed off as pat-downs) that people have suffered at the hands of the TSA, including agents putting their hands up a woman’s skirt, a woman’s pants, and a man’s pants, a 6-year-old boy being groped, and a cancer survivor having to show her prosthetic breast. I am extremely disturbed that lots of agents now seem to be putting their hands inside people’s pants. When the ”enhanced” pat downs began on November 1, they were not supposed to include this.
- Pilots no longer have to go through the naked machines or pat-downs! The TSA announced yesterday that pilots in uniform need only show two forms of identification and pass through a metal detector. The same article also mentions the idea of “allowing regular passengers to pass background checks and qualify as ‘trusted travelers’ who can skip through security just by showing identification that can be verified in a computer database.” That would be a great improvement if it became reality.
Also, I am creating a collection of TSA-related links. Please check it out!
In yet another small but significant encroachment on our liberty, TSA agents at Boston’s Logan Airport are using a new, worse pat down procedure. Instead of using the backs of their hands when patting down people’s private parts, agents are going to use their palms over people’s entire bodies (over their clothes, but still, this is not a good thing).
Pat downs will only happen to passengers who decline full-body scanners, where they exist. At checkpoints without full-body scanners, only people who set off metal detectors or are randomly selected will undergo pat downs. The worse pat down technique is being used only in Boston and Las Vegas until a “planned national rollout.” Great.
Christopher Ott, a spokesman for the Massachusetts ACLU, says:
“We’re concerned about this seemingly constant erosion of privacy…Accepting these kinds of searches may keep people safer in some situations, but not in every situation, and we’re encouraging people to stop and think about what is the right balance between privacy and security.”
But one air traveler actually said she supports the increased violation of privacy because “security trumps niceties.” Excuse me, but since when is freedom a nicety? Freedom is the most important thing in the world and is why the United States of America were founded. Anyone who calls liberty a nicety really does not understand right and wrong or what America is all about.
Ott, of the ACLU, is completely right. When will people wake up and stop accepting the erosion of their freedom just because it increases their safety and security?
I am pleasantly surprised with the TSA. Apparently they are aiming to roll out new airport security scanners that are less invasive than the full-body scanners that show people’s naked bodies through their clothes. From the Boston Globe:
“Logan International Airport is vying to become the first facility to use a less-invasive version of the full-body scanners that have been installed at hundreds of security checkpoints around the country this year…The Transportation Security Administration is working with technology companies to develop new software that shows a generic paper-doll-like figure instead of an actual image of a passenger’s body when it uses X-ray beams to scan for weapons and explosives.”
Creating and using these new scanners would mean that much less liberty is sacrificed in the name of security. While I believe that liberty should never be sacrificed in the name of security, this is still great news. Showing suspicious items on a generic outline of a human body is a big improvement over showing people’s naked bodies.
It’s sad that so many people have been subjected to the indignity of whole body scanners (according to the article, Logan has them at all of its major checkpoints!), but I look forward to the day when they will be no more.
