After hearing acount after account from friends and acquaintances of rude
and sometimes abusive behavior by federal officials in Immigrations, TSA,
and others, I spoke by telephone to a fellow at TSA in Washington. He was
agreeable and helpful, which is not a response one always gets in the capital.
Anyway, I subseqquently wrote him a letter, reproduced below, which addresses
matters that in the past have been of interest to readers.
Dear Mr. ,
After our conversation of last week (and I appreciated your taking the time)
I thought carefully about the problem of “TSA”—which, as
I mentioned, has become a catch-all world for everything people don’t
like about governmental intrusion on traveling. It is true that in airports
the emigrations officers are much more obnoxious than the genuine TSA personnel.
I discussed the matter with a group of friends who, like me, are roughly
in their mid-sixties—that is, who remember the United States as it was
years ago. We agreed that we are seeing an anger in the United States, chiefly
directed at government, that is new to us. There was widespread anger during
the war in Vietnam, but it was directed at the war, not the government in
general. Today we have something different.
There is a sense that the government now is not only hostile to the public,
which it never was before, but out of control. The degree of intrusiveness
has grown from almost none to almost unrestrained—or so people feel.
A few examples:
It is widely assumed by sane and educated people that NSA monitors all email;
whether this is true I am not sure, but it is believed. Habeas corpus seems
to have gone away. The Fourth Amendment no longer seems to exist, “random”
searches on the street being legal. Finances are tracked. You can’t
buy a commuter train ticket without a governmental ID, information from which
goes into a computer (my experience on MARC).
Police are more militarized and more aggressive. The financial crisis is
seen, with ample evidence, as the result of corruption and lack of federal
regulation. A million people are said to be on the no-fly list. Metal detectors
proliferate. Toothpaste and deodorants are confiscated at airports. The country
is seen to be in serious decline while the government spends a trillion a
year on the Pentagon and wars of mysterious purpose. Children are forced to
take Ritalin. The bureaucracy is unresponsive: It takes a year even to get
records from the VA, any dealing with IRS can turn into a years-long nightmare
even if it is only a routine matter, and the paperwork is so complex that
you can’t do anything without a specialized lawyer. I could go on for
pages.
This is the context in which “TSA” (in the sense mentioned above)
operates. I do not suggest that much that TSA does is illegal. Anything is
legal that Congress says is legal, except in the unlikely event that the Supreme
Court disagrees. Rather I question whether much of “security”
actually accomplishes what it is supposed to accomplish, and whether the benefits
outweigh the harm done.
Consider the inspection of all photos in a passenger’s camera, which
recently happened to me. It is grossly intrusive and potentially humiliating.
Depending on circumstances, the traveler may have nude pictures of his wife,
or pictures of himself engaging in sex with a Thai transvestite. Neither is
illegal, and neither is the government’s business.
Do these searches in any sense inhibit the dissemination of child pornography?
Yes—for about a week. Once the pedophiles learn of the searches—and
people who smuggle extremely illegal photos make a point of being aware of
such things—the measure becomes worthless. The malefactor puts the memory
card with the porn in his back pocket, and leaves a card of innocent photos
in the camera.
Of course “TSA” could go through the traveler’s pockets
and do a detailed search of his luggage for a tiny chip secreted in a pair
of dirty socks. TSA personnel do not have tight connections. A friend recently
showed me a memory chip, four gig I think it was, no larger than a pencil
eraser. Will “TSA” begin doing random body-cavity searches? Does
minor and ineffective inconvenience to the pedophile offset massive inconvenience
and indignity to the innocent?
So much of “security” is so obviously pointless that one wonders
why it exists. If you randomly search one in fifty passengers boarding Amtrak
at rush hour, you do not detect the terrorist ninety-eight percent of the
time. In the case of a suicide bomber, the detection leads to an immediate
explosion and, unless you conduct the inspection robotically in a blast-proof
room, several dead.
To the public, at any rate to the many people with whom I have discussed
the matter, the air of federal fear seems almost demented. I have had an (actual)
TSA woman solemnly examine a pair of tweezers to determine whether they were
blunt-nosed (acceptable) or pointed (posing a threat of hijacking). Do we
really believe that a team of Al Quaeda terrorists are going to leap up brandishing
tweezers? Equally absurd is that a woman cannot enter the US consulate in
Guadalajara with her lipstick. Yes, I know it could contain a cyanide dart
or a hidden vial of Tabun. So could anything.
This, while
not solemnly written, makes a variety of points that occur to many, many people.
How much security is enough? Any amount of intrusion whatever can be justified
on grounds of slight or imaginary benefits. Those strip-scanners that famously
reduce travelers to near-nudity are loathed by women; have they actually accomplished
any desirable end, except for the manufacturer? People in the federal security
business tend to believe that surveillance is for the safety of the public,
then to believe that more surveillance will produce more safety, and finally
to fall into the rationale that “if you are doing nothing wrong, you
have nothing to fear from inspections etc.” Police in general tend naturally
to believe this. Always, always, it leads to abuses that render the public
fearful of the police. For this reason the Fourth Amendment was propounded.
In my eight years as a police reporter for the Washington Times, the police
needed probable cause to conduct a search, this being defined as “an
articulable reason to believe that a specific person was committing a specific
crime.” (Sometimes they lied when they wanted probable cause, but the
requirement nonetheless provided a degree of protection for the public.) Walking
through Penn Station in Baltimore does not meet the definition of probable
cause, yet the PA system constantly announces that people are subject to random
search.
The knowledge that one may be searched at any time is intimidating, and
being searched, humiliating. Yes, it is legal. A judge can always be found
who will find constitutional almost anything. Yet the ability to say “no”
to causeless searches was a thing that distinguished America from the Soviet
Union. It no longer does.
Finally, there is the tendency for industry to see federal programs as money
spigots. (Having long covered the Pentagon, I know the game well.) A company
comes up with a better x-ray scanner at $170 thousand per each, times 2500
or however many airport security gates. That’s money. There are also
the contracts for training TSA personnel, for maintenance, and for upgrades.
A race ensues to come up with an even better scanner, or nitrate sniffer,
or blast-proof trash cans for Metro, which can then be sold to the government.
So it isn’t just the rudeness and bullying of Immigrations people,
or the confiscation of toothpaste and shampoo and bottled water. It is the
sense that the government, if not quite an enemy perhaps, is not friendly,
and is endless trouble. For a large and, I thank, growing number of people,
the most fervent wish is that the government leave them the hell alone.
Sincerely,
Fred Reed
