A pregnant woman who suffers from diabetes got into trouble with the TSA in Denver. They allowed her to take through her needles and syringes. But they confiscated her insulin, claiming it was an explosives risk.
The woman and her husband have filed a formal complaint with the TSA. She spoke to Denver’s ABC affiliate on condition of anonymity; as a frequent traveler, she fears retaliation.
The TSA has a habit of confiscating security-unrelated items. Over at The American Spectator, I recall just such an experience that I had at O’Hare. After years of wondering what became of my beloved Leatherman, I was able to find a likely answer: it probably found its way to a government surplus store. One store alone made $300,000 just from TSA-confiscated items. As I conclude:
So rest easy the next time a TSA screener takes away your spear gun (yes, that’s on the verboten list). You’re not just making air travel safer by leaving it behind. You’re also doing your part to reduce government deficits.
TSA policies are an over-reaction to a rare threat that kills fewer people each year than lightning strikes. Unfortunately, the human mind is not entirely rational when calculating the risk from rare but conspicuous threats, so the TSA is probably here to stay.
TSA officials recently performed a bomb drill at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and didn’t tell anyone about it in advance. Local police surrounded a TSA-employed “bomber” with guns drawn before someone finally told them it was only a drill. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
A spokeswoman says that TSA will “ensure the correct procedures will be followed in the future.”
Time will tell.
Apparently its stroller failed an explosives screening. Surprisingly, no explosives were found during extra screening, including what a TSA official describes as a “modified pat-down” of the suspicious infant.
Sometimes people wonder why I favor abolishing the TSA outright and putting airlines in charge of their own security. One reason is incentives. If airlines don’t keep people safe, they go out of business. That’s a powerful incentive to have high standards.
The TSA’s incentives aren’t geared towards performance — and it shows. Instead, its incentives are geared toward growing its budget and expanding its mission.
That’s the primary intellectual argument. But some reasons for getting rid of the TSA are more visceral. This video of a TSA agent groping a 6-year-old girl shows one of them.
Don’t like dealing with the TSA’s body scanners or pat-downs? Consider getting into politics. The Associated Press reports:
Cabinet secretaries, top congressional leaders and an exclusive group of senior U.S. officials are exempt from toughened new airport screening procedures when they fly commercially with government-approved federal security details.
Maybe Congress and the president would be more willing to rein in the TSA’s excesses if more of them actually had to endure them.
Apparently TSA head John Pistole goes through the same security that you and I do, for which he deserves praise. Though one does wonder why it hasn’t made him realize the absurdity of modern security theater.
Image credit: Brad Eshbach’s flickr photostream.
Reading William Gibson’s recent novel, Zero History, I came across an interesting passage:
There were cameras literally everywhere in London. … He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of auto-immune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ‘roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.
I find his comparing the hyper-protective state’s infringements on freedom to an auto-immune disease quite provocative.
As a young analyst, I worked on a project for the military, researching sabotage threats to American security. We found that preventing sabotage was impossible-a risk free world wasn’t in the cards. However, nation states were reliable disciplinary forces against saboteurs. Today, however, terrorists are often stateless. Thus, there are no obvious ways of disciplining such behavior.
Still, although we cannot ensure a “safe” world, we need to do what we can to make the world “safer.” To do so, everyone must be mindful of security; we cannot simply accept the measures pushed by bureaucracy as sufficient. Airlines are not only better equipped to determine the weak points in their passenger and freight handling systems but also have a greater stake in the success of security measures.
Government, in assuming responsibility for air safety, for example, creates moral hazard and neglects the costs to our economic and civil liberties. Consider the security risk created by bottlenecked security lines. We are all targets as we inch through the lines, waiting to be cleared for safety.
America’s response to 9/11 created far more costs than the attack itself. We as a society have failed to distinguish between healthy defenses and paranoid bureaucratic responses. HSA and its sub-agency, TSA, are but two examples. As many have noted, on 9/11 some horrible individuals did terrible things to America; on 9/12, our politicians took over! The costs – both direct and indirect – of such bureaucratic anti-terrorist policies are massive. And now the TSA has embarked on a massive new campaign to force air travelers to submit to either electronic nude-searches or the equally intrusive pat downs. The outrage from this move may allow us to reevaluate our whole approach to achieving a safer world.
Everyone wants to live in a safe world but only government has the arrogance to claim they can achieve this. In fact, all the government can do is make the world less convenient, less free, and more costly-exactly the result the 9/11 perpetrators sought. Should we allow them to succeed?
Photo Credit: bfraz’s Flickr photostream
The TSA has crossed a line. Its new security procedures require employees to either touch passengers’ genitals or take pictures of them. The public backlash is loud and growing. My colleagues Michelle Minton, Brian McGraw, and Ivan Osorio have all covered the issue. Here are what other people around the country are saying:
Tim Carney reports that the CEO of Rapiscan, a scanner manufacturer, is an Obama donor and accompanied the President on his recent trip to India.
A group of activists has declared November 24 to be National Opt-Out Day. November 24 is the day before Thanksgiving, and will be one of the year’s busiest travel days. Since pat-downs take more time than full-body scans, the goal is to clog security until TSA removes full-body scanners from airports. I will be participating.
The proprietor of Our Little Chatterboxes, a blog about child development issues, recounts her encounter with the TSA’s new pat-down procedures. She writes, “[The TSA employee] felt along my waistline, moved behind me, then proceeded to feel both of my buttocks. She reached from behind in the middle of my buttocks towards my vagina area… She then moved in front of my and touched the top and underneath portions of both of my breasts… She then felt my inner thighs and my vagina area, touching both of my labia.”
The blogger at Insert Title Here tells his story, with video. He was threatened with a $10,000 civil suit.
The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman wrote an excellent column, noting that “The U.S. Marshals Service recently admitted saving some 35,000 images from a [full-body scanning] machine at a federal courthouse in Florida. TSA says that will never happen. Human experience says, oh, yes, it will.”
Art Carden calls for abolishing the TSA. “The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility,” he writes.
The Drudge Report posts a picture of a TSA agent fondling a nun’s private parts.
Photo credit: cjdavis’ flickr photostream.
The TSA doesn’t have very many friends these days. Do they deserve any?
In an interview (halfway down on the left sidebar), John Pistole (TSA director) was pressed twice at why the gentleman from San Francisco was told that he might be subject to a $10,000 fine for his unwillingness to go through with new invasive security procedures. He dodged this question both times it was asked, despite it being critically important for him to acknowledge how outrageous this type of fine would be.
For a background on what happened, you can read an account here. According to Tyner, he had looked at the San Diego Airport’s website ahead of time, which didn’t indicate that they were using these scanners. He didn’t feel comfortable using them and it seems he might not have made his trip (or driven instead, etc.) if he knew he would be subjected to the scanners.
So, when he was selected for the scan, he refused, then refused the pat-down when he found out the TSA agent would be patting down his private parts. The recurring attitude featured by the TSA, etc., here is that the peasant-citizenry should have no qualms with the enlightened technocrats and their unfortunate but necessary intrusion into the privacy of everyday Americans.
Even if you accept the premise that these technologies are necessary to keep our flights safe (which many people don’t), it doesn’t follow that he has violated any sort of reasonable law. He didn’t believe the benefits of his vacation outweighed the costs of his loss of privacy, so he “accepted” not being allowed to fly. What is the point of also attempting to fine him $10,000 other than bullying other Americans towards acceptance of these new procedures?
Many free-marketeers have suggested the U.S. would benefit from returning to non-nationalized airport security. It certainly makes sense — after all, airlines stand to lose a lot of money if anything goes wrong on their planes. In a security game that involves keeping up with ever-changing terrorist threats (i.e., 10 years ago, we could wear shoes and not need to buy new contact solution every time we left town), I trust the profit-seekers over the government to find an appropriate balance between consumer demands for privacy and airline security.
Is the TSA capable of finding that balance? Here is the TSA patting down a three-year-old. They also require pilots to go through the same security procedures (remember, pilots have the ability to steer planes into buildings), who undoubtedly already go through long background checks before they become licensed pilots.
Photo credit: jello2594′s flickr photostream.
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