security theater

Regulation of the Day 200: Flying Food

by Ryan Young on November 23, 2011

in Features, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation of the Day

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Millions of Americans are taking to the skies to spend time with their families over Thanksgiving. Many of them will be carrying leftovers on their return trips. Fortunately, the TSA is fully prepared to defend the airways against terrorist turkeys and rogue desserts. Here is a list of food and other holiday-themed items that run afoul of the TSA’s 3-1-1 rule:

Cranberry sauce, creamy dips and spreads (cheeses, peanut butter, etc.), gift baskets with food items (salsa, jams and salad dressings), gravy, jams, jellies, maple syrup, oils and vinegars, salad dressing, salsa, sauces, soups, wine, liquor and beer.

That means you’ll have to put them in checked baggage if you have a decent amount. They are far too dangerous to bring on the plane in a carry-on.

There are also specific guidelines for pies and cakes:

Note: You can bring pies and cakes through the security checkpoint, but please be advised that they are subject to additional screening.

I feel safer already.

TSA Pats Down Infant

by Ryan Young on May 12, 2011

in Precaution & Risk, Regulation

Post image for TSA Pats Down Infant

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.

TSA Gropes 6-Year-Old Girl

by Ryan Young on April 13, 2011 · 1 comment

in Mobility, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk

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.

TSA Sexual Harassment: Disappointing, but Not Surprising

by Ryan Young on November 24, 2010 · 2 comments

in Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

The TSA claims that it randomly picks some passengers for additional screening. Apparently the process is sometimes less than random.

A woman flying from Orlando International Airport is claiming that two male TSA officers selected her for additional screening because of the size of her breasts:

“It was pretty obvious. One of the guys that was staring me up and down was the one who pulled me over,” said Sutherland. “Not a comfortable feeling.”

The vast majority of TSA screeners are not perverts. Even so, one can expect to see more stories like this in the coming weeks.

Image credit: Inha Leex Hale’s flickr photostream.

TSA Exempts Politicians from Body Scans and Pat-Downs

by Ryan Young on November 24, 2010 · 1 comment

in Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

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.

TSA Roundup

by Ryan Young on November 23, 2010 · 2 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Tech & Telecom

The Thanksgiving travel rush is officially underway. Airports are clogged with passengers. Many of them are upset at new TSA screening policies. A new poll finds 60 percent support for full-body scanning, and just under 50 percent support for pat-downs that involve touching breasts, buttocks, and genitals.

If that sounds high, remember that most Americans don’t fly. Jim Harper also points out that the poll’s wording is biased. “Before being asked about strip-search machines, poll-takers hear cognates of “terror” three times, “privacy” once.” Wording like that skews the results in the TSA’s favor.

Unsurprisingly, many TSA employees don’t care for the new pat-down policy either. Near-constant verbal abuse and poor passenger hygiene are among their biggest complaints. There is also the matter of having to “feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers.”

Assuming that most TSA screeners are not sex perverts, it can’t be much fun spending 8-hour shifts inspecting other peoples’ genitals. However, not all TSA employees are mentally sound. A TSA employee kidnapped a woman from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and assaulted her.

This was the action of a disturbed individual, and probably unrelated to the backlash against the TSA’s new policies. Even so, that means the TSA has done more harm than good; TSA has yet to catch a single terrorist during its entire existence.

One reason is that its screeners are ineffective. Adam Savage from the television show Mythbusters accidentally arrived at airport security with two 12-inch razor blades. The TSA did not find them, despite giving him a full-body scan.

Ars Technica posts a video of Savage telling his story, and points out that ”If the TSA thinks you can hijack a plane with saline solution and nail clippers, Savage’s 12″ razor blades are the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Since the blades weren’t anywhere near Savage’s privates, they likely would have been missed by the pat-down as well.”

At least one argument against full-body scanners does not hold ground: that the radiation dose from repeated scans can cause cancer and other illnesses. The dose of so small, that the odds of dying from the radiation exposure is roughly the same as dying in a terrorist attack. Those odds are less than 1 in 10,000,000. Passengers are over 20 times more likely to be struck by lightning.

As with any government agency, the TSA is highly politicized. ?The two companies that make the scanners have ramped up their lobbying efforts? in recent years, getting political heavyweights such as Linda Daschle (the lobbyist wife of former Sen. Tom Daschle) and Michael Chertoff to promote the scanners on Capitol Hill.

One privacy concern about full-body scans is that the images could be stored and possibly leaked on the Internet. This has already happened at a courthouse in Florida (you can see 100 of the 35,000 leaked images ?here?). But the TSA says that won’t be a problem with their scanners. Common sense says otherwise.

Their machines are unable to store images, yes. But any enterprising screener can modify them. Or he could even snap a picture of a naked image with his cell phone. Fortunately, a recent story about a Denver TSA screener who was caught masturbating is a hoax. But the very fact that it is plausible should give TSA boosters pause.

In fact, flying at 30,000 feet exposes passengers to “3 mrem of radiation, an amount that is 150 times greater than the scanner gives you before you board the same flight.”

That’s about the strongest argument in favor of the scanners. But it is outweighed by the fact that they induce some people to drive instead of fly. Since driving is more dangerous than flying, the scanners are expected, on net, to kill people.

They are not expected to actually save any lives, as security expert Bruce Schneier makes crystal clear.

It is well past time to abolish the TSA. Let airlines and airports determine their own policies. Let them compete on safety; if people think flying is dangerous, they won’t fly. Airlines have everything to lose. The TSA has no such incentive. If anything, its repeated failures are rewarded with budget increases.

Anti-Terrorism: A Political Auto-Immune Disease?

by Fred Smith on November 22, 2010

in Odds & Ends, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

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

TSA’s John Pistole Offers to Probe Senators: Shouldn’t He Buy Them Dinner First?

by Ryan Young on November 17, 2010

in Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Privacy

TSA chief John Pistole offered to give enhanced pat-downs to senators at a hearing today on TSA’s new screening policies. Over at the AmSpec blog, I break down the cause of the controversy and point out that there’s a lot more to the story than national security.

The curiously-named Rapiscan is one of two companies that makes full-body imaging machines. As former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney reports, Rapiscan’s CEO is an Obama donor who accompanied the president on his recent trip to India.

Rent-seeking being a bipartisan phenomenon, the company also paid President Bush’s former Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, to promote Rapiscan’s full-body scanners.

Image credit: TalkMediaNews’ flickr photostream.

Pat-Downs or Full-Body Imaging? TSA Airport Security Backlash

by Ryan Young on November 15, 2010 · 2 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk

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.

TSA versus America

by Brian McGraw on November 15, 2010 · 21 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty

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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