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 Earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted 310-118 to keep the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from strip-searching passengers with millimeter-wave scanners at airport checkpoints.
Screeners will grope us instead.
Millimeter-waves function like Superman’s X-ray vision, peering through your clothing to the body beneath. You don’t undress; the scanner does that for you. Meanwhile, screeners leering at the monitor and ostensibly checking for weapons can check you out instead.
Prisons have used millimeter-wave and similar technologies for years. No wonder the TSA, which frequently confuses passengers with prisoners, has tried since its beginnings in 2002 to push us into these pornographic scanners. But public outrage always stymied those efforts; there’s something unutterably creepy about government agents inspecting naked citizens. Michael Chertoff, then Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, finally growled in 2005, “We need to not get so caught up in the endless debate [about privacy] when the technology is available and out there.”
TSA soon discovered how to avoid the debate: neglect to mention what millimeter waves do. Instead, the agency’s website promoted the contraptions as an innocuous alternative to pat-downs: “…this technology can detect weapons, explosives and other threat items concealed under layers of clothing without physical contact.” At checkpoints, neither signs nor screeners warned victims how much the scanners reveal.
Robyn Blumner is a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times who formerly worked for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She's probably more aware than most folks of the TSA’s crimes. Yet the agency was able to scam her into posing naked nonetheless when it “selected" her for "enhanced screening” at Dallas-Ft Worth Airport and “directed [her] into a large machine.” She thought she was being sniffed for explosives, not exposed to potential voyeurs in uniform — and no one told her otherwise. “Had I known [what was really going on,] I would never have agreed,” she wrote. The TSA tries to justify its Peeping-Tom policies by “remotely locating” the machine’s monitor and its screener in another room so that, theoretically at least, Tom never sets actual eyes on the passenger he’s cyber-ogled. But such a phony fig leaf didn’t console Ms. Blumner. Nor did she “realize until it was too late” what had happened: “As I stepped out of the virtual strip-search machine I immediately felt a shock wave of humiliation and intrusion, particularly as I looked around the security area and realized I was the only female traveler around and the only person ‘randomly’ selected.”
In this and countless other cases, the TSA’s silence worked. So well, in fact, that the agency could announce, “Over the course of testing this technology as the primary screening procedure in six airports” earlier this year, “99.6 percent of passengers choose this technology over other screening options.” Those “other options,” pat-downs, are so offensive that only criminals and suspects endured them prior to 9/11; it’s no surprise that unwitting passengers prefer a mechanized scan. That emboldened the TSA to unveil its plans for installing millimeter-wave scanners at all checkpoints. It wants to virtually strip every passenger on every flight.
Alarmed at this nationwide peep show, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) co-sponsored a bill limiting the technology to secondary screening only, for those passengers who flunk the metal detector. And they can choose a pat-down instead. “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane," Chaffetz said. Hard to argue with that.
But Rep Dan Lungren (R-CA) did. Thanks to his artificial hip, screeners paw him every time he flies. He’d rather they see him naked (talk about transparency in government!), so he opposed Chaffetz’s bill. Lungren apparently didn’t understand that the bill gives him a choice — if you count posing naked, being groped, or forfeiting your airline ticket and possibly going to jail a choice.
Real choice — not the fake, forced, false dichotomy that passes for choice at the TSA — is important to all of us. In fact, it’s synonymous with freedom. And that’s why we ought to abolish the TSA rather than settle for curbing some of its abuses. The TSA strips not only clothing but choice from us and from the airlines. It’s a one-size-fits-all system that politicians imposed on every commercial airport in the country without regard for differences in location, problems, customers, etc. Airlines and airports cannot select other methods for securing their inventory of billion-dollar jets and their customers, regardless of what experts in security may recommend.
And that’s a shame given the TSA’s sham. Since it was a political rather than a practical response to 9/11, it cannot and does not protect us. For starters, no research substantiates any of its prejudices about security — including the theory that disarmed passengers are safe passengers. The Feds pushed that idea in response to the hijackings of the 1960’s, primarily because they couldn’t come up with anything better. But no one’s ever studied the question, much less proved it. Imagine how differently 9/11 might have ended had someone other than the terrorists aboard those planes wielded a weapon.
Ditto for the TSA’s practices. There are probably far more effective safeguards than swiping passengers’ toothpaste and forcing them to shed their shoes, but no one knows because the Feds deny us the freedom to find out.
Absent the TSA, aviation could offer as much or as little security as airlines and their customers need. SafeAir might cater to those like Rep. Lungren who happily relinquish personal dignity, while Tough Guy Airlines would forego such humiliation and hire prizefighters as flight attendants. When we shove politicians out of the way, choices multiply and everyone’s satisfied.
The bill restricting the TSA’s voyeurism now heads to the Senate — which may strip it of Chaffetz’s anti-stripping amendment. Even if the amendment and its incomplete protection survive, the bill also hands the agency $15.7 billion of our taxes over fiscal year 2010-2011. Let’s send the TSA packing instead. We’ll save our money — and our freedom.
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