Like millions of Americans, I went back to my hometown for Christmas so I could play board games and argue with my family and have awkward drunken encounters with a bunch of people I used to semi-know in high school. The holidays! I had to travel by plane, because Amtrak takes too long and isn’t even cheaper than flying (Have you ever tried to go long distances on buses or trains in the US? Jesus), which meant going through airport security.
We have decided, as a society, that if you travel by plane it is totally all right to treat you like you are a dangerous criminal. On your way to the terminal, you remove your shoes and belt, you empty your pockets, you make sure you have no potentially dangerous(?) liquids in your bag, you stand in front of a full-body scanner and put your hands above your head for seven seconds. Sometimes you are even frisked by a dead-eyed security guard while you gaze into the middle distance. A sign in the JFK airport security line I was in informed passengers that children younger than 13 didn’t have to take their shoes off—the reasoning being, I assume, that 14-year-olds are potential shoe bombers. The only differences between central booking and airport security is that your photo isn’t taken in security (though you do have to have a photo ID), and in central booking you don’t have to go through the indignity of a body scan.
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Do all these precautions guarantee our safety? Apparently not, because the Transportation Security Administration also inspects your baggage, which can even mean opening your bag and rifling through the contents. I’ve been flying for years and did not know that! Isn’t that special? I also did not know that if you have a lock on your bag because you don’t want people opening it, TSA workers may be “forced” to break the locks and they are “not liable for damage to your locks resulting from this necessary security precaution.” Hey, so apparently the government can destroy your property and not reimburse you, even if you’ve done nothing wrong!
I learned all of this when I opened my checked bag when I got to my dad’s house and found the pictured slip on top of my stuff, which had been noticeably rearranged. It adopted a not-really-apologetic tone similar to that of a roommate telling you that he ate your leftover pasta because he was really stoned. At the bottom of the notice it says, “Smart Security Saves Time,” and that was when I really started to get pissed off.
First of all, security doesn’t save time—even if you think that our security theater really saves lives, it clearly takes a shitload of time on everyone’s part to travel through the massive security line, get scanned and/or frisked, and have your bags opened. Secondly, “smart?”? If airport security is smart, my roommate’s cat is a genius, and he spends most of his time chasing and eating stray bits of plastic bags.
It’s been said again and again, but it’s worth repeating: Airport security is a joke, a cynical piece of political showmanship that makes people feel safer by making them feel like Big Brother has his shit together. You can still get a bomb on board a plane if you really want to, even with the body scanners and the shoe removal and the invasive bag searches. A terrorist succeeded in getting a bomb on a flight back in 2009, but he was foiled by onboard security—no, just kidding, he was foiled by his own stupidity when his bomb didn’t work properly.
We haven’t had a successful airplane terrorist attack since 9/11, but it’s hard to believe that this is due to TSA breaking into people’s bags and not letting you take mouthwash on flights. It’s more likely that terrorist plots are stopped on the ground by the alphabet soup of law-enforcement agencies running around, and even more likely that very, very few people have the combination of smarts and fanaticism to pull off a suicide attack on an airplane. Airport security continues to increase anyway, in an arms race with a bunch of emotionally unbalanced loners and some guys in caves half a world away who had one plot work out ten years ago.
The slip of paper in my luggage derives its authority from “Section 110(b) of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, 49 USC 44901(c)-(e).” Does that piece of legislation say that they have to search my bag by hand? Actually, no—it would be enough to have in place measures that make sure I’m on the same flight as my bag, measures that to my knowledge already exist. Meanwhile, there’s never been a case of a bomb in a checked bag that I could find through internet research, though a bag did blow up in Miami due to a slightly comical accident involving hairspray.
There’s a really fundamental debate that could be had about whether safety is more important than liberty, and at what point a safety-concerned government crosses the line and becomes invasive and even oppressive. But that debate’s never happened—in 2001 a bunch of laws got passed in a hurry that unthinkingly traded freedom for security, and that mindset continues to this day (can you say “indefinite detention under the new NDAA”?). And this debate, if it ever occurred, would presuppose that liberty-eroding security measures would actually work and wouldn’t be ineffective ways of solving nonexistent problems.
Is a slightly inconvenient total invasion of my private belongings worth a lower risk of getting blown up in midair? I’d say maybe to probably, depending on how much the risk is lowered. But I don’t think bag searches do jack shit to make me safer, and sure don’t feel safer knowing that whenever I fly, I’m guilty until proved innocent.
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