TSA and Airport Body SCanners

National Opt-Out Day
Nov 12 2010 by James Fallows

Items on security, security theater, a proper climate of caution, and an excessive climate of fear:

1) A very powerful column by Salon's Patrick Smith, in his "Ask the Pilot" series, explaining why media, politicians, and the public have collectively magnified potential terrorists' powers, by treating attacks on airliners as the worst imaginable threat to the nation. The column begins with surprising historical perspective. You'll be glad to have read it. Smith goes systematically through most of the justifications that have been advanced for airport-based security theater and lays out how extreme our reactions have become.

2) On the general climate of excess fearfulness, Fabius Maximus has an angry, trenchant article, here, about the media and internet (over) reaction to the purported missile contrail seen earlier this week in Southern California. Summary:

>>It's a serious weakness for America, since panic and fear are contagious. Someone with a bomb in his shoe, someone sending a few bombs in printer cartridges -- no matter how small the threat, each provokes extreme reactions. Large expenditures of funds, inconvenience to millions of people, loss of civil rights. On a larger scale, pointless foreign wars (WMD in Iraq!), torture of prisoners, and now Presidential orders to assassinate US citizens...It's hardly the behavior of a confident superpower.<<

For more on the "missile" launch, see AVweb, here.

3) Jeffrey Goldberg has given one perspective on the TSA "intimate pat-down" procedures that are the alternative to new "enhanced imaging" machines. A group of scientists from UCSF has offered their own reasons for concern. (PDF here; main issue is extra radiation risk.) So has the Libertarian Party of America, here. Just today I heard about "National Opt-Out Day" -- the proposal that on Nov 24, perhaps the busiest travel day of the year, passengers "opt out" of the new imaging systems and ask for the pat-down instead. Details here; images from the new scanners below, and here.

4) Go read Patrick Smith's column again. And, below, while this isn't really "serious," and has been previously publicized, why not (something similar is here):