Today’s Standard Times editorial (“Don’t weaken airport security”) is the result of good homework but bad analysis.
Acknowledging sperm mutations and an increased risk of cancer from the new “porno” scanners, the editors nevertheless advocate submitting to an imaging procedure which displays prostheses, colostomy bags, tampons, and the outline of genitals.
The editors warn that opting out of the virtual strip search and instead requesting an “enhanced pat-down” may not make them any happier. This second option, as it has sometimes been implemented, is neither enhanced nor a pat-down. It is simply sexual molestation by another name.
As terrorists get more sophis ticated, we will be called on to give up more and more of our privacy and our liberties. The Standard Times pooh-poohs the notion that these new procedures are indicative of a Big Brother society – but what’s next from the TSA when terrorists regularly start carrying explosives embedded in their bodies? Full strip and cavity searches?
Throwing away our right to privacy in the most intimate of ways is not the answer. Neither is privatizing air traffic safety. TSA agents, for all the outrageous things they are asked to do by the changing dictates of security agencies, are much more professional than their private sector predecessors. And neither is the answer to implement racial or ethnic profiling. Not only is it statistically useless, as a recent study by Professor William Press from the University of Texas at Austin shows, it leaves the door open to simple harassment. Just ask Donna Shalala, former US Secretary of Health and an Arab American, about her treatment at Ben Gurion airport last July. Apparently her profile as an American VIP and supporter of Israel were not as important as her profile as a suspicious 69-year-old Arab woman.
Until the root causes of terrorism have been addressed, attempts to bring down planes will continue. If Americans have no interest in discovering the real reasons our country has so many enemies, then we’d better get our scientists busy working on improving those million dollar bomb sniffers.
If my only choices are to have my genitals filmed or groped – or to be prohibited from traveling – these are not really choices at all. And this is indeed symptomatic of a Big Brother society with its rapidly multiplying security apparatus. I’m surprised the editors don’t find any of this as appalling as the average citizen does.
This was published in the Standard Times on November 27, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20101127/opinion/11270344
Comments are closed.