“I am a public servant, and not permitted to use my own judgment in any way.” – Superintendent Chalmers
As I mentioned in the site news post Wednesday, I’m traveling this weekend. Mercifully, I don’t need to fly. The inconvenience of air travel is a pretty well established general grievance. Anybody who has ever flown has some kind of story about it. Sympathizing with travelers, poor humble citizens being jerked around yet again, comes naturally. The people I really feel for here though are the poor bastards who have to work the security lines and take responsibility.
Short of strip searching everyone and making us all fly naked (and wouldn’t that be a sight!) there is no way to completely secure an airliner. It cannot be done. Airport security is a charade to make people feel safe about traveling while providing maximum ass cover for the officials in charge. We have extremely secure air travel. But it’s not because we restrict liquids or make people put their shoes through the x-ray machine. It’s because we have better locks on cockpit doors, computers that can land the plane without human help and, most important, well trained personnel at every step of the way.
The ban on liquids last year was illuminating. First they prohibited all carry on liquids, which from a strictly security point of view is the only thing to do. The news was immediately filled with unseemly tales of the absurd: people giving away valuable bottles of perfume, mothers having to drink breast milk in front of security, etc. It was too insane to last and it ended in a forced compromise that is the worst of both worlds: you can bring liquids, but only in small sizes and only in a clear, plastic bag.
The travel size liquids and plastic bags make flying that much more inconvenient and daunting. But anyone with a decent knowledge of chemistry (read: B- or above in high school) has the basic understanding needed to construct a small explosive out of things you could hide in a couple of travel sized bottles. We’re causing more anxiety but are still unable to provide the impossible standard of security we’ve set for ourselves.
Let’s look at something they haven’t banned yet: electronics. From a physics and chemistry standpoint, they should ban all carry on electronics immediately. To you and me it’s something to do on the plane to help pass all that boring, uncomfortable time in the pipe. To security it’s a sealed plastic shell that could contain anything. Inside something as large as a laptop you could put any number of dangerous chemicals that would look utterly laptop-like on x-ray machine display. (If you wanted to be really clever, you could even preserve the functionality so it at least appeared to boot up if activated.) Of course they can’t ban laptops or other electronics. The business travelers would stage an immediate torch and pitchfork style rebellion and parents would be deprived of the miracle of portable video entertainment.
There are also all sorts of places on the human body you can conceal things. It’s pretty easy to get items in to and out of the rectum and the stomach if you’re willing to make the effort. Glass eyes, false teeth, and prostheses spring to mind as well.
To combat all that we’ve got massive amounts of technology and piles of complicated regulations. I suspect that most of those machines in the concourses, and all the new ones that will surely make an appearance in the coming years, are predominantly a boondoggle for any idiot who can dream up some crazy new security device and hire a lobbyist to make it seem like the safety of America rests on adopting this new (patented) device or technique. As long as people and their bags get from one place to another (most of the time) everything else will be made ever more cumbersome and convoluted in the name of security. But inconvenience does not equal safety, and pushing the screening process to the limits of human tolerance doesn’t make flying any safer, just more annoying.
That’s the hideous reality for our security personnel. Every passenger and item that passes through must be treated as a threat, no matter how preposterous it is to consider. They are the tangible, uniformed proof of how serious we are about security yet the rules and regulations that they must follow make them objects of ridicule and annoyance.
Airport security ought to resemble a relaxed border crossing more than anything else. Step up, show your identification, answer a few questions to give the agent a quick appraisal of your state of mind, and be on your way. If the agent doesn’t like something, you get pulled aside. That would certainly result in some racial disparities, which is unfortunate, but it would be less onerous and more honest than what we’re currently doing. We should ease up on the goofy rules and put our trust in the people at the airport.
