To Let the Government Touch, or Not to Let the Government Touch--The great debate of our times

Pajamas Media ^ | November 19, 2010 | Bryan Preston

[jazusamo]

Ronald Reagan famously quipped that the most terrifying sentence in the English language is “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Truly, Ronaldus Magnus was more right than he ever knew. Behold your friendly government agent, who is only here to help, courtesy the Denver Post.

It’s not quite the Gadsden Flag, but this image is fast becoming the symbol of the new “Don’t touch my junk” movement.  Whether to let government agents touch us where the sun don’t shine or not is no longer an academic question. It’s happening to more and more fliers every day, among other things altering the meaning of “frequent flier” in some unpleasant ways. And never let anyone hear you say that you enjoy air travel nowadays. They’ll look at you funny. And as each day of this passes, you’ll deserve it.

But the great TSA, or T&A, fracas brings up an item for debate: Which is more invasive, the picture machine/close touch combo or the mental search as done by the Israelis? Before you answer, read up on Michael Totten’s take on Israeli airport security techniques:

[O]fficials at Ben Gurion International Airport interview everyone in line before they’re even allowed to check in.

And Israeli officials profile. They don’t profile racially, but they profile. Israeli Arabs breeze through rather quickly, but thanks to the dozens of dubious-looking stamps in my passport — almost half are from Lebanon and Iraq — I get pulled off to the side for more questioning every time. And I’m a white, nominally Christian American.

If they pull you aside, you had better tell them the truth. They’ll ask you so many wildly unpredictable questions so quickly, you couldn’t possibly invent a fake story and keep it all straight. Don’t even try. They’re highly trained and experienced, and they catch everyone who tries to pull something over on them.

That sounds more than a little intimidating. But don’t answer yet. Not until you’ve heard from Claire Berlinski.

When I last flew El Al, they began with simple questions: Why are you flying to Israel? To give a lecture? Where? Who invited you? Really? Do you have a copy of the invitation? How do you know them? Really? And you don’t speak Hebrew? None? Why not? You didn’t learn any in school? Why not? It went on for quite some time. Somehow I ended up telling them where exactly I’d gone to kindergarten. That’s not one of those details that would be easy to manufacture on the spot.

Where she went to kindergarten? That’s pretty invasive, actually, but only in a mental and personal-biography sense. It could be mildly embarrassing if you went to some school that you didn’t want to admit to in public, I suppose, so Aggies may not like it. The likelihood of the questioning agent actually remembering all of those details you’re forced to give them is pretty low. They’re smart, trained agents, but they interview hundreds if not thousands of travelers per day. And they’re not really looking for the information anyway; they’re gauging your reaction to the questions, and evaluating that for possible further inquiry.

On the other hand, the likelihood of TSA’s picture machines saving your naked pic for further, ahem, study is higher than we were told when they and their lobbyists sold these things to the public.

Terrorists are smart, or at least the terror masters who send out the stupid bombers are smart. They study our security methods. They adapt based on their successes and failures. They mix it up.  One day it’s box cutters, the next it’s a shoe bomb, the one after that it’s the panty bomber. You can see where this is going, and the next search mechanism that takes that next move entirely into account is going to give us all a national colonoscopy. Literally. But hey, TSA is only here to help.

So far, our federal betters’ approach has been to adapt to what the terrorists have already done, not what they’re about to do or thinking of doing. The Israeli system seems to take this tactical reality into account. Instead of focusing on what terrorists have already done and using that to inconvenience and irritate the innocent flying public, the Israelis focus on behavior. What they’re doing, as Michael Totten notes, is profiling. It’s just not ethnic profiling.

That makes sense too, once you give it a few minutes’ thought. Arabs comprise about 9% of the Israeli population. Sure, Israel could try to profile that and just keep that 9% off their airplanes. Among other bad outcomes, that’s likely to radicalize enough Arabs who wouldn’t otherwise go Arafat that it might create more day-to-day security problems than it would be worth. And besides that, profiling against such a broad swath of its population just runs against the grain of what most would consider right or fair, or even justified. And going purely on ethnicity probably wouldn’t catch the Jose Padillas and Richard Reids of the world anyway, so the terrorists would just recruit more of them.

The question is, is Israelification of our airports even possible for us?  A year’s worth of travel in and out of Ben Gurion probably adds up to half a week of total U.S. annual air travel. We’re a lot bigger and we have a lot more airports, with a lot more international connections. It seems to me that Israelification is scalable to the U.S. system. It would require a lot of training and adaptation, but we should be training our security folks to think and act smarter anyway. Aside from keeping us safer, having them become smarter just might keep them from unionizing. Which they were never supposed to be able to do anyway, but may now, thanks to this lawless administration and its tendency to get by with giving more than a little help to its union friends.

Even though the Israeli method can be a bit of a brain invasion, put me down as favoring that over the TSA strip n grope routine. Getting past the frisking of nuns and kids and the unwelcome touching of junk, the Israeli system is one thing that ours definitely isn’t: it’s smart.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, hails from Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

[Paladin2]

The issue is should the gov’t “profile” or just act stupidly.

[jazusamo]

Exactly! It’s worked for the Israeli’s for decades.

[Thunder90]

To think, if this happened under Bush, there would be open calls for impeachment, investigations, and massive rallies calling Bush a Nazi and a fascist. The ACLU, CAIR, and other organizations would be screaming A LOT louder than they are now. And, the Democrats, including Obama and Biden, would be calling for a moratorium on it.

No TSA searches.... Unless a Democrat is President...

[SumProVita]

I FULLY support profiling and extended interviews.

And.... Gee....the cargo is not getting much attention....or have they increased attention to this...and we simply haven’t heard anything about it?

[bboop]

There is no debate. They can keep their grubby hands off. And if they want to learn from the best, they can go take lessons from El Al. They have perfected it by using COMMON SENSE.

[gwilhelm56]

I will NOT be flying anytime soon.. unless I can afford to go NETJETS. If I can’t drive... I’m NOT GOING.

New tag says it all as to why!

[BobP]

To think, if this happened under Bush, there would be open calls for impeachment, investigations, and massive rallies calling Bush a Nazi and a fascist.

--------------------------

Download or listen to this small audio file:
Airport Insanity.

Download or listen to this small audio file:
TSA Insanity.

Download or listen to this small audio file:
Don't touch my junk.

[taxtruth]

Charges should be filed against all TSA workers asap.

[Girlene]

No debate - No touch. They’ve crossed a line in the sand that freedom-loving individuals, parents, even DU’ers understand.

Good read, jaz.

[Jim Scott]

I'm glad this TSA groping/full-body scan issue has arisen. We've become a nation of sheep, passively acquiescing to a constant erosion of our freedoms. As Mark Stein said today on the Rush Limbaugh show: if you could go back in time (to 1946) and tell George Orwell that U.S. government bureaucrats will be groping American citizens genitalia when they want to board a commercial airline flight and this will be considered both necessary and normal, he would think you were nuts.

We've allowed the left to push us far, far from where the Founders envisioned our citizens to be; free and independent with a small government. Apathy and the clever manipulation of the media, academia and the political process have brought us to this fine mess. Only a huge, unrelenting public clamor and determined resistance to this outrage against this government-led obscene violation of people's privacy (while ignoring the benefits of profiling) can reverse this ridiculous policy. We'll see. At least the issue has awakened people and perhaps to the point where they'll rebel. However, I'm not holding my breath, waiting.

[Gene Eric]

>> Charges should be filed against all TSA workers asap.

Indeed the oppressive government fosters and enjoys class warfare.

Before we completely condemning those charged with ‘protecting’ us, let’s turn our attention to the leadership that issued the mandate.

Contact Congress.

[Gene Eric]

Before we completely...

[lp boonie]

Problem with the El Al model is we would have to fire all of TSA. They are not the brightest bulbs in the package from what I’ve seen. They tried to train chimpanzees to do the TSA screener jobs but they kept getting bored and wandering off.

[july4thfreedomfoundation]

There WERE searches when Bush was president.

As a member of the flyertalk.com web site since February, 2002, I can tell you that the frequent flyers who post there have been very upset since the airports re-opened several days after the Sept. 11th, 2001 attacks.

True, they didn’t have the x-ray scanners until about a year, year and a half ago, originally in 19 airports, but the TSA started agressive breast pat-downs of women in 2004 in response to the Russian plane bombings by Muslim women.
After thousands of women complained, that policy ended.

There were occasional reports of men (and women) being patted down and gropped in private areas, and men (and some women) being told to unzip their pants and shake them out; every third or fourth person stopped at the gate for a secondary search; women having their bras and panties pulled out of their carry-ons and held in the air while the TSA guide searched their tote bag, etc. Some women also complained of being jabbed in their crotch by agressive wanding procedures. Another woman was forced to drink her own breast milk in order to prove it was not an explosive. All during the Bush years.

The crappy treatment has been around for a long time....it’s reached a boiling point now because (1) the x-ray scanners are appearing in greater numbers of airports than before and (2) the start on October 29th of far more agressive and intimate body searches than before.

Also, Michael Chertoff was the head of Homeland Security under Bush. He now has a huge financial interest in the company that makes these x-ray scanners.

[Shady]

They are preparing us for the Dictatorship to come.

[jazusamo]

Yes, hopefully it will awaken enough people to speak out and demand an effective system patterned after the Israeli one which has proven itself.

The height of incompetence on this matter was a few days ago when Napolitano was asked by a reporter if Muslim women in Hajibs would be required to be patted down, Nappy didn’t know the answer and fumbled it with a non answer. It was clear she had talked about it with someone and it was still undecided. Then the next morning Pistole had a news conference to assure us everyone would be treated the same, which I still don’t believe.

The woman isn’t qualified to be a TSA employee, let alone be the DHS Secretary.

[jazusamo]

There’s a lot of truth to what you say.

[Publius6961]

bookmark

[Dutch Boy]

What if a large number of people stuffed dismembered Barbie doll parts in their underwear? How freaked out would the TSA get when they pulled a dismembered Barbie head or arm from several people’s shorts?

Or better yet, put a sandwich or some oatmeal packs in your draws, It will be much softer than a Barbie arm. Wouldn’t want to hurt your junk by accident.

It’s been a long week. I may have slipped over the edge again.