Editorial 12.10, November 2010, by Deirdre Helfferich Grope-A-Dope The media are abuzz lately with the Transportation Security Administration’s new policy in the name of National Security, also known as security theatre, or the Virtual Strip Search with optional Grope-A-Dope. Or perhaps that would be Radioactive Porn with your choice to Get Felt Up By A Stranger. It looks like Homeland Security (a literal translation of Heimat Sicherheit, for the paranoid among you, by the way) has finally gone too far, and the populace is bloody well pissed. It’s truly amazing that a US president blatantly admitting that yep, he ordered torture, or another one claiming the right to send out assassination squads isn’t enough to get people fired up, but hey, start touching the public’s junk, and hoo, boy, let the revolution begin. We, the public, are dopes, idiots, and fools—first and foremost, for allowing things to get this far. As Representative Ron Paul said, “The duty of the government is to protect our rights,” not to abuse them. “The real problem is that the American people have been too submissive,” he said in an impassioned speech before Congress recently, comparing the public’s docility to that of cattle being fattened up for slaughter. “[W]hat we’re accepting … is so symbolic of us just not standing up and saying enough is enough!” We passed that point long ago, in my opinion, when the USA PATRIOT Act was passed (it was renewed along with its sunsetted provisions in February 2010). The difference between the abuses of warrantless wiretapping, torture and extraordinary rendition, indefinite detainment for noncitizens, assassination squads, presidential (and therefore unconstitutional) wars in which by far the large majority of people killed are civilians and noncombatants, and the new TSA screening embarrassments is that largely these atrocities happen to Somebody Else. The mistake here was that the scans and gropes are happening to ordinary people, in large numbers—and now people are realizing just to what extent their rights can be, willy-nilly, ignored or abused. We are being forced to go through the possibly hazardous and definitely revealing scanners, on the one hand, or the humiliating invasion of our personal body space, creating a cultural and instinctive emotional backlash. I say “mistake” because the erosion of our privacy rights has been an ongoing and steady process for more than a decade, resulting in minimal fuss along the way, but because this was too sudden and too close to strongly-held taboos, the public is now fussing LOUDLY. And that doesn’t make it easy for Homeland Security or other government agencies to strip us of our rights—at least, not this way. While actual human beings are being degraded, their privacy violated, and their dignity disregarded utterly, corporations have won a battle for their privacy rights: AT&T (warrantless wiretapping is A-okay with them!) won a judgement in a lower court that corporations have the same privacy rights as individuals when it comes to Freedom of Information Act Requests. The case is now going before the Supreme Court, which has previously shown itself to be quite sympathetic to the idea of corporations as persons (I refer to the Citizens United case). It won’t do us peons any favors if the Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s decision. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, “No other country in the world subjects its air travelers to the combination of screening procedures that Americans are being asked to endure.” Yet, despite all the hoopla around this stupid procedure, the TSA still doesn’t inspect all the cargo carried by passenger planes, which makes these silly scan-and-gropes look far more like a showy desensitization process. According to a Ponemon Institute study, most people believe these security measures are unnecessary (68 percent), that security is very important (61 percent), and that their privacy is very important (79 percent)—but convenience was far more important than any of these concerns. If a noninvasive security measure was used that caused a five-minute additional delay, only 21 percent of the travelers polled would choose it, and that percentage dropped to 9 percent if the delay was ten minutes. In other words, most travelers are perfectly willing to sacrifice their Fourth Amendment rights to shave a few minutes off their time waiting in airport purgatory. How cheaply we seem to sell ourselves! Yet, I think the truth is different. This was a hypothetical situation posed in a poll. The reality is quite different. I went through not one but two “pat-downs” (a grossly inaccurate term for what is done) at the Anchorage International Airport on November 4. I went through the metal detector and my bag and shoes and coat went through the scanner with no problem. Still, I was called out for a physical body search (apparently because I was wearing a long dress?) and an older woman ran her hands all over my body, carefully explaining what she was going to do at each pass of her hands. All very professional, out in the open—and completely ineffectual. I could easily have been hiding something under my breasts or even in my hair and she never would have known. She swabbed down her blue latex gloves and a machine test showed me positive for explosives. (Never mind that I had been sitting next to a farmer, Mike Emers, in the cab on the way to the airport, who probably had fertilizer—which can trigger a false positive—embedded in his clothes. He didn’t get pulled aside, I did.) So they did it all over again, and again it was not very thorough, but this time I didn’t test positive, so they let me on through. At first I viewed the whole process as a nuisance to be put up with, but as it went on, and later, reflecting on it, I got more and more annoyed by the situation and the sheer stupidity of it. I didn’t want to create a fuss (my boss and Emers were standing there waiting for me). And really, it wasn’t that bad. Or so I told myself. And so, I allowed a truly monstrous violation of my rights as human being, not because it was convenient, but because the alternative would be to risk being obstreperous, and to wait a day or two before I could go home. I hadn’t expected anything like this, and was unprepared. It didn’t occur to me that refusing or making a ruckus might result in getting investigated or fined $10,000, as John Tyner of “don’t touch my junk” was threatened with. I was just a dope who wanted to get back home. This is where the TSA has us: we either submit to this idiocy, or we don’t fly. I, for one, now that I am home, won’t fly again unless I absolutely have to, until such time as the indecency foisted upon us by the TSA ends. | ||
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