TSA: Tyrants or a Thin, Blue Line?
By Blue Collar Muse Posted in Breaking News — Comments (28) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The powers permitted to Government ought to be few and well defined. So believed James Madison. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of "police power". It should be noted the Constitution only extends police powers to the federal government in case of "counterfeiting, treason, piracy and offenses against the laws of nations." Which makes for disturbing news from Homeland Security. Seems citizens need to be aware of yet more when flying.
Walter Williams illuminates. There is a new federal offense for air passengers. Called "nonphysical interference", it carries up to $1,500 in fines for distracting a Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) screener's attention from what he is doing. Williams writes the definition of
... nonphysical interference is solely up to the discretion of a TSA screener since it isn't defined in the regulations. TSA agents can levy fines for a passenger disagreeing with the behavior or arrogance of a screener.
Williams reports hundreds of accounts of rudeness by TSA employees. In March, 2004 alone there were almost 3,000 formal complaints about TSA behavior, none of which resulted in disciplinary action. This from folks who now have authority to fine and arrest you for "interfering" with their duties! This doesn't inspire confidence in the proper exercise of power.
Even worse, Williams also reports TSA has an entirely new position. Behavior Detection Officers (BDO) are now examining body language, facial expressions and other behavior to determine which passengers exhibit behavior warranting a more detailed screening. Bob, a trained BDO blogging at TSA's 'Evolutions in Security' blog, defends the practice. He notes,
The program was designed by Paul Ekman (PhD), ... He’s been studying behavioral analysis for the past 40 years and has taught the TSA, Customs and Border Protection, CIA, FBI and other federal agencies to watch for suspicious facial expressions of tension, fear or deception. ... After passing along his skills to US Customs, their “hit rate” for finding drugs during passenger searches rose to 22.5 percent from 4.2 percent in 1998.
and further relates
Between July 1, 2007 and February 7, 2008, 514 people were arrested after being referred for additional screening or directly to law enforcement officers by behavior detection officers. The arrests include unlawfully carrying concealed firearms or other weapons, possession of fraudulent documents, transporting undeclared currency, possessing illegal drugs, immigration law violations, and outstanding warrants.
I'll admit the technique increased US Customs' hit rates over 500%. I'll also note it still failed over 75% of the time. That hardly seems a scientific result to brag about.
Bob says BDOs might have flagged some of the 9/11 terrorists and "subjected them to secondary screening and questioning." That might have saved lives. And it sounds low key. Citizens are singled out for searching and a few questions and bad guys get busted. However, the WSJ reports BDOs are "agents ... trained to watch what [citizens] ... do and ask pointed questions to raise their stress levels ... to conduct rapid-fire questioning to find inconsistent stories." That's a different scenario and the potential for abuse is obvious.
If we apply Customs' 75% failure rate to Bob's 514 arrests, over 2,000 innocent passengers were intentionally upset, provoked and abused in producing that result. Of the list Bob touts, only "firearms and other weapons" impact air travel safety, the real job of TSA. How many of the 514 busts were weapon related? 5? 25? 100? Allowing 25 undetected weapons through would be a 1% failure rate. Doing nothing would have vastly improved TSA performance.
This is an apples-to-apples comparison. Because a 75% failure rate detecting bad guys by behavior equals TSA's rate for detecting bombs at the airport! Publishing figures USA Today says "stunned security experts", the TSA itself admitted failing to detect 75% of bomb components it tried to sneak past screeners at Los Angeles International Airport. At Chicago's O'Hare, the failure rate was 60%. These figures are from 2007. But the paper also reports "Tests earlier in 2002 showed screeners missing 60% of fake bombs. In the late 1990s, tests showed that screeners missed about 40% of fake bombs ..."
In what should have been a highly touted result, the best screening results came from private screening companies. In 2007, "San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows." In 2002, "... screeners failed to find fake bombs, dynamite and guns 24% of the time. The TSA ran those tests shortly after it took over checkpoint screening from security companies." TSA could immediately improve results by over 200% if they simply privatize the process!
Something needs to change. The figures paint a dangerous and unflattering portrait. TSA has had a 150% turnover in personnel in just over 6 years. This means inexperienced employees, often with only basic training, are on the job. There is little in the way of technology to make up for the inexperience. This produces pressure on frontline TSA personnel. Top that off by allowing an agency without police powers to increasingly look like police and act like police and we create what 'Consumer Reports' calls "A 'facade of security'". We also have the real threat of creating the very environment terrorists desire; innocents victimized by authority in response to terrorism.
I wish I had solutions. I don't. But it seems our current solution is becoming worse than what it seeks to prevent. Increasing TSA authority is the wrong response. We need less confrontational, more successful and, dare I say, non-governmental options. The goal is not safety at any price or even merely safety. It is safety within the constitutional bounds of smaller government and undiminished personal liberty. We're at another one of those crossroads. Choose wisely.
Driving is looking sweeter every day, despite high gas prices.
Me? I just don't take vacations.
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Dependence is Slavery.
Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.85
most public employers in the Country were already scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find people who could pee in a bottle and pass a background check to be cops and correctional officers and other types of workers, e.g., airports and ports, who could withstand the screening.
They ramped up that workforce by digging in the dirt under the barrel and by pirating employees from other employers, especially at the supervisory level. The line staff don't make a lot, though they're pretty well paid for the skillset they usually bring, but the supervisors and managers are VERY well paid and usually come from state and local police forces.
I used to be a very frequent flyer and I hated airport security even before the Thousands Standing Around came about. I've done enough work with cops and COs to know that if you take a person with very limited skills and education and give them a lot of authority, some very significant percentage of those employees are going to abuse that authority unless they have very good, very close supervision. When the supervision itself comes from an authoritarian background, you have a system calculated to be intrusive and often abusive.
I submit that the 9-11 hijackings couldn't happen today even withoug TSA screening. The whole event was a product of the generally held belief in the Country that the best thing to do with hijackers was go along for the ride. That mentality no longer exists in either crew or passengers and both passengers and crew know that the flight deck will not open the door or divert the plane to save someone, so they have to take matters in their own hands.
The whole airport screening process is offensive to a free people and I just cannot get past the images from old black and white movies of the Gestapo officer walking the aisles of the train demanding, "Papers, papers." Of course, if we actually made some attempt to control our borders and look over the shoulders a bit of the people we let come here, especially those named Mohamed or some such, I submit that little of it would be necessary anyway.
In Vino Veritas
"Even if you think our presidential choices this election year are between disgust and disaster, anyone who has ever been through a real disaster can tell you that this difference is not small. It is big enough to go vote on election day." - Thomas Sowell
If most of the TSA budget had been spent on behind-the-scenes bomb detection instead of overt, obnoxious people detection, the industry and the public would have been better served. I don't see many instances recently of ostentatious airport praying and mimcry of terrorist behavior on passenger planes. We have been probed and goaded by these stunts enough for would-be terrorists to know that hostage docility is no longer a given.
If only the TSA would reach the same conclusion from their own probing and goading. It's the bomb, not the box knife, stupid!
"The whole airport screening process is offensive to a free people and I just cannot get past the images from old black and white movies of the Gestapo officer walking the aisles of the train demanding, "Papers, papers." Of course, if we actually made some attempt to control our borders and look over the shoulders a bit of the people we let come here, especially those named Mohamed or some such, I submit that little of it would be necessary anyway."
Amen! Keep preaching that! Its amazing how many conservatives I know are all for the kind of invasive searches in airports.
Soon, only the well-to-do will fly with any frequency, and everyone else will be hitting the road--or maybe even the rails, if Amtrak can find a way to capitalize on the failings, weaknesses and excesses of the airline industry.
I would rather spend 8-10 hours in the minivan with my wife and 3 kids than go through the 6-hour ordeal and expense required to make a 2 hour flight.
Now, if we can keep John Warner from Carterizing the speed limit back down to 55...how much money does he receive from airline industry lobbyists?
If I need to go from Juneau to Anchorage, it's a two day car trip by ferry and two-lane road over the mountains and through wilderness or an hour and a half flight. Juneau to Seattle is a two or three day trip by ferry and road or just under three days by ferry alone or a two hour flight. And the ferry part of that trip is tres spendy! All of Southeast Alaska is accessible only by ship or plane. All of the rest of Alaska west of the Alaska Range and north of Fairbanks, roughly two-thirds of the State is accessible only by air or summer barge for freight. Just driving, itself expensive these days, is not an option.
Generally, most intra-Alaska flights are hardly a target for any sort of terrorism, so only God knows why TSA puts the same standards up for all Part 135 airports whether they're JFK or Kotzebue, Alaska. That said, all of the flights from Seattle or Juneau to Anchorage pass within twenty miles or so of the TransAlaska Pipeline Terminal at Valdez, a very lucrative terror target. Slam a jet into a tanker either in Valdez Narrows or, more disasterously, alongside the terminal and you've just cut off fifteen or twenty percent of the US' oil supply for a very long time.
In Vino Veritas
I went to college with a guy from Alaska. Good guy.
He told me of a time he had issues trying to get to MN (where the college was)
Even though he had a car with Alaska plates, and an Alaska Driver's license, and his car packed full of stuff for college, he still got a hard time from a border agent who wouldn't believe that he was a US Citizen.
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Dependence is Slavery.
Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.85
to jack Alaskans around. Sometimes you get a US Agent with an attitude, but not usually if you look generally respectable - and there's pretty loose standard for respectablity.
The Canadians give you the third degree on entering their socialist paradise, especially about guns and DUIs and other convictions. You can't bring a handgun through their fair land and they give you the third degree about long guns. If you have ever had a DUI or a conviction for most any crime, you're either barred or have to post a bond sometimes of several hundred dollars to assure your good behavior as you travel through their country.
It's said only half jokingly here that the only thing that keeps our ferry system in business is the number of Alaskans who can't go through Canada.
In Vino Veritas
On a positive note, Canadian Border Patrol refused to allow CodePINK into canada to protest.
They had a bunch of whiney emails about it. It was great.
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Dependence is Slavery.
Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.85
like when we visit family in LA. Driving from Atlanta is not a good aption. But I'll bet that people are doing he math on short flights in the lower 48, and it is not coming out in favor of air travel. Improved interstates, vehicle comfort, GPS systems(for finding efficient route and alternates around traffic jams)and acceptably high speed limits have made the shotgun seat driver my biggest irritant these days. DVD and MP3 players have minimized the punk problem.
WRT to rail travel, the Alaka RR trip from Anchorage to Seward was the best RR trip our family ever took. The White Pass RR in Skagway was the second best I've ever been on, although we didn't take the kids the second time(they weren't born the first time) due to cruise ship schedule constraints.
especially during the early '80's to Sugar Bowls. Also regularly drive through UCLA(Upper Corner Lower Alabama) on the way to Destin, FL.
the Southern Railway still existed and still ran the Southern Crescent, I used to take the Cresent from ATL to NYC once or twice a month. If you flew, it was up at three or four am, drive all the way around from NE to the airport on 285, catch the early morning Eastern or Delta flight to NY, wait for the bags, wait for a cab, put up with the cab, and you got into your hotel about lunchtime.
You could catch the Crescent out at Brookwood Station about five pm, get a Pullman for a little less than First Class airfare, have dinner in the diner with real linen, real silver, a real menu and real service, drinks in the Club Car, then turn in for a good night's sleep. You might get awakened in the middle of the night when the Southern through cars were switched to the Pennsylvania/Amtrak train in DC, but other than that, it was a nice, smooth ride. You could shower and get dressed pretty much at your liesure and get a nice breakfast in the diner, and you got to NYC a little before lunchtime. The old Statler Hilton was/is connected to Penn Station by a tunnel and the Red Cap would take care of your bags. Altogether a MUCH more pleasant experience than air travel even back in the days when air travel could still be pleasant. Of course, the Cresent was a money losing proposition for Southern and they finally dumped it to Amtrak's cattle cars and McDonald's service.
In most of the Country and for most people though, trains are too infrequent and too slow for anything but liesure travel and there are large parts of the Country that have no passenger service at all any more. Even the Alaska Railroad has only very limited passenger service outside the tourist season and the WP&Y doesn't run at all anymore outside tourist season.
In Vino Veritas
... that when Amtrak, or passenger rail in general if it ever makes a comeback, shows any signs of successfully diverting people onto the rails the TSA will immediately institute the same kind of hair-brained Kabuki "security" we are stuck with at airports.
John
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Why would God invent something like whiskey? To keep the Irish from ruling the world of course.
from passenger rail in the future, simply because it suffers from the same inherent weakness as passenger air travel: It doesn't get you from door to door like your car can. This is also the major weakness of most modern urban mass transit rail systems which try to link downtown to the suburbs. And you're right about the TSA tentacles grabbing the rails, too. Just another bureaucracy programmed to expand its scope and budget regardless of necessity.
... aside from the keystone cops mentality and basic incompetence of the front line "troops" is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of authoritarian bureaucrats in DC developing new security methods and procedures for their minions to inflict on the traveling public. But there is not one senior staffer who has the responsibility and authority to ensure that the myriad procedures and methods actually work for the true customer, the passenger. They simply do not care about the impact of their actions on passengers or air carriers --- nothing could be further from their minds.
John
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Why would God invent something like whiskey? To keep the Irish from ruling the world of course.
Don't all of us elitist Conservatives have wetbars?
And butlers that know how to properly make mixed drinks?
And a Segway so that we don't have to actually WALK from the Study to the Lounge in our mansion?
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Dependence is Slavery.
Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.85
Well... I have .... uh....
well...
wait! I have GUNS!
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Dependence is Slavery.
Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.85
I have my eye on a few more.
I'd like a good overunder shotgun, maybe 20 ga. for skeet/trap shooting.
Also, I want a kel-tec plr-16.
and a lever action rifle.
and a 1911.
However, instead, I have school loans. So I'll be content with my Kel-tec pf9, ruger kp-95, marlin 980s, mosin nagant, s&w 22-a1 and westernfield 12 ga pump.
If only I had the money to play with all of them in the same day.
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Dependence is Slavery.
Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.85
on all that money that we are paying for this disastrous agency.
McCain for POTUS so the left can't ruin SCOTUS.