The Price of Imaginary Security

I hate airport security. Every time I'm threaded through the whole bureaucratic tangle of procedures, I can't help but feel like it's primarily concerned with merely seeming meticulous; as if the TSA is basically just covering their ass. What is it if not a preposterously theatrical series of exercises; a cartoonish creature engineered by committee to combat a confluence of all our silliest nightmares.

A guy hides explosives in his shoes and suddenly every passenger has to take off their shoes. A crotch bomber fails to detonate his undies and the TSA rushes to deploy machines that can see through our pants. Never mind that those half-baked ideas might have easily never worked, it makes us feel better. Seems as if any halfwit terrorist need only light a match on a plane to trigger some new intrusion in our growing Rube-Goldberg array of airport security measures.

And this is usually the point at which some very stalwart, well-intentioned passenger inevitably chimes in to dutifully surrender our collective privacy with an unflappable declaration along the lines of, "If touching my junk is the price of security, I'll pay it." Which is noble and patriotic and wonderful, except for one thing — IT DOESN'T ACTUALLY MAKE US SAFE.

Safety isn't currently on the table, is it? Privacy or security — as much as we'd love to frame it in these very dramatic terms — isn't the practical reality of our situation. Deep down inside, we all realize this. We all understand that a naked psychopath looks almost exactly like a naked well-adjusted citizen. We only believe our convoluted little games work because we desperately NEED to believe they work. We NEED safety to be an option. Yet if we give ourselves permission to question that premise, it immediately becomes very easy to see the flaws in the assumption.

I'm no expert, but neither is the guy at the x-ray monitor, jaded by the endless parade of portable devices scrolling by; and really how difficult is it to disguise an explosive as an iPad or a Kindle? I don't know, but it doesn't seem totally impossible, does it? A potential hijacker looking for a sharp edge to hold to someone's throat need only snap a CD in half. Prison riots have been started with less than we're allowed to take onto planes. So ban all electronics. Ban all carry-ons. Okay. What's stopping the intrepid madman from infecting himself with smallpox before he boards? The plots that work are never obvious until they're played out, and they will always be at least as numerous as our most clever enemies — regardless of security.

Our whole airport security infrastructure, in all its vast Byzantine complexity, is bizarrely obsessed with policing inanimate stuff. But it's not a stuff problem, is it? Our would-be attackers aren't so casual in their righteous hatred that they'd give up because they suspect they couldn't get away with strapping C4 to their balls. It's not a stuff problem. It's a problem of intent. And that's not an excuse to appoint Juan Williams as head of the TSA; there's still plenty of caucasian psychos out there. No, the most dangerous thing a terrorist can take onto an airplane isn't a pair of scissors or a Quran; it's little more than the will to do serious harm, and we have no machines to detect that.

We need a new way of thinking about security. A new philosophy. Maybe a passenger vetting program; maybe bomb-sniffing dogs. Ultimately, I don't know what the ideal combination of security measures looks like. I don't know how you build a perfect system. I don't even know if you can. What I do know is this — bloated reactive protocols and humiliating violations don't make us safe. They make us tools, but they don't make us safe.

And anyway, is there any TSA obstacle more compelling than the unspoken social contract that any especially suspicious doings (like trying to detonate your blackberry or whittling a plastic shiv) will probably buy you an epic, mile high ass-kicking?

- Travis

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