It's not TSA's fault
October 18th’s bad news for the TSA includes a pilot declining the choice between aggressive frisking and a nudatron. He blogs about it in “Well, today was the day:” [link to http://www.expressjetpilots.com/the-pipe/showthread.php?39523-Well-today-was-the-day no longer works]
On the other side I was stopped by another agent and informed that because I had “opted out” of AIT screening, I would have to go through secondary screening. I asked for clarification to be sure he was talking about frisking me, which he confirmed, and I declined. At this point he and another agent explained the TSA’s latest decree, saying I would not be permitted to pass without showing them my naked body, and how my refusal to do so had now given them cause to put their hands on me as I evidently posed a threat to air transportation security (this, of course, is my nutshell synopsis of the exchange). I asked whether they did in fact suspect I was concealing something after I had passed through the metal detector, or whether they believed that I had made any threats or given other indications of malicious designs to warrant treating me, a law-abiding fellow citizen, so rudely. None of that was relevant, I was told. They were just doing their job.
It’s true. TSA employees are just doing their job, which is to secure transportation systems. The trouble is, their job is impossible. We all know that it’s possible to smuggle things past the nudatrons and the frisking. Unfortunately, TSA’s job is defined narrowly as a secure transportation system, and every failure leads to them getting blamed. All their hard work is ignored. And so they impose measures that a great many American citizens find unacceptable. They’re going to keep doing this because their mission and jobs are defined wrong. It’s not the fault of TSA, it’s the fault of Congress, who defined that mission.
It’s bad enough that the chairman of British Airways has come out and said “Britain has to stop ‘kowtowing’ to US demands on airport checks.”
The fix has to come from the same place the problem comes from. We need a travel security system which is integrated as part of national transportation policy which encourages travel. As long as we have a Presidential appointee whose job is transportation security, we’ll have these problems.
Let’s stop complaining about TSA and start working for a proper fix.
So how do we get there? Normally, a change of this magnitude in Washington requires a crisis. Unfortunately, we don’t have a crisis crisis right now, we have more of a slow burning destruction of the privacy and dignity of the traveling public. We have massive contraction of the air travel industry. We have the public withdrawing from using regional air travel because of the bother. We may be able to use international pressure, we may be able to use the upcoming elections and a large number of lame-duck legislators who feared doing the right thing.
TSA is bleeding and bleeding us because of structural pressures. We should fix those if we want to restore dignity, privacy and liberty to our travel system.