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Flights of fancy

 
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janetyu
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Joined: 14 Jan 2010
Posts: 60
Location: Norway

PostPosted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 11:35 pm    Post subject: Flights of fancy Reply with quote

this one is a little bit old. but needs to be remembered.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/04/us-airport-security

by: Jennifer Abel
January 4 2010

Who benefits over the TSA controversy?

The civil liberties fight over airport body-scanning and pat downs is tainted by corporate interests. It's time to follow the money

The day after Christmas 2009 marked an important milestone here in the US, land of the free, home of the brave and self-styled beacon of individual rights across the globe: for the first time federal authorities went so far as to tell law-abiding travellers: "Anyone who needs a bathroom has to hold it in at least an hour."

Throughout my relatively short lifetime, the US government's shown an alarming increase of interest in its citizens' alimentary functions. Federal laws requiring urine-testing for drugs, anti-terrorist regulations limiting in-flight bathroom access – that last aspect of the otherwise-predictable Transportation Security Administration overreaction to the Christmas terror attempt left me especially pissed off, pardon the expression. I have a kidney problem that requires me to drink far more water than most people; if I were Catholic I could damn near string my own rosary out of the stones I've generated.

So I drink lots of water, dammit. How did this become a national security issue? If I don't drink I'll get another kidney stone, and you do NOT want me on a flight passing one of those. (Remember those scenes in The Exorcist when the demon possessed the little girl and she started croaking unholy obscenities and shooting puke-missiles everywhere? It's like that, only with different colours.) So I must drink, which means I must go to the bathroom, yet the federal government – specifically Gale Rossides, the TSA administrator responsible for the Boxing Day flight restrictions – told me I couldn't do that because a wannabe terrorist set his thigh on fire during the last hour of a flight?

And that "last hour" of a flight could easily stretch out for two or more, if the plane falls into a holding pattern before landing. During that final hour, or two, or three, Rossides wanted passengers to keep their hands visible at all times, refrain from holding anything in their laps, never reach into their carry-on bags, and obey a variety of other humiliating and pointless regulations that would make great spirit-breakers for serial-killer inmates in a supermax prison, but do nothing to stop a prepared terrorist from damaging a plane.

Fortunately, the new regulations included several draconian limits on international business travelers: no working on a laptop or listening to music, since in-cabin electronics weren't allowed on flights into the US. The Boxing Day bans didn't last long. From a civil-liberties perspective, we Americans were lucky that latest TSA chicanery inflicted inconvenience upon wealthy people with political clout. But how did America go that wrong, where someone so prone to authoritarian overreaction got legal authority over any life form more advanced than toilet-bowl mold? Why wasn't anybody fired over this?

I spent the early part of Christmas day thinking "Hmm, I should take advantage of a cheap-flights deal to visit relatives down in the Carolinas." Then came the attack, and when the new flight regulations were announced next day I decided: "Hell no, I'll wait until I find time to drive the 1,600-mile round trip myself." Should I need to fly across an ocean, the nearest Canadian airport is only 450 driving miles and an international border away from me, and I'd sooner deal with that than the TSA.

The one good thing about the Christmas attack is that it hasn't inspired anywhere near the usual number of calls for racial profiling. The terrorist this time hailed from Nigeria and looks neither Arab nor "Muslim"; he was unmistakably a black guy. To its credit, more or less, TSA never implemented outright racial profiling, no blatant requirements to single out brown people with squiggly alphabets. Instead, TSA swings too far in the other direction and seems to go out of its way to strip-search elderly Midwestern grannies so it can brag, "No pandering to racial stereotypes here, by God!"

If we were really serious about airline security, we'd imitate the tough-but-effective system Israel uses to keep El Al terrorism-free. But the Israeli method requires real money and effort, intelligently spent: its security agents are expert professionals, and compensated accordingly.

America, with many more airports to worry about than Israel, focuses on quantity over quality in its security agents. To fill its ranks quickly and cheaply, the TSA doesn't even require a high school diploma. (Note to American school students: You know those inspirational posters you see where famous athletes and celebrities exhort you to "Stay in school?" You can totally ignore those if you want to work for TSA when you grow up.)

We aren't willing to buy security that works, so we settle for illusions that don't. No reading books when your plane approaches its destination, no tweezers in your carry-on, shampoo's a threat when there's more than three ounces – that's how America responds to threats against it. The terrorists don't even need to succeed anymore, my country has already failed.
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