Quote Of The Day
From Jonah Goldberg, re: airline security:
Anyone who flies regularly will tell you, the hellishness of airline travel is not primarily derived from the outrage of lost privacy, it’s derived from the outrage of inefficient, time-consuming idiocy. I would gladly trade the privacy invasion that would come with those body scanners in Total Recall in exchange for the ability to casually walk into the boarding area.
As I’ve mentioned before, my job has me on the road quite a bit, and thus I visit our illustrious TSA on a regular basis. I survive largely on airports having the black-diamond “Expert Traveler” security line and having a time-tested system of packing that gets me through the line quickly.
Unlike some libertarians, who choose not to fly rather than be subjected to TSA scrutiny, I see this as an unwelcome, unnecessary, but trivial evil. I view air travel as too important to me (both personally and professionally) to allow the government to slow me down. I know I’m going to be hassled, but it is most important to me that the hassling be kept to a minimal level and that it disrupt my plans as little as possible. I must admit that I was more than a bit irked over the holidays traveling with family, when the TSA screener wiped my infant son and I down for explosive residue (I was carrying him in a Baby Bjorn) “to make sure he was a real baby”. But even that was only an inconvenience, it’s not like he swabbed us for our DNA (at least that I’m aware of).
All that said, the level of idiocy is highly annoying. On short trips, I prefer not to check baggage, lest it get lost. At the same time, as a beer aficionado, I like to buy beer where I’m traveling that isn’t distributed in CA. With the liquid restrictions, I’m then forced to either forgo a purchase and not carry beer back with me, or wrap it in my luggage and check it on the return hoping that baggage handlers don’t leave me with a wet, smelly bag upon my arrival home. I often forgo the purchase these days rather than risk losing the bag or ending up with a mess.
However, I will take issue with one thing Goldberg says:
We keep hearing how we have to trade privacy for security. “No we don’t!” says the always helpful ACLU. “Yes we do!” say some security experts. “Maybe we do, maybe we don’t,” say others.
It’s all terribly tedious and it misses a very basic point: We already trade privacy, a lot of privacy, for security.
We already trade privacy for the appearance of security. Posts like this remind me that we’re actually not much safer as a result of all this hassle. It is truly security theater, designed to make us feel better but almost completely useless.
But while I’m certainly more concerned about privacy and government surveillance than the average joe, I’d be willing to trade the concern that some screener sees my naughty bits for a much quicker and less hassling airport experience*. And when I’m traveling with family, if it would make it unnecessary for me to take shoes off my toddler (getting them back on is the hassle), I’d be positively overjoyed.
