02.17.10
Today’s Security Dog & Pony Show
The current United States can be defined as an immense accumulation of not terribly acute or attentive people obliged to operate a uniquely complex technology, which all else being equal, always wins. No wonder error and embarrassment lurk everywhere … Every employee a machine’s toad. — Paul Fussell, BAD, 1991
Today’s lead story on American airline security innovation was made for Paul Fussell. In 1991, he could not have forseen the War on Terror. But he could easily have predicted the many reactions to it in US life.
For one, the making of air travel more and more odious for the sake of an increased appearance of security.
“To the list of instructions you hear at airport checkpoints, add this: ‘Put your palms forward, please,'” reports CNN here.
“The Transportation Security Administration soon will begin randomly swabbing passengers’ hands at checkpoints and airport gates to test them for traces of explosives.”
“The point is to make sure that the air environment is a safe environment,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said to CNN. “We know that al Qaeda … terrorists continue to think of aviation as a way to attack the United States. One way we keep it safe is by new technology [and] random use of different types of technology.”
Then CNN (and one imagines every other news agency) trots out ‘security experts’ to get their opinion.
Keep in mind, readers, that in the US it takes only a quick Google or shake of the digital Rolodex to find an expert who will tell you anything and everything are good ideas.
“Security experts consulted by CNN said swabbing hands is a good move … ” added CNN.
Privacy experts, of course, want to ensure TSA workers will not discriminate when swabbing. The testing must be truly random and senseless.
In the US, this means a ridiculous application.
Invariably — babies, quadriplegics, your grandmother, teenage girls, people in wheelchairs or with walkers or handcuffed to security men, the Chinese ping pong team — all will be tested.
You can furnish some other examples, DD is sure.
“The TSA has more than 7,000 explosive trace detection (ETD) machines and has purchased 400 additional units with $16 million in federal stimulus money,” reported CNN.
In 1991 for BAD, Fussell explained the US had become defined by realizing that stupidity is a national characteristic. As a result, everything henceforth and to this day must be delivered in either a thin skin of fraud or some other made-up bit of rubbish fashioned to make people think a thing is great.
In this manner, readers are delivered the implied idea that the stimulus money has been doing good in the making of going to the airport even more unpleasant.
“It’s a ‘very good idea,’ said [some] security expert [named] Tony Fainberg,” to CNN.
In early January I wrote about the underpants bomber, who has brought this on, at The Register.
Thus:
[The] dilemma is clear.
Human error being always guaranteed, on both sides, no amount of technology – whole body scanners, electric noses, bomb-sniffing machines and expanded computerized watch lists (particularly in the hands of the US, where laymen have been conditioned to view them as magic wands) – can wholly stop men with improvised chemistry experiments in their private places. Yet no public official, under risk of being fired, can speak of this obvious thing.
In fact, one might theorize there’s a practical limit achieved in which the complexity inherent in the accumulation of security systems and data and the limiting human capital required to operate and sift it erases any theoretical benefits and gains beyond a certain point. And that’s a place on the graph we are already past.
The complete article is here.