Why Frisking is Useless

I've argued for a while that frisking people at airports, or at other security checkpoints, is worthless except if the TSA and other government agencies are willing to actually invade peoples' privacy. And I mean invade, as in checking the body's various useful and surprisingly capacious hiding places. Innocent people carry Swiss army knives in their front pockets. Sophisticated terrorists hide bombs in their anuses:

Taking a trick from the narcotics trade - which has long smuggled drugs in body cavities - Asieri had a pound of high explosives, plus a detonator inserted in his rectum.

This was a meticulously planned operation with al Qaeda once again producing something new: this time, the Trojan bomber.

Since we're not, as a society, going to allow anal cavity searches at airports, there's really no point whatsoever in the manual pat-down. The good news here is that maybe al Qaeda will have a slightly more difficult time recruiting suicide bombers now that this new technique is known. You can imagine the pitch to the potential bomber: "Okay, what we're going to do is, you're going to make a suicide video, then you're going to bend over and Osama's going to shove a bomb up your ass. It's going to be uncomfortable for a while, but then you'll blow yourself and go to heaven, but without your ass, and probably also without your balls. So, good luck, and try to walk naturally."

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2009/09/why-frisking-is-useless/27453/