James Fallows

The whole episode lasted about 2 hours.  While the officers who questioned me were not overtly or personally threatening, the situation was intimidating and threatening.  I was never told details of the "profile", so I don't know how to prevent this from happening again, aside from talking to federal employees at all times while flying.  I am concerned that DEA and DHS now have files on me.  This distresses me GREATLY.  I am equally concerned that my plane's tail number is now suspicious in the eyes of law enforcement....

[He adds this caveat in a follow up note:] Although my adrenaline gets going when I think about this whole mess, and I can read the US Constitution, I have ENORMOUS respect for the rule of law and for the men and women who put their asses in harm's way to help assure my safety.  That includes local, state, & federal law enforcement agents, as well as our military.  The people who should answer for this crap are the cowardly bureaucrats who sent all those men, vehicles, airplanes, dogs, and guns out there - not the men dispatched to the scene.

His full account after the jump. After that is the second case, from Clay Phillips, a retired Navy officer who had a similar experience.

To say it again: I am not contending that the aviation world is being inordinately picked-upon. Overall it is a privileged part of society -- and demographically it skews toward older white males who are politically conservative, have money, and often have military experience. Ie, these are people who are not generally the object of police profiling for terrorist or other criminal tendencies. So if the security state is leaning heavily on them, you can extrapolate to other groups. The stories begin below.

More »

 Silverstein, the pilot in command, raised objections and was given three options: wait inside the FBO [the "Fixed Base Operator," the little office that exists at most small airports] or  wait quietly outside, or be detained in handcuffs. An instrument-rated private pilot and AOPA member, Silverstein is also an active real estate investment banker who has never committed a crime, he said.

A little more than a year ago I mentioned the case of Shoshana Hebshi, a young American woman who lives in Ohio, is married, and has twin sons. Hebshi was born in California to a Jewish mother and a father originally from Saudi Arabia.

On September 11, 2011, she took a Frontier Airlines flight from San Francisco through Denver to Detroit. You can read her whole account of what happened once she got to Detroit, but this is the summary: After the plane landed, it parked for a while without going to the normal gate. Then heavily armed security forces came onto the plane and came to the row where Hebshi was sitting. They handcuffed her and the other two people in that row. The three passengers were marched off, searched, detained,  and interrogated as possible terror threats. On what grounds? The two men sitting next to Hebshi, whom she didn't know and who didn't know each other, were dark-skinned South Asians, and another passenger or a member of the crew became suspicious of them. As Hebshi said in her initial post:

Someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity. What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn't know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough? Even considering that we didn't say a word to each other until it became clear there were cops following our plane? Perhaps it was two Indian man going to the bathroom in succession?

The FBI's attitude at the time was, Better safe than sorry. According to the AP:

Detroit [FBI] spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said ultimately authorities determined there was no real threat.

"Due to the anniversary of Sept. 11, all precautions were taken, and any slight inconsistency was taken seriously," Berchtold said. "The public would rather us err on the side of caution than not.

Today the ACLU filed a complaint against Frontier Airlines, the local airport authorities, and various FBI, TSA, CBP, and other federal agents for abusing Hebshi's rights. You can read the ACLU's news release here, and the formal complaint in PDF here. Samples from the complaint:

 2. An American citizen born in California, Ms. Hebshi was arrested and detained because of her ethnicity and her seat assignment: she has an Arab last name and was seated next to two men of South Asian origin, who each allegedly used the lavatory for ten to twenty minutes during the flight.  Ms. Hebshi did not know these men, nor did she speak with them or leave her seat at any time before landing in Detroit.

 
3. Although Frontier Airlines never suggested that Ms. Hebshi had engaged in any suspicious behavior, Frontier Airlines staff provided her name to federal and state authorities when reporting the allegedly suspicious conduct of the men seated next to her on the plane.... 

5. During her several hours in detention, Ms. Hebshi was subjected to an invasive and humiliating strip search, which required her to strip naked, bend over, and cough.

6. Ms. Hebshi, by her attorneys, now challenges the discriminatory conduct of Frontier Airlines, which identified her as a "suspicious" passenger based on her ethnicity, race or national origin, resulting in her arrest and detention.

Good news from our friends at TSA: they are getting rid of the hated (by me) Rapiscan "backscatter" screening machines like the one shown at right. These are the scanners in which you stand between two big, opaque boxes, raise your hands, and have X-rays shot at your body. The systems measure the "backscatter" radiation that reflects back from hard and soft surfaces on your body and clothing. Radiation in such backscatter systems is much weaker than medical X-rays, which are of course meant to go right through your body. Still, it is ionizing radiation, which is guilty until proven innocent in terms of possible health effects. 

Sometimes the Atlantic is on the news for upbeat reasons -- for instance, our two current stories, by Charles Fishman and me, on positive manufacturing trends in the US. These fortunately appeared just before announcements from Foxconn and Apple of manufacturing-expansion plans in America.

I have been getting in trouble with many of my friends for asking them to think about what is politically possible, actually effective and might find agreement among reasonable gun owners. Full disclosure - I am a gun owner myself but very much in favor of stricter controls.

It frustrates me to no end that no one on the gun control side of the debate knows anything about firearms, the differences between them, or precise ways to differentiate between them in law (or for that matter, in conversation). So all we hear are knee jerk cries to 'ban assault weapons'. And to hear that again after a horrible event in which an 'assault weapon' wasn't even used is just inane. It's like calling for a ban on convertibles after a truck accident.

Here's my problem with the focus on 'assault weapons': what people are really talking about are not weapons that are designed to look like military weapons- that's merely cosmetic and it always diverts the conversation. What they are really talking about are three features - the fact that these rifles are semi automatic, that they are designed to accept high capacity magazines and that they are often - not always but often - chambered for small, high velocity rounds, rounds designed to break up in the body and cause maximum damage.

Whether they have flash suppressors or a handle on top or look like an AK47 is absolutely irrelevant. There are other rifles that have some or all of the above features and not all weapons styled after 'assault weapons' do. It is critically important in this argument to be very precise.

Furthermore, many people still talk as though these weapons are fully automatic, which none of them are, at least legally.

If we concentrate our gun safety efforts on those specific features I listed, I truly believe that we would not only gain traction among the public who do not own guns, but also some respect from those who do. Most gun owners can see the sense in restricting those features - especially in rifles like the Bushmaster .223 that Lanza carried (but apparently did not use). [JF note: later information indicates that the Bushmaster was in fact used.]

With handguns it would be trickier. Nearly all handguns currently sold are semi auto and there is a good reason - they are lighter and easier to control. The force absorbed by ejecting the spent shell and re-cocking the gun reduces the recoil considerably, making it possible for example, for a woman or a smaller man to shoot in a controlled way. While there is a great deal of support for eliminating semi-auto rifles it might be harder to find the same support for handguns. Magazines, however, might be a place to start.

Importantly, there is a consensus on some points and those are the points where new legislation should concentrate.  Also even the NRA has agreed in principle to stricter background checks, more diligent checking on mental health and above all better enforcement of current laws before the creation of new ones.

I apologize for the rant, but I am a pro gun control/safety gun owner and I am crazy frustrated with the current debate, the language in which it is framed, and above all the idiotic assumption that people can legislate or petition to change something which they can't be bothered to understand or know anything about.

With a twist that may be enlightening for people on both sides.

A Chinese-citizen engineer recently came to the United States on a month-long business assignment. He was excited, and so was his company. For the company, this was the first-ever foreign installation of new robotic equipment, in a Florida juice-packing operation. For the engineer, it was a chance to be in a very nice part of America, enjoying for a while a lifestyle simply unavailable in his normal environs.

Just before the end of his stay, the engineer stopped to take this photo. Chinese readers may be able to guess why he took it. American readers may be able to guess what happened next.


I got in trouble one time for taking pictures while in China, but that was in a situation that had "political sensitivity" written all over it and where I knew the risk I was about to take. I describe that episode in my new book and discuss what particular Chinese-government insecurities I thought it revealed. I wasn't thinking when I wrote that passage about the comparable photograph-pathology that has emerged in the United States. We're all caught on video all the time, but ordinary people who take pictures -- near airports, of policemen, and now of a school bus -- are presumptively suspicious.

Please fill in the rest of the thoughts; stories like this wear me out.

Yesterday Jeffrey Goldberg told the astonishing story of his mother-in-law's run-in with TSA screeners, and I had complaints of my own. I followed mine with a quote from a stalwart Republican reader who said: the Bush Administration may have set this machinery into motion, but isn't it Obama's responsibility now? Why, he asked, do liberals act as if

...DHS is apparently some sort of unmoored federal bureaucracy, unanswerable to the White House, randomly stopping innocent people and embarrassing the United States.

‪If you guys [ie, people who criticized Bush-Cheney security excesses] act like our President can't control these people (DHS/TSA), who will? ‬

The full answer, of course, involves the ratchet effect of "security" measures. It's easy for politicians to slap on extra "precautions," in the name of keeping us safe; and by the same logic it is hyper-perilous for any politician ever to suggest their removal. After all, eventually there will be another attack, another death, another thing that has gone wrong -- and at that moment all fingers will point at the leader who "let down our guard." I made that case more fully back in 2010.

Here are two other specific answers. First, from Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota:

Muons have a half-life of 2.2 microseconds.  In less time than that, the GOP would be howling for President Obama's head if he were to unilaterally disassemble the TSA.  Consider the reaction from the right when some idiot FAILED to ignite a bomb in his underwear. 

I do not know what the President's own views on this matter are, but your reader, who states that he is a conservative, should not be surprised or disappointed that Pres. Obama has not, all on his own, changed the structure of the TSA. It has been made abundantly clear that the President would be forced to pay a terrible price for such a common sense move.

And from David Moles of San Francisco:

Regarding your reader who sees the "unmanageable" TSA as a symptom of our inability, as a nation, to control our government:

It would almost be comforting to think that as a nation we all hate the TSA, dread the ever-tighter security ratchet and have nothing but contempt for security theater. I say "almost" because the corollary would be that your correspondent's right and the lunatic unpleasantness is a sign that government is already out of control.

But there's a much simpler explanation, which is that, unlike you and me (and, I assume, unlike your conservative correspondent) most people in this country don't fly very much, and when they do, they don't expect to enjoy it. Many people in this country (even otherwise quite sensible people) are at least a little afraid of flying, and many people in this country are afraid of terrorism, and both fears are far out of proportion to the actual risk of either; terrorism on an airplane is the stuff of nightmares. Any politician that made reining in the TSA a cornerstone of his or her campaign would attract a small constituency of aviation buffs and frequent flyers -- and a storm of gleeful attack ads accusing said politician of being weak on national security and soft on terrorism.

(The same of course goes for the INS and for Customs and Border Protection, in spades. Most Americans don't travel internationally, don't speak a foreign language, and don't believe the rest of the world has anything to teach us -- certainly nothing important enough that making it easier for scholars, artists and tourists to visit the US would be worth the risk of making it easier for illicit immigrants to sneak in and take our jobs.)

I don't think that as a nation we've lost control of our government. But I don't assume that as a nation we all think the way I do, either. If we want to change the way Homeland Security behaves, first we need to change the way our neighbors want it to behave.

P.S. I would love to see good statistical evidence that I'm wrong! Then maybe we could present that same evidence to some politicians' pet pollsters.

(Please see peeved update below.)

China: Earlier this month, in Shanghai, passengers who were peeved about a long delay stormed out of the terminal onto the taxiway, milling around amid arriving airliners.

Taking no chances, this week airport authorities in Dalian decided to keep passengers amused during their delays. The obvious solution: bring in teams of cheerleaders.



- In New York, a 7-year-old girl with cerebral palsy is involved in the same sort of incident. Picture and description from The Daily:

With her crutches and orthotics, Dina cannot walk through metal detectors and instead is patted down by security agents. The girl, who is also developmentally disabled, is often frightened by the procedure, her father said.

Marcy Frank [her mother] usually asks the agents to introduce themselves to her daughter, but those on duty on Monday were exceptionally aggressive, Joshua Frank said, and he began to videotape them with his iPhone.

"And the woman started screaming at me and cursing me and threatening me," he said

I don't reach quite that conclusion, as I'll go into more another time. But I will be reflecting yet again these next few hours on the varied excesses of the security state.

Update-update: Just saw this from Jeffrey Goldberg. Now the door is closing.

I am not in DC today, but if I were I'd be outside right now ready to watch something I've never seen: a flyby and low pass by the modified 747 that is the "Shuttle Carrier Aircraft," with the shuttle Discovery mounted on its back en route to its new home with the Smithsonian. Here is the idea:


Update: from another enthusiast who saw the plane just now, from the Georgetown area on the DC side of the Potomac:

I saw it!  incredible. straight down the river. really loud. and fast. clear sight. no time for pic.

Then a second pass: much slower this time. down the river. Clear view. Huge. Followed by a little chaser jet. Just awesome

Sometime I would like to know who, in NASA or the Smithsonian system, decided on this ceremonial flyby to remind Americans of what we had achieved. I would say: Thanks! "Just awesome." And sometime I would like to know who, exactly, decided to block flight information in a reflex of "security" thinking. I would say: Let's get a grip.

But of course the main theme is: Just awesome.

Updates: Here's a shot from an official Navy photographer of the aircraft passing over Washington.

(See updates below.) This news has been all over the Indian press but not so much here. Short version: India's version of Brad Pitt / Matt Damon / Bruce Willis was held up -- again -- on arrival in the US by Homeland Security officials, because his last name is the ever-suspicious "Khan." As a reader puts it:

I haven't seen much of any attention paid to US airport security detaining Shah Rukh Khan (right), one of Bollywood's biggest stars, for 2+ hours at Newark Airport on his way to accepting a major award [as a Chubb Fellow] at Yale.  University officials had to intervene on his behalf to get him released.  Imagine the uproar if another country detained Brad Pitt.  Very embarrassing.

This is what we are doing to ourselves, in the name of "security." More coverage here and here. A typical story, in Al Jazeera, began:

He is one of the most famous men on the planet. Adored  by millions. His films are almost always box office smashes. But when Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan travelled to the US on Thursday, he was detained by security for two hours while they checked out his "status".

As everyone in India seems to be pointing out, the particularly awkward nature of this episode is that one of Khan's recent films was My Name is Khan, about a Muslim who travels to Washington to tell the U.S. president that despite his name he is not a terrorist. Arrrggh.

For what it's worth, here is an Atlantic item on how Shah Rukh Khan's expanding fame -- even in the U.S. -- shows a new level of success for Bollywood.

The 9/11 attacks have damaged America much more in the years since then than they did that day.
___
UPDATE. A reader with a further question:

There is a dimension to the Khan fiasco beyond the embarrassment/insult to India of detaining one of their most famous citizens, which is: Just how much faith can we have in the TSA/Homeland Security data system if they can't determine in five minutes (let alone two hours) who this guy is? Maybe they need to start using Tinderbox or TheBrain!

And a reader with a clarification / correction:

The reader that you quoted concerning Shah Rukh Khan's detention at Newark airport is actually confusing two separate incidents. Khan was detained at Newark three years ago when he came to the US (ironically) to promote his film "My Name is Khan". According to the wiki article on the film and the incident he was apparently detained in order to ascertain his identity. Since he was kept in a waiting room with a large number of South Asian travelers, not only could he find plenty of third parties to vouch for his identity, but he ended up being asked for autographs.

In this most recent case, Khan was arriving by private jet to Westchester County Airport. If detaining him for two hours a second time wasn't bad enough, he was also traveling with Nita Ambani, the wife of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, the largest corporate conglomerate in India.

So for American equivalents, it's a bit like a local airport in a foreign country detaining both Brad Pitt and Melinda Gates. But then again, since TSA officials also gave the Indian president a pat-down last year, I suppose this is par for the course for South Asian travelers in US airports.

1) Permanent emergency. Kip Hawley, right, who was TSA administrator during GW Bush's second term, has an important and eminently sensible-seeming big essay today in the WSJ on re-thinking airport security. I was out of the country during most of his time in office and have never met or interviewed him, so I don't know how what he says now matches what he did then. Also, I have not yet read his new book laying out his views at greater length. But at face value this essay makes convincing points about "security theater," which I hope will carry extra heft because of his background.

Most of Hawley's points accord with my pre-existing views, so naturally I think they're correct. But on one, he has changed my mind, or at least opened it. If you've been in countries where you can keep your shoes on when being screened -- as I've recently experienced, for instance, in both Australia and China -- you are amazed by how much this reduces the cumbersomeness and delay of the screening process. Hawley says he came to TSA determined to change that rule but became convinced that it still mattered. You can read his case for yourself.

Here is a point so obviously true that I wish Romney and Obama were competing to embrace it. An item on Hawley's must-do list is:

Eliminate baggage fees: Much of the pain at TSA checkpoints these days can be attributed to passengers overstuffing their carry-on luggage to avoid baggage fees. The airlines had their reasons for implementing these fees, but the result has been a checkpoint nightmare. Airlines might increase ticket prices slightly to compensate for the lost revenue, but the main impact would be that checkpoint screening for everybody will be faster and safer.

2) I opt in! As I've mentioned more than a few times, I take a dim view of the TSA's new "backscatter" full-body-scan machines. That is because they use X-rays, and my policy toward ionizing radiation is to avoid it when I can. Yes, I am aware that sitting at high altitude inside an airplane exposes you to extra cosmic radiation. But unless you travel in a lead-lined plane, which creates engineering challenges of its own, that's an inextricable part of the flying equation. About backscatter machines you have a choice, and I have chosen to opt-out.

But if my concern is about needless (in my view) exposure to X-rays, then there is no reason to worry about the similar-seeming but technically different other kind of full-body scanner. This is the millimeter wave machine. Sometime later I will describe a meeting that Jeffrey Goldberg and I had, in February, with TSA officials to explain how these machines work, and what images the operators see. The point for the moment is: millimeter-wave machines are of course based on a form of radio-frequency transmission, not X-rays. I know that there are scenarios and hypotheses in which radio-frequency waves can theoretically be dangerous. But my working policy is:
   X-rays are assumed dangerous unless demonstrated to be safe
   Radio waves are assumed safe unless demonstrated to be dangerous.

So I recently opted-in to my first millimeter-wave scan, at DC's National Airport, and lived to tell about it (although I look for lines with metal detectors as my first choice). Here's the handy guide.

Millimeter wave (roundish in shape, transparent open sides): I opt in.


Backscatter scan (two big boxes that you stand between): I opt out.




3) Or are you just glad to see me? A reader who has lived and worked around the world sends the not-entirely-constructive-in-spirit plan he has for his next trip through security.

My prank is somewhat tasteless, so be forewarned.  It's taking Jeffrey Goldberg's kilt proposal and turning it up to eleven.  I want to opt-out while wearing a large dildo strapped to my inner-thigh.  The look on the screener's face when he discovers it would be priceless.  As far as I can tell, the list of prohibited items says nothing about large latex appendages, so I couldn't be accused of trying to smuggle anything in. 

Of course, with my luck, the whole situation would spiral out of control and end up going viral on the internet - not exactly the way I wish to gain international notoriety. It also strikes me as a good way to get fast-tracked onto the No-Fly List. 

Pleasurable to think about, but never something I'd actually do.

Which brings us back to a central argument of Kip Hawley's piece: that the cookie-cutter experience most passengers have with the TSA makes it harder for travelers to think of the agency as helping us all avoid extreme risks, and easier to think of it as a rote rule-enforcer to be exasperated with, and to think subversive thoughts about. In the long term its effectiveness depends on people feeling that they are working with the TSA rather than against it. Let's hope Hawley's essay makes a difference.

(Please see update below.) Last week, in the latest roundup on "the Kindle menace" -- whether electronic devices actually create any kind of danger in flight -- I quoted a reader who gave this real-world example of the way unknowable problems could crop up:

I have a microwave over that knocks out my satellite internet when cooking at high power. No doubt FCC approved, but it clearly impacts communications devices. I have no idea if the oven is non-conforming, the satellite system is non-conforming, or if the standards aren't tight enough.

Another reader, who works in the medical-devices industry, says this interference actually demonstrates a different point:

This is down in the weeds but interesting. The guy who commented that his microwave interferes with his satellite radio and thinks it is a sign that something is wrong is missing a crucial piece of information. It's not really knocking out the satellite radio, which is far, far away, it's knocking out his 2.4 GHz router, which is probably underneath his desk.

His router is 2.4GHz because that is one of the few unlicensed bands. (Ham radio requires a license, police radio requires a license, FM 103.7 Golden Oldies needs a license, but you don't need a license for your wireless router or anything else (cordless phone, bluetooth keyboard, etc) that operates at that frequency.)

The reason the FCC made it an unlicensed frequency is because there was something already there that messed up reliable transmission. It seems that 2.4 GHz is the natural frequency of the water molecule, and microwave ovens work by transmitting high levels of energy at that frequency so as to vibrate water molecules fast enough to cause them to heat. So... Messing up routers is exactly what to expect from microwave ovens. No one needs to fix anything.

A long dispatch just in from another electronic engineer. Stay tuned (bada-bing!).

Update. A reader in the UK writes back to correct the corrector:

Microwave heating is sometimes explained as a resonance of water molecules, but this is incorrect: such resonance only occurs in water vapour at much higher frequencies, at about 20 GHz. Moreover, large industrial/commercial microwave ovens operating at the common large industrial-oven microwave heating frequency of 915 MHz--wavelength 328 millimetres (12.9 in)--also heat water and food perfectly well.

The wavelength of microwave oven radiation is say in the range 4" to 8" which is far, far too long to resonate with a water molecule! Also if you did use radiation that was short enough to resonate with water molecules the energy would be absorbed in the surface of the item being cooked.

I know when we've reached a point beyond which I am incompetent to referee a discussion or disagreement. Ladies and gentleman, that point has arrived! I will use this as an incentive for improvement in my own grasp of the physics of microwave heating, and I leave further exploration of these issues to the actual experts.

Two powerful forces. When they collide, which will prevail?

As it turns out, it's no contest. A reader writes about what played out at this year's Carnaval:

This video touches on two of your themes: airport security and cross-cultural differences. It's a bloco, or parade dance party, at Santos Dumont the city airport for Rio de Janeiro. Minute 1:30 to 2:00 has the best sambaing. [JF: Yes, by all means see at least that part. And here is more on the namesake Alberto Santos-Dumont.]

I doubt that the same joie de vivre is possible in a TSA-sanctioned environment.

I share such doubts. On a more positive note, soon I will offer a declaration of peace, at least on one front, between my own personal preferences and the rules of the modern TSA. Meanwhile, Viva Brasil!
__
Update. A reader who travels very frequently in and out of China's main airports was in Beijing Capital airport today. He sends a shot of the security line a few hours ago at what is now the second-busiest airport in the world.

(Please see updates below.) David Hobby, the photographer who runs the popular Strobist site and photostream, has a sobering account today of how he got in trouble with the police for taking this picture of a tree.



Sample of what he describes:

'If You See Something, Say Something'
That's the slogan. But it is, of course, overly broad and simplistic. Which means that your average mouth breather can interpret it however he or she wants. And the einstein who reported me as a "suspicious person" called me in while I was making this benign photo as part of a multimedia time-lapse on autumn:

I was called in as, and I quote, "Somebody suspicious and lots of flashes of light going off."

At least that is how the cop described it when she pulled up to me, bubble gum lights blazing, to ask me what I was doing. And anyone who knows me knows that my immediate reaction was to resort to humor laced with sarcasm.

"Well, I am either a photographer taking an innocuous photo of a maple tree," I said, "or I'm al Qaida, casing our critical deciduous infrastructure."

This did not go over well.

Meta-point reminder: the challenge in dealing with any threat, from international terrorism to domestic crime to infectious diseases to mayhem of any sort, is to maintain a balance between the steps you take in the name of security, and the steps you deliberately don't take, in the name of preserving liberty and some kind of normal unmonitored life. Over the past ten years, "security" measures have too often worked like a ratchet, being added in the name of thwarting some new threat ("no liquids or gels") and very rarely being removed. As a matter of practical politics, this is easy to understand. A politician runs practically zero risk in urging new "protective" measures, but faces tremendous risk in urging that we lighten up (since the politician will be blamed for whatever accident / crime / attack later occurs).

Thus it's worth continuing pressure against further movement of the ratchet. American society is becoming steadily more policed, monitored, and suspicious, which will continue unless we resist. Thanks to JZ for the tip.
___
Update 1: As Michael Cohen and Micah Zenko point out in a Foreign Affairs article "Clear and Present Safety," the United States is in fact less threatened by enemies foreign and domestic than it has been in a long time, and certainly less than much political rhetoric suggests.

Update 2: As Michael Ham points out on his "Later On" site, the latest horrific schoolyard shooting, today's in Ohio, is somehow exempted from the category of "threat" that urgent action is required to prevent. As he says:

The slightest effort to make firearms less readily accessible--particularly to those we least want to get them--is shot down (as it were) by the National Rifle Association and their paid Congressional hirelings.

Does anyone else find this juxtaposition odd? Timorous about flying, but willing to be shot to death in malls and schools. Strangely fearful on the one hand, fatalistically accepting frequent stupid deaths on the other. Going to any lengths--regardless of privacy, humiliation, intrusive searches--when around airplanes, but rejecting any hint of control of firearms.

These are in five distinct modes. After this I will taper off for a while. Plus, there's another debate to watch!

Theme one: making the best of things.

As someone that enjoys a drink as much or more than the next guy (and is also frugalish), the fluids rules for flying were a huge bummer for me because it was my practice for morning flights to build myself a nice big bloody mary in a disposable bottle for consumption as I passed my way through the security apparatus and inevitable downtime before the flight.  Rather a good deal compared to the pathetic offerings for top dollar otherwise available to travelers.

Which brings me to my travel tip:
Minis (the tiny little liquor bottles) happen to fit into your TSA quart sized baggie and are perfectly legal to take through security. A bottle of OJ on the far side of the line and you're in screwdriver heaven.  Although, please be discrete as the US still has insane open container laws.

Which brings me to my story:
Not long after I figured out this loophole, I tossed my baggie full of minis in the x-ray bin and the TSA screener looked at them and gave me a broad grin and said, "Now there's a man 'at knows how to fly."  To which I could only grin and nod in agreement.

Theme two: don't blame the government, plus stop whining.

Because TSA is a government agency people seem to take extra delight in mocking or questioning it. It is useful to remember that we had x-rays, security, and security personnel before TSA ever existed. Some of those folks were far less trained, less professional, and far less knowledgeable than what we currently have now. For people who think this is just security theater, fair enough. But at least the cast now has better actors and the performances tend to run more smoothly.

I agree about the extra edge of anti-government hostility -- though if Wackenhut and other private firms (Blackwater! even under its new name) were back in charge, we'd have the offsetting "rent-a-cop" slurs. The X-ray point is not correct: in the old (pre-9/11) days, airports used metal-detectors only, not the "backscatter" X-ray scanners and "millimeter wave" devices that have recently been introduced.

Theme three: TSA solidarity.

As I was exiting screening this morning I overheard two agents discussing Sen. Paul and his recent "issue"(?) in TN. Their take was that he was seeking special treatment as a politician and that the TSA couldn't possibly do anything wrong. I thought this was pretty amusing and also wondered if their opinion extended to the entire organization or just to the screeners? I have never met any low level employees who ever believed that management was competent. Does the TSA defy this trend?

Theme four: We're not "in decline," we're just acting stupid.

I don't think [America's backwardness with airports and their amenities] it's a sign of a nation in decline... To me, what is striking is how deliberate it seems. I understand that the airports of poor countries often look grubby - there just isn't money around to keep them squeaky clean and well repaired all the time. In the US, it looks like the expression of a country that just can't be bothered (collectively) to have good public infrastructure. When I'm waiting in this or that line at Dulles (which I do quite a lot) I'm not thinking, "Oh no, the Chinese will have built three of these by the time I'm done here", I'm thinking, "why don't they care enough to pay for decent airports"?

Having to go through immigration and recheck your luggage so that the TSA is just the icing on the cake seems to me another symptom of this. It doesn't even serve a mock purpose (like taking off your shoes), it just doesn't make any sense at all. Surely the US government would have noticed this at some point, so why can't they be bothered to change it?

Of course I can look at this from the inside, I've lived here long enough to understand the politics and the path dependency and the odd attitudes towards anything "public". But sometimes, I just don't want to. Those are also the moments when I really hope that ten years from now, I'll still visit the US often enough, but live somewhere else.

To round this off, theme five: We can't do anything about it.

As you yourself stated: it's impossible for anyone to reduce the security theater because of the risks involved, both physical, and certainly if it was a political initiative. If President Obama even hinted publicly that he wanted to make travel more convenient by reducing TSA security, or even just supported such an idea, the Republican field would immediately pounce on that as "criminal negligence" and "exposing the American people to danger." And then if something did happen, that's it. Obama's finished. He'd have no supporters. Like the isolationists before Pearl Harbor, the minute a disaster occurs, all the people complaining about the inconvenience and humiliation would shut up immediately. Nobody is going to listen to reasonable arguments against security theater when several hundred Americans are dead.

Politicians and other leaders have nothing to gain by maintaining the current level of security, but they have everything to lose by weakening it. The trickle of gratitude that would result is not worth risking the tidal wave of condemnation if something then did occur. "And after all, the American people are safer with things as they are, inconvenient though they be, right?" goes the reasoning. So it's in everybody's interest to just keep things as they are.

The only way to do it would be to do it slowly and "anonymously" over a long period of time.

With that, it's time for another GOP debate! And, the promised SOTU notation is now done and should be posted when we get all the formatting worked out.

If you haven't seen it already, it is worth checking out this minute-long clip from the Nashville Tennessean, showing Sen. Rand Paul during part of the hour-plus period he was in a TSA cubicle in Nashville because of a disagreement about whether he needed an extra pat-down. Paul is hidden behind the column for the first few seconds of the video, then he emerges holding a cell phone to his ear and sits down in the chair on the left.



Obviously this minute doesn't show us everything about one hour; we're not seeing the full context; and so on. But with those caveats, it's worth watching Paul's demeanor in light of police claims that he was being "irate."

The theme in some of my recent TSA-related grievances has involved just this kind of situation: at some airports agents have seemed (to me) to be on hair-trigger to show their authority and put passengers in their place for non-compliant "attitude." Again, we don't know everything that happened with Rand Paul, but in the clip he looks more sedate than most of us would be if held for an hour, forced to miss a plane, and as a result not being able to give a scheduled speech at a major rally on the National Mall.

I do recognize the impossibility of what the TSA and its leaders are trying to do.
   -If they give their agents any leeway or discretion, there will be a million complaints about judgment calls going one way or another.
   -If they don't, we have a US Senator (or any other person) made to cool his heels for an hour when there are no reasonable grounds to think he's a security threat.
   -If the TSA treats everyone as a potential terrorist (which is the de facto current practice, although Administrator John Pistole said in an interview last year that he was trying to move away from it), it creates the patdowns-for-toddlers episodes.
   -If it doesn't, it opens itself to other complaints.
   -If it acts as if any cost or inconvenience is justified if there is the slightest risk of attack, it can nearly destroy the travel system in order to save it.
   -If it doesn't -- and something happens -- it knows that the same Congressmen who complained about security theater will soon be presiding over "who let the terrorists through?" inquisitions.

So, it's tough. But I don't think we've worked out the sweet-spot compromise solution. More on this soon, after Jeffrey Goldberg and I have another chance to interview TSA officialdom.

A few other reader notes. On the bright side:

I live in Des Moines, and I have found, not surprisingly, that the smaller airports are better as far as TSA kindness goes.  The agents in here in DM are very nice, and even crack jokes.  Of course, it would not surprise me if I ran into them at the mall - it's a small city. 

In Orlando recently, the agents were professional and fairly nice, but they did confiscate a fruit cup from my 7 year old daughter.  That kind of thing is utterly amazing to me.  It was a clear plastic, see through cup.  Really?

It could be worse elsewhere:

Have you ever been to DeGaulle in Paris???  TSA seems like heaven.

Regional airports in the USA, for instance Gerald R Ford in Grand Rapids MI, are friendly, fast, handy, clean, well-run.

Detroit is better than it used to be.  O'Hare is HUGE, but fairly well-managed.

I'm with Louis C-K, at least as far as US airports are concerned.  It used to take you 4 months to get from NYC to SF.  Now it takes 4 hours, and you SIT IN A CHAIR while it's happening.  Keep perspective; get a grip; plan some recovery time for when things do go awry.  We're blessed even in the midst of our chaos.
And avoid DeGaulle like the plague.  The plague, I tell you.

I am a fan of the classic Louis C-K riff on how impatient, whiny, and complainy we all become. But airline travel is not a good illustration. Travel from NYC to SF is incomparably faster, safer, and easier than it was 150 years ago. It is slower and harder (though even safer) than it was 25 years ago.

Further in this vein:

I'm a book editor in Chicago.  This note is to encourage you to maintain your "hard-over" attitude on the TSA and their hateful, ruinous effect on commercial air travel, which was very recently one of the great democratic glories of modern life.
 
Their work is transparently, obviously pointless and stupid; please continue to point this out at every opportunity your position affords you.  The public justifications for it are nonsensical.  The backscatter machines, while I'm not really that concerned about their safety, provide featherbedding to crony companies at enormous public expense.  But the most serious problem is the plain fact that the rules and routines are facially absurd and contemptible, far beyond any other aspect of government from IRS to state DMV. 
 
The entire operation is an embarrassment to the United States and its citizens. 

More in the queue, and after our interview. Also, see this new Pro Publica article on a proposed bill requiring independent testing of the TSA's full-body X-ray scanners -- which, it's worth remembering, are prohibited in Europe.

In response to my contention that American airports had become run-down and off-putting to an extent that Americans who don't travel internationally may not realize, several "on the other hand" replies.

First, a reader who is highly experienced in and around aviation sends a report of two recent "humane" interactions with the TSA. I've changed the names of the airports he mentions so as not to make the TSA people in question too easy to identify:

The first case was in December at [a major West Coast airport]. I was in line for security behind a late 20ish pregnant woman. As we got close to the front of the line she leaned over and asked the TSA person at the mileage elite/first class line (who had nobody in his line), "I'm just curious, are these things safe for pregnant women, do I have to go through?" My first thought was that she just sealed her fate for extra security.

She was obviously pregnant, and sounded generally concerned and wanting to know if the x-ray boxes in our path were safe.

"They say they are" was the response from the TSA agent. She didn't seemed all that satisfied.

A few moments later he leaned back and said, "once you're past the ID check, go over to the line on the far [left or right], there isn't a machine over there."

As somebody who also opts out at every occasion, I was surprised and pleased by this piece of advice. And sure enough, both of us walked to the far-side line after the ID check and were whisked through a metal detector only. No x-ray in that line.

I have since made a point of going through this same line at that airport twice more and each time with the same no x-ray/opt out decision needed.

The next experience happened [yesterday] departing [a major East Coast airport]. After opting out of a millimeter wave scanner (I just opt out of everything on principle), I was politely walked to a location for the pat down. Just as the pat down began (professionally and politely), another agent walked over and said he was going to send my carry on suitcase though the x-ray again for a second screening. No problem.

After the pat down was complete, the TSA agent said to me, "sorry about that, I just wanted to make sure you weren't one of us."

I was confused and it must have showed. He explained that the reason he was extra careful with the pat down - which was actually not the most careful one I have received - is because after I opted out and my bag warranted another scan, he thought I must have been a TSA tester sent through to check the system. He then explained to me how that happens every so often and the little things that the testers have on them to test the TSA agents.

So two stories of rather polite TSA agents sharing a little inside info with me. One an advice on how to avoid the x-ray scanner, the other on where to hide something if I wanted to emulate where the testers apparently think the sneaky traveler carries contraband.

Now, from a reader who says US airports aren't really that bad:

On the aesthetics, cleanliness, and amenities of US airports: I haven't been through every major airport in the US, but I've been through many of them. This weekend I was at SeaTac, Newark (where I had to spend the night in the terminal), and Orlando. In my time I've been through Atlanta, Houston, O'Hare, Midway, JFK, Dallas, Minneapolis, etc. Most of the hubs.

Most of them are pleasing enough, in Holiday Inn kind of way. Most of them are clean. Most have decent amenities, at least until the late evening hours. They could all use Japanese-style "tube hotels" in them, for the case of longer times between flights, and they could all use more truly personal services.

I've only found one that was wholly unacceptable, and that, unfortunately (given the nature of international flights) is Newark. It's an open pit, a noisome, foul, offending spot ("things rank and gross in nature possess it merely"). To put it literally and succinctly, it stinks.

Just one man's opinion, without tears.

And further on this theme:

I've always found Heathrow to be one of the worst experiences one can have to change flights. If one has a connecting flight, you still have to through the customs rigmarole. If I ever have a transfer in London that is less than 2 hours, I usually decline it because there's an even chance I'm missing my connection. CDG, while not as bad, is pretty bad as well, since you have to go through security unless you're connecting within the EU.

After the jump, a report from a reader in Japan.

More »