Airport Security

I wrote this at the airport last Saturday, and finally got around to posting it.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a terminal at Houston George Bush International Airport. I usually tune out the assorted generic announcements that come over the intercom about security and unattended bags because I’ve heard them all before. Some of them may come off as a bit Orwellian, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable that we be alert for suspicious behavior and refuse to take bags from strangers. What made me sit up and listen today was an announcement that I had never heard before. It may be that this particular warning is unique to Houston, or it may be a new addition to the security warning script. The announcement that struck me was a warning that “inappropriate” jokes and remarks about airport security may result in arrest. I’m not surprised really, because intelligent people have avoided making jokes about airport terrorism for at least the last ten years. There was something about the disembodied voice that really drove it home: our right to free speech is being abridged. I don’t think making jokes about airport security is a case of shouting fire in a movie theater. I think this is another case of security theater. For those unfamiliar with the term, “security theater” is the derogatory name given to the assorted security regulations that have been enacted more for show than effect. Things like removing shoes at security checkpoints and limits on fluids in carry-ons are security theater. They are reactive rather than proactive and they promote inconvenience more than they promote security. I don’t deny that there are people who want to commit horrible crimes on planes and using planes as weapons, and I agree that we need to do what we can to prevent such crimes. What I object to are policies that are expensive, intrusive, and ineffective.

We need to accept that we can’t stop all crime, and that includes terrorism. There’s a certain baseline level that we just need to live with, as hard as that is. We need to punish the perpetrators, and we need to prevent terrorism where we reasonably can, but the post-9/11 notion that we can “beat” terrorism or “end” terrorism is as deluded as hoping to prevent all murder and theft. As a society, we need to accept that there are bad people, and those bad people introduce a certain level of danger. Looked at history, our present level of danger is trivial. For eons, all of humanity has lived in fear that a rival tribe would ride in over the hills and burn the village to the ground. That we have reduced that possibility to something rare and extraordinary is an accomplishment, and we shouldn’t lose sight of how significant that is.

We made a mistake declaring war on terrorism, because terrorism is not an enemy state; terrorism is crime. Terrorists are murderers that operate on a grand scale, and we should pursue them and treat them as criminals. To do otherwise legitimizes terrorism and validates terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. We should arrest those we can, try them for their crimes, and punish them. We have a system of criminal justice for this reason, and I cannot understand why we let the military usurp its authority. In the cases of other nations sponsoring terrorism, as Afghanistan did, or other quasi-nations sponsoring terrorism, as is happening in Somalia, there is a case for military intervention. However tempting, I think nation-building is a mistake. Destroy the threat and get out. Make it clear that we will cause irrevocable harm to our enemies, but don’t get caught up with turning them into our allies.

This brings me back to the topic of airport security. The system we have now is showy and somewhat effective, but it is incredibly inconvenient and encroaches on the freedoms of airline passengers. We need to create a system that is effective, rather than a system that looks good. We should implement more behavioral and demographic profiling. The fact is that very few terrorists are young mothers with babies. Very few terrorists are old men with replacement hips. Will there be people who abuse this? Certainly. There are people who will go to any length to hurt others, including employing young mothers and old men as suicide bombers. But back to my first point, we need to accept that the staggering, overwhelming majority of terrorists are not going to these lengths, and the staggering, overwhelming majority of young mothers are not terrorists. In addition to demographic profiling, we should implement more behavioral profiling. Train check-in agents and airport personnel to identify suspicious behavior, and then track those individuals with more scrutiny. I guess what I’m getting at is stop using a one-size-fits-all approach to security and start focusing our attention and energy on those most likely to harm us.

I would be remiss if I didn’t make a comment about the full-body scanners recently installed at security checkpoints in several airports. When I first heard about these, I was excited because I imagined they would make security go faster. Finally, we could keep our belts on and our coins in our pockets! I was wrong. For whatever reason, these scanners are used in the same manner as the metal detectors they’re replacing, except slower. Not only do you have to remove your belt, your pocket change, and your cell phone, but you also need to empty your pockets of non-metallic items like your wallet. Then you need to stand still in the middle of the machine while it scans you, a process that is slower than striding through a metal detector. Since these machines are slower and more intrusive than metal detectors, the only justification for them is that they make us safer than metal detectors. The question is, do we care about being that safe? Do we want to give up assorted conveniences and freedoms in exchange for a marginal increase in security? Are the returns worth the cost? As I argued above, there is a certain level of terrorism that is so costly to prevent that we have no choice but to accept it. I think these scanners, as they are currently implemented, cost too much in time, inconvenience, and offended citizens to be worth the marginal security gains they afford us. I think that we should continue to employ scanners, but not as a replacement for metal detectors. I think they should be a voluntary option for individuals with piercings, prosthetics, or metallic clothing who cannot go through a metal detector. These individuals would otherwise be required to select a pat-down, and that’s excessive. I should also note that there’s some evidence that the backscatter x-ray technology used in some of these scanners may not be safe. The jury is still out on backscatter, but there is a safe (non-ionizing) alternative in the form of millimeter-wave RF scanners, which have also been employed by the TSA in the same role as the backscatter scanners. The prudent thing to do would be to use only the millimeter-wave devices, if only to quiet the naysayers.

Dylan Ratigan is Mad as Hell

This clip has been making the rounds on the internet for the past few days. I first saw it on Reddit, and then one of my friends showed it to me on Facebook. I can see why he thought it would interest me, given my distaste with our government lately. Ratigan makes some good points here, and I’d love to see some of these things come to pass, but ultimately, I think that people like him and rants like this are part of the problem.

Ratigan makes it very clear that he’s angry with the government, but that’s hardly novel. The Tea Party was doing it last summer already. At this point, everyone with their head screwed on straight knows that our government is a mess, that our economy is a mess, and that our country is a mess. Congress’s approval rates are in the teens. Dylan Ratigan is mad; I’m mad too. In a way, I was pleased to see someone in a position of power finally say something about the problem (and don’t tell me that hosting a cables news show isn’t a position of power). It galls me that Barack Obama can come out of what happened two weeks ago and call the debt ceiling “compromise” a victory for anything but political hostage-taking. I am often outraged by the things the media choose to report on. I agree that we have all been too silent for too long about the problems, even though we all know they exist.

The thing is, yelling doesn’t solve the problems. We can be mad as hell, but it won’t create jobs, fix our roads, or shake our government out of the partisan deadlock. If anything, the rise of the Tea Party has made our government even more dysfunctional than it was. They yelled and screamed and got elected, and now that they’re in office, they pledge to do whatever it takes to prevent anyone else from getting what they want. More yelling and screaming is hardly going to improve the situation. I really do hate the deal we struck to raise the debt ceiling, but I am glad we struck a deal. If the left had been as obstinate as the far right, who knows where we would be?

The fact remains that something must be done. Ratigan seems to think the President can do it.

I would like him to go to the people of the United States of America and say, “People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it. But I’m the President of the United States, and I won’t have a country that is run by a bought Congress. So I’m not going to work with a bought Congress and try to be Mr. Big Guy, ‘I’m working with a bought Congress’, I’m going to abandon the bought Congress like Teddy Roosevelt did

There are a few problems with this idea, and the first is that it plays right into the hands of those who oppose him. The Republican Party has spent the last three years trying to paint Obama as a dangerous socialist with Hitler-esque dreams of fascist rule. These amusingly contradictory accusations have been surprisingly effective, especially when you consider that Obama hasn’t even done half of the things they accuse him of (raise taxes, etc). If he were to stand up and declare himself independent of Congress, all of these people would be vindicated. The Hitler references would flow like cheap beer at a frat party. All of the Constitution-hugging Tea Party types would decry his skewering of the separation of powers, and they would be right for a change.

Ratigan is partly right about one thing: the “bought Congress.” Of course, it’s the “partly” that makes things complicated. The fact is that in today’s world, it’s extraordinarily expensive to mount an effective political campaign. To some degree it always has been, and that’s one of the reasons political parties exist. The necessity of TV advertising has made the price tag all the more ludicrous. In order to run for national office, one must amass millions of dollars. Unless one is a multimillionaire, this presents a problem, so candidates take donations. They take donations from individuals, corporations, and special interest groups. Special interest groups, the much-maligned forces of evil that run our country, aren’t all bad. A lot of them are just groups of people who got together behind a common goal and petitioned the government, which is what democracy is supposed to be about. The Sierra Club, the NRA, and the AARP are special interest groups. So are assorted business consortiums and unions. So are the people who want to eliminate government corruption. Special interest groups can espouse things that are good, bad, or neither. They are not the problem. The problem is that money talks in ways that votes don’t, because you can’t get votes without money to pay for the TV commercials and campaign advisors and tour buses. The problem is the massive monetary hurdle, because until and unless we find some way to lower it or remove it, candidates will always be beholden to donors. I freely admit that I do not know how to accomplish this, but I believe it to be the only way to remove the power money has over policy. As long as campaign fundraising is more important than actual issues, we have a problem.

Back to Ratigan’s rant, let’s imagine that Obama did what he proposes. Imagine Obama went on TV and told us our Congress is bought. What happens next? Ratigan doesn’t seem to know. He proposes an infrastructure bank, something I strongly support as a way not only to address our infrastructure projects, but reduce earmarks by taking the decision out of the hands of Congress. But who authorizes this infrastructure bank? Obama just said he won’t work with the “bought Congress,” but they hold the purse strings. A large caucus of Congress has made it their goal to oppose everything that comes out of Barack Obama’s mouth, even if they would have agreed with it otherwise. Calling them a bunch of crooks is hardly going to make them more likely to sign onto his plans.

Ratigan’s proposal is so reeking of socialism that even I’m a bit wary. I find it hard to believe that Americans “will have no issue when I incorporate an infrastructure bank that I fund with repatriated offshore money that I bring in and then use to create 2% direct lending to every business in America because when you realize that the banking system is fully corrupt and defrauding us.” Whether the banking system is “fully corrupt and defrauding us” is a matter for people more intelligent than I, but what Ratigan’s proposing here looks like replacing a big chunk of the banking industry with a government lending agency, funded by repatriated offshore funds. My first question is how you repatriate those offshore funds. Second, if you can find a legal way to do it, how does this affect the businesses that currently hold the funds? It’s all well and good to grab our torches and loot the businesses, but in the end, a lot of us work for the businesses, so maybe burning them to the ground isn’t a good idea. That said, I definitely agree that our tax code makes it far too easy for a multinational to keep funds and assets overseas and avoid taxes. We need a tax code that acknowledges and works with the modern global economy, but we can’t institute it overnight.

I am disappointed in Obama, and I know I’m not the only one. Although many commentators have scolded the “radical left” for expecting more from the President, he ran on a platform of hope and change. I know that I won’t get the government I want, not from him or any other likely candidate. We didn’t expect him to be a socialist, but when I think of hope and change, I think of New Deals and Great Societies. We got neither. It must be said, though, that he accomplished a lot. America is not ready for universal healthcare, but I think that the reforms passed two years ago will make a positive difference for a lot of people. His economic policies, though timid, did stave off a truly painful depression. He may have taken his time in getting there, but he has made great progress on rights for gays in and out of the military. Most recently, his Secretary of Education announced a policy that ends the most asinine part of No Child Left Behind. Most of the things that Barack Obama hasn’t accomplished (ending the Bush tax cuts, proper Keynesian spending, employment programs, environmental legislation, tax reform, making Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare more sustainable), he has failed to accomplish because Congress has no interest in them or actively opposes them.

Obama’s great failing is in controlling his message and bargaining with his opponents. I don’t know why he has proven so bad at controlling his message, but he consistently fails to frame the debate. He doesn’t get out ahead of the issues (at least not since healthcare), and he doesn’t inspire. He lets the other side paint him as something he isn’t, and finds himself cornered because they control the debate. He fails in bargaining because he wants to be post-partisan. He wants to come to the bargaining table in good faith with an offer that he thinks is fair to both sides. Unfortunately, the Republicans still consider him a Democrat, and they take his “fair offer” as the opening bid in a haggling session. This is how we got tax cut extensions and debt ceiling showdowns. This is how we ended up with a healthcare reform bill that did not even include a public option. I would love to see Barack Obama engage the American people and rally them behind things that I think are important, and I sense that’s what Dylan Ratigan wants. I just don’t know how he’ll do it.

The fact is that we all know there are problems. What we don’t know, or can’t agree on, are the solutions. We cannot forget that a big part of the country doesn’t want to see taxes go up, even if it’s to pay down the debt. We cannot forget that a big part of the country wants a smaller government. They have votes too. I won’t get the government that I want. What kills me is that there are things that all of us want, or at least most of us, and they die a quiet death while we fight over the things we can’t agree on.