My column today is pretty harsh on conservatives, saying that the TSA's invasive procedures are an extension of how successfully they've been in winning the argument over larger choices between liberty and security.
But conservatives bear a lot of blame for their current predicament. This comprehensive assault on individual freedom didn't occur in a vacuum; it occurred because conservatives were successful in frightening Americans into choosing security over liberty every time the choice was before them, and because America's elected officials take being blamed for a terrorist attack more seriously than their oath to protect the Constitution. While the scanners have been in development for years, their deployment was rapidly accelerated in the aftermath of last year's attempted underwear bombing, as the TSA became even more concerned about the threat of nonmetallic objects. Conservatives must now face the Frankenstein they created by breathlessly hyping the threat of terrorism for political gain: A recent CBS poll found that 81 percent of Americans support the new machines.
A few people have noted that Democrats are often just as bad or fairly useless on this front too. I wouldn't argue with that, but I think Democrats are mostly bad or useless because they're really scared of Republicans. They haven't even offered an alternate argument.
I asked the TSA about alternatives to the body scanners, and there doesn't seem to be anything else that could substitute as a primary screening device. The TSA has deployed explosive trace detection devices (ETDs) that detect minute amounts of materials used in explosives as a secondary screener, but even if you combined the less invasive metal detector with the ETD, the "non-metallic threat objects" the body scanners are designed to detect could get through.
So among these three threats, metallic and non-metallic weapons, and a possible hidden explosive, from the TSA's perspective the screener is the only one that can detect all three, although as I point out in my column with in the third case it's not really clear that's true. Given the legal landscape we're probably stuck with them for a while, unless people want to get really serious about pushing political leaders to encourage the TSA to develop some kind of less invasive tech alternative or the kind of intelligence-based approach Noah Schactman recommends. Given institutional inertia and the fact that the procedures are pretty popular, I'm not optimistic about a change.
