The good news is that the American political leadership on both sides of the aisle is starting to bend on the new TSA regulations much faster than I thought possible. Two Republican legislators, Rep. John Mica and Rep. Thomas Petri, both of whom will be assuming positions of authority related to transportation issues in the next Congress, have written a letter stating accurately that "treating every passenger as a suspect or criminal is an inefficient use of scarce resources." TSA head John Pistole has stated that he wants to "look at how we can do this type of screening and do it less invasively." The bad news is that some conservatives are, predictably, exploiting the controversy to further several bogus political narratives.
Let's go after the TSA workers. Republicans have been on the warpath against government workers, and some of the response to the new TSA guidelines has focused on the workers themselves, rather than the political leadership responsible for putting these policies in place. Rep. Ron Paul introduced a bill that would subject TSA workers to prosecution for the use of invasive frisks and body scanners. It won't pass, but blaming TSA workers like they had a choice in the matter is the wrong route to take -- anecdotal evidence suggests they don't like the frisks either, as does common sense. Most people don't want to spend all day touching other people who don't want to be touched.
It's all Obama's Fault. Former Bush-era TSA official Tom Blank told Dave Weigel that the body scanners were "deep-sixed" during the Bush administration and brought back after last year's attempted Christmas bombing. Not according to the Government Accountability Office, which states that operational testing started in fiscal year 2007 and limited procurement began in fiscal year 2008. Body image scanner deployment was accelerated in the aftermath of last year's attempted underwear bombing, but the scanners themselves had been in development for years. That's not a defense of the scanners, by the way; the GAO report notes that "TSA has substituted existing screening procedures with screening by the Whole Body Imager even though its performance has not yet been validated by testing in an operational environment." Awesome.
We just need to racially profile. This is popular in conservative circles, but it's nonsense, and it's a credit to Mica and Petri that their letter is focused on intelligence gathering and behavior profiling rather than racial profiling. The latter may seem satisfying to conservatives as a form of collective punishment against Muslims, but in practice, profiling is no more accurate than random searches. Former Bush-era Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, no liberal, stated that the underwear bombing itself showcased "the danger and the foolishness of profiling because people’s conception of what a potential terrorist looks like often doesn’t match reality." Former Bush-era CIA/NSA Director Michael Hayden has made similar statements. Treating every Muslim as an enemy just might persuade some people that the U.S. is actually in a broad clash of civilizations with Islam -- while that's a strategic disaster from a counterterrorism point of view, I understand that it's exactly what some conservatives want.
We'll just privatize. Privatization is really a separate argument here, but one of the more dubious solutions proposed by Mica is his attempt to get states to individually privatize their airport security. You can opt to privatize your airport security, but it's still regulated by the TSA. The body scanner/pat down option doesn't become less invasive because it's not done by a government worker. According to the TSA, "TSA’s policies – including advanced imaging technology and pat downs – are in place at all domestic airports."
So there you go. I suspect public opinion of the TSA procedures will be very different after the holidays, but either way, there's some bipartisan interest in pushing the government to pursue less invasive security procedures, and that's a good thing.
