The backdrop of my favorite science-fiction novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune series, is something called the Butlerian Jihad. Some 10,000 years before the main events of the story take place, humanity rebelled against “thinking machines” — intelligent computers — controlling people’s lives. The revolution was sparked because a computer decided to kill, without the consent of any human authority, the baby of a woman named Jehanne Butler.
I bring this up because I’m wondering why we can’t have a Reppertian Jihad. Its namesake would be Lena Reppert, a 105-pound, 95-year-old Florida woman. Her daughter claims Reppert was forced by airport security to remove her adult diaper in compliance with a body search. Reppert is dying of leukemia. She did not have another clean diaper for her trip.
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The Transportation Security Administration belatedly denied forcing the removal of the diaper. Sari Koshetz, a spokeswoman for the TSA, insisted that the agency was sensitive and respectful in dealing with travelers, but she also told the Northwest Florida Daily News that procedures have to be the same for everyone: “TSA cannot exempt any group from screening because we know from intelligence that there are terrorists out there that would then exploit that vulnerability.”
That’s apparently why Drew Mandy, a 29-year-old disabled man with the mental capacity of a two-year-old, had his six-inch plastic toy hammer yanked from him by TSA on his way to Disney World. Mandy used the hammer as a security blanket of sorts. But the TSA agents insisted it could be used as a weapon. “It just killed me to have to throw it away because he’s been carrying this, like, for 20 years,” Mandy’s father told WJBK in Detroit. What his dad doesn’t understand is that if Islamic terrorists can’t have plastic toy hammers, no one can.
Mandy’s father says he wrote to the TSA and got an apology and a promise that agents would be retrained, but horror stories like these keep mounting. I’d tell you how thorough the TSA search was of blogger and advice columnist Amy Alkon (who collects such tales), but this is a family magazine. Suffice it to say, your government left nothing to chance.
And that’s what brought to mind Dune’s Butlerian Jihad. The holy war against machines was also a war against a mindset. “The target of the jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” a character explains. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments.” In the aftermath, a new commandment was promulgated: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
It seems the first commandment of the TSA is that every mind must be trained in the likeness of a machine. “Garbage in, garbage out,” is how computer programmers explain the way bad inputs determine bad outputs. Likewise, if TSA workers are programmed not to use common sense or discretion — surprise! — TSA workers won’t use common sense or discretion.
Why not? One reason is we’ve institutionalized an irrational phobia against anything smacking of racial or religious profiling. Once you’ve decided that disproportionate scrutiny of certain groups is verboten, you’ll have to hassle everyone equally. Thus we’re told that a 95-year-old woman’s diaper is just as likely to be the front line in the war on terror as a 22-year-old Pakistani’s backpack.
Defenders of the TSA insist we can’t abandon such mindlessness because, if we do, clever terrorists will start using adult diapers as IEDs. Others say we know that profiling isn’t effective because the Israelis don’t use it.
Both lines of argument assume security personnel cannot be trusted to be much more than automatons, mindlessly acting on bureaucratic programming. If that’s true of the current personnel, it’s not because it has to be.
In fact, the reason the Israelis don’t do simple profiling is that they use intelligent profiling conducted by highly intelligent screeners. At Ben Gurion International Airport, everyone’s interviewed by security. Some are questioned at length, others quickly. The controlling variable is the “living judgment” — to borrow a phrase from Dune’s Herbert — of the interviewers, and not wildly expensive full-body scanners and inflexible checklists.
Does anyone think that the personnel searching Lena Reppert honestly thought there might be a threat? Or is it more likely they were, machine-like, just doing what their garbage-in programming dictated?
For the very simple reason that most TSA employees are morons that cannot be trusted to make prudent decisions. They are taught to do everything "by the book." That way, they cannot be blamed.
This is the same "zero tolerance" mindset that has infected our schools. An aspirin is just as bad as crack cocaine. How much sense does this make?
This is an extension of the same thinking. You see, there are certain groups that get caught with the hard drugs in greater numbers. So, we have to expand the field to get enough of the other kids so that it doesn't appear as if we are being racist. The same thing is done with the terrorists. We know where most of them worship. Yet in Congress, while doing hearings on muslim radicalization in prison (of individuals who have a demonstrated leaning toward breaking the law), we get a Congress Woman that wants to complain about Christian Fundamentalism! News Flash, Judeo-Christian "fundamentalism" can't bring down the country because the country was founded on Judeo-Christial ideals!
I am a Catholic of Irish heritage. If, during the height of the IRA terrorism in Ireland I was subjected to additional scrutiny, that would have made sense. Subjecting me to additional scrutiny now, so that we don't hurt anyone's feelings, is insanity. Perhaps if we made it a pain in the neck to travel for the followers of that "peaceful religion" then more of them might speak out against their brothers-in-arms.
The only discernable requirement to be a TSA agent is having a pulse. I have recieved vastly different treatment from TSA agents at different airports. Often they are polite, but occassionaly you run into the one who thinks it is their job to ruin your trip. They have you in a position that unless you are willing to miss your flight and be detained you must submit to their every command.
Now apply this same observation to Obamacare. Government applies "one size fits all" to everything, reducing it to the lowest (ie dumbest) level. Just as TSA workders are programmed to act as automatons so too will be healthcare providers. Dr/Patient relations will give way to an HHS manual.
Perhaps though I am overlooking the symbiosis between government agencies. Under Obamacare there will be no 90 year old leukemia patients for TSA to deal with.
When most Americans agreed, post-9/11, that an airport security system needed to be put into place, we had in mind a thinking, questioning, skeptical, investigating intelligence service, NOT another bureaucracy like the Post Office or the DMV.
Unfortunately, the latter is what we ended up with and the TSA demonstrates how difficult it is to reel in stupidity driven from Washington, especially one where the back seat driver is the liberal political agenda.
Is there anyone who thinks that the unionization of these idiots will do anything but protect the perpetrators of increased foolishness on a more regularized basis?
How long will it be before airports and airlines get together to remove the TSA and replace it with their own private organization that could focus on actual threats to safety?
Every bureaucrat embraces the cloak of a rigid, unthinking, "system" over discretion.
Why? When you can blame a system, no individual (or manager) can be held accountable. The life of a government bureaucrat depends on avoiding any choice that might have the slightest possibility of blowing back on them.
This is also reflected in the nonsense of clear adults being asked for an ID in a bar. Everyone is carded so no law suit can be filed. The fact that the process is utterly idiotic for any sentient adult is meaningless to the management that treasures no risk above reasonable behavior.
Treat everyone like infants and expect them to obey. Somehow that doesn't sound like a "progressive" society to me.
That's exactly right, the tendency toward mindless compliance; part of the problem is a society that's far too quick to litigate, so there's much of an incentive AGAINST responsible, discerning behavior that accounts for the context.
This isn't progress in the sense of increasing freedom and a more responsible exercise of that freedom, but it's progress in the only sense that matters to the statist Left: it centralizes the power and the willingness to make judgment calls with our so-called Betters.
Jonah, Thomas Sowell wrote that the Isralis DO use profiling. Ask Thomas Sowell, he'll tell you. He wrote that they let him pass through to his flight without inspection, because they aren't looking for an elderly African-American. They are looking for suspicious persons who fit the profile of troublemakers.
There are 2 things at play here: 1)Bureaucratic Dominance 2)Public Passivity.
Bureaucracies become self-serving from almost day one. They have no other goal other than to build thier own empires and then expand them. Political Correctness drives the TSA. Janet Napolitano runs the TSA and answers to the President and her Democratic sponsors in Congress. They provide political cover for her. And in turn she covers for the TSA abuses. The Bureaucracy always wins
2)Like Europe, our citizens continue to absorb these abuses. You rarely hear a govenor or federal lawmaker come to thier resuce. But, air travel continues; people just quietly submit to these abuses. Few believe the TSA efforts have made them any safer. There are no boycotts, nor any large scale protests.
Modern, progressive bureaucracies can be sould crushing institutions. There is no accountability, and once in place they never go away. As a matter of fact, the TSA is no branching out to train stations and airports. There are rumors that they may eventually set up shop on our federal highways. Who knows, in the future the TSA may be conducting pat-downs at rest-stops.
Oh you can complain all you want, but if you don't submit, they arrest you. I've had more than one drone say "you don't have to fly today". Your vacation is ruined and while you may get publicity and get off, it's not worth it.
The best thing to do is take the offending TSA drone's name and write a letter with copies to your congresswh-re and your senatewh-res. If they get enough complaints, they may just do something.
Short of that, only mass uprisings at the airports will cause change, but I bet in the meantime they cancel all the flights.
God forbid, but another thing that will cause things to change is a terrorist who sets off a bomb before he goes through security, while in a queue with innocent passengers.
At that point, expect the TSA to strip search you at the Departures terminal curb ---until there's a curbside bombing.
OK, then it will be the airport entrance. Until....
Jonah, for pete's sake, get with it! "Dune" - all of Herbert - hopeless trash. And the guy ADMIRES Islam. The writer for you is Jack Vance. In fact, whatever is good in Herbert's books is mostly thanks to Vance (they were pals). The pertinent Vance titles - in this case - are too numerous to mention, but one of his early throw-away "gadget stories", about a robot which takes over a world, "Plagian Siphon", or that episode in "Mazirian the Magician", "Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream", in which a somnolent "eternal" robotized ruler is disturbed, go well beyond the taudry "moralities" peddled by poor old Frank.
What you really want, however, is "The Cadwal Chronicals", the only American book of the stature of the Golag Archipelago.
The examples provided in the comment are just the latest ones of the rule of logic and rationality in government's control of our lives.
It's rational to believe that anyone can be a terrorist carrying a bomb onto an airplane; that's why it's obvious that a 95-year-old woman should have her Depends searched and why it's perfectly understandable why a retarded middle-aged guy should have his toy hammer taken away from him.
The use of common sense is not OK because it requires questionable discriminations to be made between one person and another. Government has to cleave to strict equality.
At least it does in these latter days, when we have abandoned common sense for logic.
They are people who have been bought off with a relatively high pay for their level of "expertise". A secure job with benefits today is the Golden Prize.
The TSA employees are threatened with loss of that secure status if they do exercise their judgement. Indeed, the DHS is terrified that they will use reasonable judgement - they know that the lawsuits that will follow will tag them as "racist, Islamphobic, haters". Such a tag is the kiss of death in our Liberal world.
The management wants to protect their jobs, and will bully their employees to make sure that they follow orders to the letter.
The employees, having been put into a rigid, fearful environment, start taking out their frustration on the passengers. They act out their anger by enforcing rules in ridiculous ways, and treating any questions about their actions as arrestable offenses. They are NOT disciplined for going over the top. They ARE disciplined for being reasonable.
I've been through security at Ben Gurion airport at least a dozen times.
Not only is security tight and multi-tiered, with personal interviews conducted of EVERY traveller by intelligent trained security officers, but the airport itself has been physically designed with security in mind.
Israel can do what it does in terms of security because it only has one major international airport, with a relatively limited number of flights in and out. Israel is simply physically too small of a country for any significant number of domestic flights; all parts of the country lie within 200 miles of Ben Gurion airport, with the vast majority of the population and major cities within less than 80 miles.
While we could (and probably should) try to emulate Israel a little bit more with respect to intelligent screening/profiling, the reality is that to go all out requires intelligent screeners with quite a bit of training. Israel, collectively, is willing to pay the cost of hiring these people (mostly young women, and all ex-military, by the way, due to Israel's compulsory military service), which gets borne as an added cost of travel to and from Israel.
But that model model simply isn't practical in the USA. The number of "intelligent" screeners would be huge in terms of numbers and costs, and I don't think most Americans would tolerate the extra delay this sort of personalized screening would take on domestic flights in particular.
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