America suffers this absurdity while Britain scraps its liquid limits.
America suffers this absurdity while Britain scraps its liquid limits.
W hen Congress created the Transportation and Safety Administration in 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it provided the TSA administrator with unique powers to manage its personnel. The thinking was that, because of the TSA’s involvement with national-security issues, its management should be granted the same degree of flexibility and rapid response as that of the new Department of Homeland Security.
Last year, the Democratic Congress and President Biden fulfilled a long-held goal of government labor unions, which are some of their most generous campaign contributors: They removed many of the management powers of the TSA administrator and gave its 60,000 workers more power to form a collective bargaining unit. They also placed the TSA under the same management umbrella as ordinary federal workers.
Since then, the TSA has only gotten more nonsensical and sluggish in its management of airport risks.
For example, the TSA has now decreed in its best Orwellian fashion that peanut butter is subject to its rule banning liquids over 3.4 ounces. The logic, such as it is, is that peanut butter “conforms to the shape of its container.” However, the TSA also acknowledges that frozen liquids are a solid and can be brought on board planes — even though, like peanut butter, they conform to the shape of whatever container they are in.
In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, the ruling party invented a new language called Newspeak. Part of it “consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms” that “resembled the scientific terms in use today,” but the party defined “them rigidly and stripped them of undesirable meanings.”
According to Orwell,
there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for “Science,” any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.
Examples of the TSA’s lagging behind the rest of the world in updating security protocols are numerous. According to the website FlyerTalk, only four countries copy the TSA’s demand that passengers remove their shoes before going through security detectors: Russia, the Philippines, Belize, and Sri Lanka. Even über-terrorist-conscious Israel will not force you to walk in socks or nylons (or barefoot) through airport checkpoints.
Is it any surprise that the TSA can’t keep up with all of its mindless interpretations of its own rules? As Gary Leff, the author of the travel blog View from the Wing, notes, “sometimes TSA itself gets confused by its own Newspeak rules. For instance they posted to their website that sunscreen would be exempt from its rules but then claimed this was an error.”
But the TSA does change its rules when it wants to. After Covid hit in 2020, it suddenly allowed passengers to bring up to twelve ounces of hand sanitizer in airplane cabins.
Security expert Bruce Schneier, who sometimes advises the TSA, wrote in 2020, on his blog Schneier on Security, that the hand-sanitizer exception pointed out the absurdity of the rule limiting liquids: “Won’t airplanes blow up as a result? Of course not. Would they have blown up last week were the restrictions lifted back then? Of course not. It’s always been security theater.”
In Britain, the nonsense about liquids is about to end. Airports there will end their liquid restrictions by June 2024 at the latest, as they install higher-tech screening machines.
Ironically, these new higher-tech machines are already in use at many airports in the United States. But a TSA spokesman told the Smarter Travel website that “while we have them deployed at more checkpoints, we are years away from announcing a change to the current liquids rule.”
Just as Republicans warned last year, TSA employees are indeed now as sluggish and resistant to change as any ordinary federal employee.