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Catch and Release

The new airport body scanners are in place in time for the Thanksgiving ritual of flying to family dinners, and everybody is grousing again about increased security measures that don’t measurably increase actual security.

Glancing in car trunk didn’t increase security. Nominally a search for weapons, I’ve driven through airports simply to have guards confirm that we did, indeed, have boxes in our car. Random searches don’t increase security. Random searches may be an effective way to stretch a limited police force in deterring certain crimes—crimes where the cost of getting caught multiplied by the probability of getting caught outweigh the potential profit—but it’s hard to imagine Al Qaeda being deterred by the thought that one in six (or ten, or whatever) suicide bombers might get through, or that the suicide bombers would be willing to blow themselves up for infamy and eternal glory but not to risk one chance in six of being questioned by authorities and seeing their names on the news. Machines to examine people under their clothes don’t increase security. No-fly lists don’t increase security, though they’re a great way to harass undesirables like professors, opposition senators, and darkies. Elaborate rules over whether your private parts can be touched with the fingertips or the back of the hand in a body search don’t increase security, or in any way dilute the act of molestation.

At best, it’s pointless theater: an elaborate gesture of doing something about terrorists that doesn’t even fool the intended audience. We know we aren’t being protected. But it’s safer for officials to look busy than to admit vulnerability. At worst, it’s part of a general program to get people used to surrendering vital civil liberties for no reason beyond bringing a free people under authoritarian control.

This airport horror story evinces from start to finish both security personnel and the authority of “national security” run amok, but I call your particular attention to the section involving the $10,000 fine for acceding to being escorted from the airport. Turns out that leaving the airport is a crime punishable by a $10,000 fine. Quite apart from the fine’s excessive size, I fail to see the purpose of criminalizing the act of leaving an airport. If the law is aimed at terrorists, don’t we want them leaving the airport without boarding an aircraft? And if the law is aimed at lawful citizens, why should they be fined at all? Most disturbing of all, however, is the notion that citizens can be ordered to commit a crime, and punished for that crime, and the authorities who order it should not be subject to penalty of any kind, not so much as a reprimand.

Such an approach to authority and liberty is endemic to the war on terror, and it’s becoming endemic through society at large. More than that, it’s becoming institutionalized through habit, through practice, and even through law. If that isn’t more alarming than anything terrorists might do to us, something is deeply wrong with this country.

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