TSA Security Theatre Not Safe, Discreet or Effective

USA Today gave Homeland Security chief and “Big Sister” Janet Napolitano 787 words to make her case for the scanners and gropers in a piece called Scanners are safe, pat-downs discreet. We Won’t Fly’s response is by Kevin Carson:

Safe? This from the same government that stonewalled for years on Agent Orange, depleted uranium, and Gulf War Syndrome. And some scientists are already warning back-scatter radiation will raise the statistical incidence of skin cancer.

Discreet? Yep, a TSA employee shrieking “Opt out! Opt out!” sure sounds discreet to me.

But what about effectiveness? There are serious questions as to whether the Underwear Bomber’s device would even have shown up on a body-scanner.

And the TSA’s modus operandi is to devote thousands of bureaucratic man-hours relentlessly grinding out the perfect policy for winning the last war. Precisely because Al Qaeda is an agile networked organization, rather than a lumbering bureaucracy, it’s likely not to keep trying stuff that it knows the pointy-haired bosses at TSA are developing countermeasures for. Everything TSA does is predicated on the assumption that Al Qaeda is a bureaucracy as stupid as the TSA itself. The TSA approach — Security Theatre — is a lot like the drunk who looks for his keys under the streetlight because the light’s better there.

Secretary Napolitano’s repeated references to “mult-layered” security are especially humorous. The top “layer” of the TSA bureaucracy, thanks to an overload of “intelligence” from an intrusive surveillance state on steroids, generates mainly false positives. The Keystone Kops at TSA were unable to stop the Underwear Bomber even with specific, actionable intelligence from the perpetrator’s own father.

In the face of such bureaucratic paralysis from intelligence overload, the one viable alternative is to decentralize and harden, and rely on the last-mile network. Ironically, though, TSA has imposed authoritarian restrictions on the one “layer” that actually demonstrated the capability to stop people like Richard Reed and the Underwear Bomber: the passengers.

The one thing large, bureaucratic organizations are good at is aggregating concentrated power, and then making up plausible-sounding lies to justify that power. It’s generally a good policy, when an official spokesperson for such an organization claims a measure is either safe or effective for the purposes it ostensibly serves, to assume everything they say is a lie.

Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog. Read more of his work at C4SS.org.