Legal Commentary

Objections to Rampant Airport Security

By Jeralyn

The ACLU weighed in today on the new TSA airplane security rules, and the increase of whole body imaging scanners.

[T]he government should adhere to longstanding standards of individualized suspicion and enact security measures that are the least threatening to civil liberties and are proven to be effective. Racial profiling and untargeted body scanning do not meet those criteria.

..."We should be focusing on evidence-based, targeted and narrowly tailored investigations based on individualized suspicion, which would be both more consistent with our values and more effective than diverting resources to a system of mass suspicion," said Michael German, national security policy counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office and a former FBI agent. "Overbroad policies such as racial profiling and invasive body scanning for all travelers not only violate our rights and values, they also waste valuable resources and divert attention from real threats."

[More...]

The ACLU says it's a pretext for racial profiling:

[T]here is no way to predict the national origin of a terrorist and many terrorists have come from countries not on the list. For instance, the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid is a British citizen, as were four of the London subway bombers, and in 2005 a Belgian woman launched a suicide attack in Iraq.

..."Singling out travelers from a few specified countries for enhanced screening is essentially a pretext for racial profiling, which is ineffective, unconstitutional and violates American values. Empirical studies of terrorists show there is no terrorist profile, and using a profile that doesn't reflect this reality will only divert resources by having government agents target innocent people,"

"Profiling can also be counterproductive by undermining community support for government counterterrorism efforts and creating an injustice that terrorists can exploit to justify further acts of terrorism."

As to the body scanners, the ACLU says when they were tried in Great Britain, officials decides they were not shown to be effective in preventing terrorist threats on airplanes.

And according to security experts, the explosive device used in the attempted attack on a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day would not have been detected by the body scanners.

They provide a false sense of security. And when used without individualized suspicion, they violate our privacy rights.

"If scanners and other intrusive procedures are used, it should be with their limitations in mind and only when there is reason to believe that an individual poses an increased risk to flight safety, not as blanket measures applied to millions of innocent travelers."

And what about the cost? A Swedish professor writing in Al Jazeera today, dubs the security changes The $30bn pair of underpants . While I don't agree with everything he wrote, he makes this good point:

Think about it. One angry young man with about three ounces (around 80 grams) of explosive material, $2,000, and a pair of specially tailored underwear has completely disrupted the US aviation system. It does not even matter that he failed to blow up the plane.

The costs associated with preventing the next attack from succeeding will measure in the tens of billions of dollars - new technologies, added law enforcement and security personnel on and off planes, lost revenues for airline companies and more expensive plane tickets, and of course, the expansion of the 'war on terror' full on to yet another country, Yemen.

....And what happens when the next attacker turns out to have received ideological or logistical training in yet another country? Perhaps in Nigeria, which is home to a strong and violent Salafi movement, or anyone of a dozen other African, Gulf, Middle Eastern or South East Asian countries where al-Qaeda has set up shop?

Will the US ramp up its efforts in a new country each time there is an attempted attack, putting US "boots on the ground" against an enemy that is impossible to defeat?

We are embarking on another collision course with our privacy rights and about to increase our commitment to funding the war on terror and intervention in the affairs of other countries, and once again, like with the Patriot Act and the War in Iraq, we're not going to be any safer, just less free.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 04, 2010 (boomark / email).