Safety Last

There is a trend lately - whether in the world or in the U.S. or both - to demand that the government make us "safe".

"There ought to be a law!" is the battle cry of the folks who seem intent on swaddling the public in legal and regulatory cotton so that nothing harms them. Now, I'm not talking about product safety wherein blatant negligence results in injury or death. We need to have products, food and drugs that contain what the label says without necessarily killing or hurting anyone in the normal use/consumption of said product. There's nothing wrong with insisting on an acceptable level of product safety. But what is acceptable?

This is where the line between reason and insane becomes blurred. To some, acceptable risk is bungee jumping with moth-eaten elastic. To others, they have to weigh the risks between holding one's breath and breathing. But this is on an individual level. People deciding for themselves what their acceptable levels of risk is. This is all well and good. People shoud decide for themselves how much risk they want in their lives. If it kills them (hopefully, BEFORE they procreate), their bad risk assessment abilities aren't passed on to the next generation, or they serve as a good example of how not to do things for the more risk assessment aware. If it stops people from doing anything productive at all, then they do nothing to endanger anyone else and life goes on without them (because eventually, there's too much risk involved in procreation, they stop procreating and die out).

It's a win-win for Darwin and the Human Race.

But somewhere between the two extremes, we have the government. Swaying between aggressive self preservation and avoiding preservation at all costs, what we end up with is a mash-up of utter indifference and over-zealous protectiveness in the form of laws, regulations, procedures and rules that are glaring in their extremes.

When it comes to business, we have regulations that often are at odds with what is in the best interests of the people - regulations and rules that hold the environment and the health of people in what is arguably utter contempt. On the other end, we have laws and regulations that invade the individual person's dignity and person for the sake of "safety".

It is to the latter that that this posting is addressed. There are a myriad of examples of government-mandated safety regulations. From the seat belt to clean water standards, these regulations help keep us safe in a very real manner. They prevent frequent injury, illness and/or death. But some safety regulations go a bit overboard. These are the kind of things you find at public events: Security screenings for hidden weapons or explosives.

Now, I'm not opposed to these, in general. After all, SOMEONE has to get money for all that high-tech security screening gear people are inventing. But when these screenings are both invasive and utterly ineffective, the overboard-ness of the things becomes glaringly apparent. Take, for example, the TSA's latest brain fart: Virtual strip searches and/or public sexual groping.

For people who are unfortunate enough to be forced to endure the "ham in the can" experience of modern aviation, the indignity of air travel today begins at the security gate. There, they will find a vast assortment of advisory notices telling passengers what they can't bring with them. This list includes the usual things like weapons, pocket knives and other things that have obvious weapons potential. It also includes things like nail clippers (Apparently, the victims of the deadly nail clipper attack dies laughing that some schmuck tried to hijack a plane with them) but, curiously, fails to include pens and pencils as well as car and house keys - all of which are taught in most personal self defense classes to be used as weapons.

One wonders what the hell they're thinking there.

Another thing they are told is the amount of liquids they are allowed to bring on the plane in a carry-on. The maximum, I believe, is 3 ounces per item. This is because it is believed that this amount is insufficient to mix with anything else to create a bomb. This belief is, of course, an utter fallacy, but if the TSA doesn't come up with something new to irritate air travelers every year, people might think they're not doing their jobs.

Once at the actual security station, the by now impatient at the two hour long wait passengers are required to surrender their footwear right off the bat. Most people will then be sent through a metal detector, have their carry-ons x-rayed and, dignity pretty much shot, will move into the canning - or rather boarding - process.

The removal of shoes is because one person, one time, attempted but failed, to ignite a small amount of explosives in his shoe. Whoever decided that three ounces was an insufficient amount of liquid to ignite and do any damage should have checked the shoes of this guy since he carried around three ounces of explosives in each one, but, hey, I'm just a blogger who can read. It would appear that the TSA is contradicting itself, either that or they only really object to people blowing up planes with shoe-bombs but not with OTHER cleverly concealed 3 ounce plastic explosives.

The wonders of modern security never ceases to amaze me.

But despite these, thus far utterly useless, endeavors, we have the most brain-dead, bone-headed, nightmare of security procedures: The Scan and Grope.

This entails a randomly selected victim being singled out of the line to undergo "enhanced security screening" procedures. The poor schmuck is forced to stand in a booth, arms over their head as if in surrender while being irradiated in such a way that the return signal displays what is essentially their naked body to someone in another room. Never mind that radiation exposure and damage is cumulative over a lifetime. Never mind that some people have religious nudity taboos. Never mind that not one of these people - not one - has ever concealed anything of consequence.

Never mind that this device will not show anything concealed inside the human body where considerably more than three ounces of explosives (along with the necessary equipment to set it off) can be concealed. The long and short of it is that this personal-privacy-intrusive scan can not detect what it is designed to detect even if that something is NOT inside someone.

But the ultimate indignity is what happens if you refuse the scan: You are sexually molested.

That's right. In public, in front of several hundred silently consenting witnesses, a stranger grabs you by your private parts, checking for hidden explosives.

Please note, all of this is because one person - once - tried, but failed, to set off a bomb concealed in his underwear.

The horror stories of abuses and indignities - from the cancer survivor who was forced, in public, to show the agent her breast prosthesis to the ostomy patient whose urostomy bag was ripped off in the course of the search and was subsequently forced to sit on an airplane in his own urine - are legion. It is patently obvious that this latest assault on our privacy is neither popular or warranted. The truly sad part is that the underwear bomber would most likely have passed both visual and manual inspection.

Now, I do happen to know a little bit about the constitutionality of security at airports and to what standard it is applied. It is required that the security not be overly intrusive (without probable cause, that is) and that it be effective. This is based on past decisions handed down by the Supreme Court over the years to various things the TSA has implemented. X-rayed luggage, metal detectors and even removed footwear are fine, it seems. They, at least, have some reasonable chance of detecting what they are designed to detect and so, even if it's undignified, that part's constitutional.

Unfortunately, the enhanced security screening procedures - both the scanner and the groping - are acknowledged by security specialists around the world to be ineffective at detecting an "underwear bomb". That is precisely what they are SUPPOSED to detect. Of course, the TSA vehemently denies this, but can you really trust an agency that can get its porn for free through a high-tech peep-show of hundreds of people a day to have the best interests of the flying public at heart?

In all seriousness, the new security screening procedures are so unconstitutional as to be a government sanctioned sexual assault every time someone is groped or scanned. The litmus test for the constitutionality of these enhanced screenings came back blatantly against it, but the TSA soldiers on, groping and sexually violating passenger after passenger at dozens of major airports around the country on nearly a minute to minute basis.

This is how the government has opted to keep us SAFE? By utilizing procedures and technology that don't work?

It would seem so.

I know I've said that people are stupid. I stand by that. Point in evidence: A general lack of rioting in the streets (or at least at airports) over these new procedures. They are an affront to the personal dignity and privacy of the average American air traveler, but aside from several vocal people, the vast majority of them just take it in stride, never realizing the magnitude of liberty and freedom - not to mention privacy - they, with their silent consent, have lost.

And so, in the interests of safety, the people of the U.S. continue to be violated in their person and privacy in a process that guarantees nothing but embarrassment, thus proving Franklin's adage, that those who would give up a little freedom for a little security deserve neither and lose both.