Hoo Boy, Watch the Security Lines Now

We flew from Maryland to Iowa this week and I've got to say, security lines have not been a big problem on this trip. We had some terrible delays, some flights were canceled because of weather and some because of mechanical problems, we sat for two hours on one plane while the pilot was stuck in traffic coming to work, but the security lines in the airports were mostly orderly and fast.

I got picked in Chicago for a special check, they put me in one of those new scanners that look through your clothes. The guy was so serious, he told me to show him what was in my "right front back pocket." He got quite impatient with me when I didn't know where my front back pocket was. I had some coins in my "right front" pocket, but not enough to set off the metal detector, and my wallet was in my "right back" pocket, and they allowed me to fly.

It was interesting to see how they pat you down. This big serious guy says, "I am going to pat your pocket to see if there's anything else there" after I had taken the change and guitar picks out. Then he had me turn around and said "Now I'm going to pat your back pocket with the back of my hand," after I had taken my wallet out of it. Just a little institutional homophobia, I guess, making sure I didn't think he was getting frisky with me. Frisky involves the palm, not the back of the hand, very important distinction.

Here's the New York Times:

Transportation authorities began imposing tighter security measures at airports on Saturday as investigators conducted searches to learn more about the Nigerian engineering student accused of igniting an incendiary device aboard a Northwest Airlines jet as it landed in Detroit on Friday.

The White House declared the incident "an attempted act of terrorism." The plane landed safely around noon on Christmas Day after passengers helped subdue the suspect.

As a result of the attack, British Airways announced on its Web site on Saturday that passengers flying from London to the United States would be allowed to carry only one item onto a plane. In addition, an official of the United States Homeland Security Department said Friday night that other unspecified security measures would be imposed at the nation’s airports. The Transportation Security Administration was also holding a briefing on Saturday morning. Governments React After Terror Attempt on Airplane

I hate to be in the Midwest and see the words "tighter security measures at airports" in the news.

I guess this guy entered the system in Lagos -- our security in the US depends on screening in Nigeria. But like, what would they have found? Of course at this early point the news is vague, it's mostly rumor and propaganda, you don't know if he was actually connected to any organization or if he had a real explosive. I read somewhere that he set his crotch on fire. That is not intelligent terrorism.

Here's the NYT:

It was unclear how the suspect managed to get the explosive on the plane, an Airbus A330 wide-body jet carrying 278 passengers that departed from Amsterdam with passengers who had originated in Nigeria. A senior administration official said that the government did not yet know whether the man had had the capacity to take down the plane.

The device, described by officials as a mixture of powder and liquid, failed to fully detonate. Passengers on the plane described a series of pops that sounded like firecrackers.

In classic fashion, they refer to the stuff as "the explosive," though it did not explode and nobody knows what it is, really. He could have been lighting his airplane trail mix on fire for all we know, they would have still called it "the explosive" because that sounds much scarier than "airplane trail mix."

And this "ranking Republican:"

“This was the real deal,” said Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said on Saturday. He was briefed on the incident and said something had gone wrong with the explosive device, which he described as somewhat sophisticated. “This could have been devastating,” Mr. King said.

Of course it's the real deal, because only the real deal will scare Americans in the way we learned to enjoy in the Bush era. If it was some Nigerian mental case pouring his airplane trail mix into his pants and setting it on fire there would be no reason to panic, and we like to panic.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official said that the materials Mr. Abdulmutallab had on him were “more incendiary than explosive,” and that he had tried to ignite them to cause a fire as the airliner was approaching Detroit.

Mr. Abdulmutallab told law enforcement authorities, the official said, that he had had explosive powder taped to his leg and that he had mixed it with chemicals held in a syringe.

A federal counterterrorism official who asked not to be identified said Mr. Abdulmutallab was apparently in a government law enforcement-intelligence database, but it is not clear what extremist group or individuals he might be linked to.

I'm trying to make sense of that. The guy's in the database but they don't know why. Somebody went to the "government law enforcement-intelligence database" and typed in "Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab" and got a hit, and then didn't scroll over to read what else it said. Yup, boss, he's in there, well that's the end of my shift, I gotta go. And wouldn't it have been a good idea to check the database before letting him on the airplane?

As far as public decision-making goes, I don't like the way this is heading. Guy has a Muslim name, he's from Nigeria, he fits the stereotype, so right off the top "ranking Republicans" and government experts are crowing that he's the real deal and everybody should freak out. The security level at the airports was orange already -- did you know they still announce that every few minutes, even though it's been orange for years? Now they caught a guy trying to do something, they're going to bump up security and slow everybody down, frighten everybody, but it's too late. You have to catch the terrorists before they set their crotches on fire, it's no good to inconvenience everybody for nothing after the painful event.

One guy tried something, let's say it was real, let's say he had been assigned by al Qaeda to put actual explosive trail mix in his pants -- what is the true statistical predictive value of that fact for similar acts in the near future? In the weeks after the Shoe Bomber got stopped, exactly how many people attempted to use their shoes as bombs? At least eight gazillion people took their shoes off to be x-rayed -- they're still doing that, we're still going through security barefoot -- and nobody had a bomb in their shoes. It is unproductive to lock everything down after a guy has ignited an incendiary trail mix crotch-pack on an airplane already, but you know it's going to happen just to make people feel that the government is doing something.

Some may object to my tone here, I should not make light of a serious attempted terrorist attack. I am a firm believer in real security, and I am a critic of faux-security. After 9/11 we allowed our government to manipulate our fear level, we handed common sense over to the Bush administration and they used it politically to get people elected and to suppress objective discussion about whether we should attack a couple of countries that had not done anything to us. The stereotype of the Muslim terrorist emerged, even as more probable terrorists of the right-wing variety were demoted in the press. And now we've got this, an incompetent Nigerian scorching his genitals with incendiary trail-mix, and the TV news loves it.

It is possible that this character was sent by an anti-American organization to blow up an airplane. If that is true, he didn't do a very good job of it. He could have gone into the bathroom to set off his bomb, for instance, or he could have used a material that would actually explode and not just pop like a small firecracker and burn his britches. If he was sent by an organization, in other words, they were not very well organized.

I do want the airlines and our federal government to ensure safety for air travelers as well as they can. I do not want terrorists to blow up airplanes with innocent people on them. And there might be ways to prevent that, it makes sense to keep a list of known members of terrorist organizations, for instance, and then monitor or prevent their use of airplanes. But many, if not most, of the measures that are taken do not make anyone safer. We saw this scare-everybody approach in the Bush years, and it appears the same stuff will continue in the new administration, techniques have been designed to remind people constantly that they should live in fear, to encourage people to be suspicious of one another, to persuade people to rely more on big-brother government.

Word is just coming out on the new procedures as I write this. Early reports say you won't be able to get out of your seat or set anything on your lap for the last hour of a flight now. Great, so people won't be able to get out of their seats now, like the people did who jumped on this Nigerian guy and prevented him from doing whatever he was starting to do, while he stayed in his seat. Whatever, people have to feel like somebody is doing something, I guess.

NBC News is reporting on the new procedures:

• Pat downs of passengers at airport security, concentrating on the upper torso and legs;
  
• Physical inspections of all carry-on bags at the gate;
  
• Requiring all passengers to be seated for the full hour prior to arrival;
  
• Banning the use of blankets and pillows one hour prior to arrival.

In other words, they're going to treat every passenger on every flight as if they were going to do exactly what this last guy did. If you carry your explosives incendiary stuff on your arms instead of your legs and set if off in the first part of the trip rather than the last part you'll have no problem.

We do need to be careful, in a realistic way. There are lots of people out there who don't like the United States, and some of them are violent. I would like to see the threat of random attacks treated objectively. I would like to know that government officials are able to assess the probability of an attack at any time, and that they will have done the reconnaissance necessary to anticipate where it will come from -- they had advance warning that this Nigerian was bad news and did not capitalize on it. I would like to know that there are evacuation procedures and a plan for responding when an attack does occur, given the fact that it will probably not resemble previous incidents. I would like them to eliminate or at least reduce danger before guys start lighting their crotches on fire on actual occupied airplanes in the air.

Clamping down our national sphincters after a scare does not make anybody safer, and that should be the goal, to make people safer. It's very difficult to defend against random violence, I understand, but frightening the public advances a xenophobic political perspective without increasing real security.