pat down

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

– Benjamin Franklin

When a society becomes sufficiently afraid of an outside enemy, it can be manipulated into irrational responses that are then easily abused by those in power. This has been the sad story of America in the decade and a half since 9/11 (for more, see: How I Remember September 11, 2001).

The TSA is just one of many shady and generally useless government agencies (and private companies) involved in a massive money and power grab since the kickoff of the endless, Orwellian “war on terror.” Rather than preventing any terrorist attacks, the TSA is engaged in security theatre. This has become very obvious to me during my many trips between Denver and New York City over the past five years.

As someone who has never gone through a naked body scanner, I am particularly sensitive to where they are positioned and where they are not. In Denver, they are basically everywhere, yet interestingly, in the terminal serving Frontier Airlines at La Guardia in NYC there are none. This seems incredible to me given how big of a terrorist target it is. Somehow New York City is able to screen passengers just fine without the naked body scanners, yet Denver can’t? How is that the case? It’s the case because the expensive new screeners are nothing more than security theatre. Security theater that pays very, very well for the device manufacturers.

Yet, it is much more dangerous than this. Whenever you give bureaucracies absurd powers “to protect you,” what you’ll invariably end up with is egregious abuse in the name of “for your own good.” The latest evidence of this was recently revealed in the emergence of a scheme by two TSA employees at Denver International Airport to allow a male screener to grope specific passengers that he found attractive. Importantly, this scam couldn’t have occurred if metal detectors were used.

We learn from CBS4 News that:

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