And How Will The TSA Catch This?

May 15, 2012

Newsweek reports on the phenomenon of surgically implanted bombs in suicide bombers:

[I]ntelligence is mounting that new terrorist bombs are under development that are meant to be implanted surgically inside a man or a woman (conjuring fears, not least, that someone who looks great with child could in fact be heavy with explosives). Last spring, U.S. intelligence officials began to pick up worrying information that al-Asiri was working with doctors on just such a project. Some dismissed the plan as far-fetched. But by last June, the CIA concluded that al-Asiri was close to being able to pull it off.

Newsweek continues:

Fortunately these devices are easier to describe than to detonate….But as [Former FBI Agent Don] Borelli points out, “Even the threat of these devices causes a reaction by the security apparatus where we wind up spending millions of dollars.”

Money quote:

The body scanners now in many U.S. airports were installed to prevent a more deadly repeat of the Abdulmutallab incident. If SIIEDs could be perfected, however, even full-body scanners would not detect them.

And what will we do then? sub-dermal nanobots with miniature TSA cameras? Anal probes? Or perhaps we’ll just begin exposing everyone to X-rays at TSA check-points on a regular basis, which is, you know, problematic.

Some people try to brush off the TSA’s more outrageous episodes by calling them unreasonable exercises of discretion. Sam Harris recently advocated that racial profiling was preferable to indiscriminate pat-downs that typically define TSA procedures. But look at the bolded text from the selections above. As I’ve said on prior occasions, it is simply not out of the question that otherwise unassuming or vulnerable-looking citizens could in-fact be utilized by terrorists as couriers for a bomb device. The TSA is therefore, ceteris paribus, not acting unreasonablywhen it indiscriminately searches everybody, including strip-searching 84-year old women and patting down physically disabled 7-year olds. The TSA is doing exactly what it was designed to do when it carries out these sort of outrageous, offensive searches of our most vulnerable citizens. That’s not apologia for the TSA; it is an attempt to make people understand a fundamental truth: this isn’t a system that can be “tweaked” to avoid the examples that make us uncomfortable. By making exceptions for the “unlikely” cases, the TSA opens the door for those cases to be exploited. They literally can’t afford not to humiliate people in a world where we assume that something like the TSA is even necessary.

And that’s really the point that me and my ilk (i.e. those who are critical of the TSA’s current anti-terrorism procedures) have been trying to make all-along. If you assume arguendo that we need the TSA, then it becomes necessary for them to carry out their mission in a way that involves inevitable affronts to human dignity. They can’t afford to make exceptions. This, of course, leads us back to our original dilemma: do we tolerate these affronts to human dignity for a nominal increase in safety? Do we accede to the necessity of violating everybody’s privacy, and waste an enormous amount of resources humiliating people, while facilitating various affronts to human dignity? Or are we willing to live with the extremely small risk of succumbing to another terrorist attack?

My answer remains the same: we do not need these procedures. They do not actually make us safer. The Newsweek story above demonstrates that the “Evil Doers” will find a way to get a bomb in the country if they really want to. There are also less expensive, less invasive ways of preventing terrorism. Like not dropping bombs on innocent people in the Middle East. That would be a start.

11:53am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxLXI4BW

(Notes: 33)