Xblog

Okay, I have to admit the notion of some TSA employee off in a room somewhere watching our naked bodies as we walk through the airport seems pretty awful, particularly for the TSA employee. Of course, the one highlight of the TSA employee’s day has been ruined by blurring of certain parts of the shot (not quite sure how they get the system to cover the right parts given all the funny shapes we come in, but we’ll hope it’s effective). Now that the titillating issue has been dealt with, we can start catching terrorists, right?

Problem one: you get to choose whether you use it. This has to be the stupidest part of the whole thing. Before, you had to face the pat-down. Now, you can choose between the pat-down and the fancy X-ray machine. So now, someone attempting to compromise the integrity of airport security gets to choose whichever security measure they think they have the best chance of getting by. The end result is that adding these undoubtedly expensive machines provides no additional security over the traditional pat-down (if it was going to catch something the pat-down would miss, the attacker would simply elect for a pat-down), it potentially weakens security (if there is something that the pat-down would catch that the X-ray wouldn’t).

Problem two: you have to fail the initial test in order to get sent to this one. Much is made in the article of the ability for these new machines to “detect plastic and liquid explosives and other non-metallic weapons that can be missed by standard metal detectors”. The machine might be able to do it, but the security process they’ve got set up likely won’t, because you don’t get sent to this machine unless the “standard metal detectors” detect something. So, the machine really only helps reduce the number of false positives, doing nothing for all the false negatives we’re all freaking out about. There is a benefit to reducing the false positive rate (and lord knows the standard metal detectors seem to detect nothing but false positives), but frankly this seems like a horrible waste.

For the machines to be effective, the protocol ought to be something like random and/or TSA employee selection, with no choice for the target. Of course, trying to implement such a policy is going to be a nightmare. You’ll probably have people screaming in airports, lawsuits from the ACLU, etc., etc.

Which brings me to the more logical solution: just don’t do it. These machines are undoubtedly horribly expensive and do create serious privacy concerns. Worse still, you just know that this means more young boys are going to fall for those stupid X-ray glasses ads in the back of comic books. ;-) I’m sure we can spend the money on far less controversial and effective security measures, like checking more of the containers that get shipped in through our ports.

So why do this? Well, for starters, you know someone is making a killing on this. More importantly though, by giving us a new airport security measure that while ineffective is very titillating and demonstrates yet another new technology to protect air travelers, it helps spread the news (and nothing spreads faster than a titillating story that people can talk while pretending to focus on the privacy issue ;-) that it really is safe to fly again. Ultimately, that seems to be more of a concern than providing effective security measures.

I think my New Years resolution ought to be to always wear a tin foil hat when flying, as it will undoubtedly enhance my safety more than most measures that have been put in place in the last five years.