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The TerryReport has been picking up random stories recently from air travelers (friends and family, in the main) who have not enrolled in the TSA Pre-Check program but who are being sent through the faster, Pre-Check lines. This is not supposed to be. You are supposed to have to enroll in the program, pay 85 dollars, undergo a background check and be finger printed. What’s going on? Thanks to the Washington Post for finding out and posting it in the newspaper:
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SPECULATION ALERT: Does this sound like the TSA wants to crash the pre-check program before it really gets into high gear? Why would they suddenly be routing passengers who did not enroll in the program through the easier check zone where you don’t have to take off your shoes, pull the laptop out of its case or unzip a plastic bag with liquids? After more than ten years of more and more security, why, all of the sudden, does the TSA think we need a lot less? The conspiratoral among us would say the TSA might be trying to crash a program that it really doesn’t want to run anyway.
It is also crazy that just as the program is getting to be spread across all of the country, those who have taken the time to enroll and have spent the money suddenly find themselves in line with people who did none of that. Is the TSA trying to show people they wasted their time and money? Who knows.
In any case, pre-check is worth the trouble, as long as it lasts. Not having to choose between an x-ray that might or might not be harmful or a physical patdown which is insulting and often degrading makes it worth paying and getting the background check over with. The indication from the TSA, according to the WashPost, is that non-enrollees are being randomly selected to pass through the pre-check line. What hasn’t this been done long ago? Why it is being implemented at the same time the program is getting many more participants who have paid the fee and gone through the background check process?
The TSA has admitted, without saying it directly, that its “one size fits all” approaching to screening needs to be changed. What the program does is to treat everyone like a potential terrorist in the hope of finding the one terrorist among the next 200,000,000 passengers. I was at Dulles airport once some years ago when the people being screened in front of me had credentials as officials of the Justice Department, the people who are involved in enforcing America’s laws. If they can’t be trusted, who can?
The people who work for the airlines, mainly the pilots and flight attendants, got themselves exempted from the X-ray machines and pat downs by threatening not to work if they were subjected to such treatment. They left the passengers out in the cold on that deal. This is a clear indication of where we stand with the airlines: the average, non-high paying passenger is somewhere above a cup of dirt and below a bowl of warm oat meal in terms of desirability. We, the people, accept mistreatment at the airports out of fear (especially for the occasional, once or twice a year flier) and because we think, or we hope, that the TSA knows more about how to fight back against terrorism than we do.
Treating everyone in our society as potential terrorists everywhere they go has a corrosive effect on cooperation, peacefulness and general social decency. (It is not unlike applying the bad practices of racism to all of us at once.) Nonetheless, the “take it to the max” approach was good cover, a good diversion, for the failure of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to prevent the airline hijackings of 2001. The security crackdown took attention away from the sleepy half measures that had been in place before 9-11 and helped to reassure the most frightened fliers, like the casual vacationers and those seeing family once or twice a year, that “everything” was being done. Could it be time that we moved well beyond “security theater” to concentrate on the real, serious threats?
Doug Terry, 3.2.14
Here’s the link to the WashPost article: http://tinyurl.com/mkyfzwg
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