The Road to Hell is Paved with TSA Body Scanners

"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
~Dwight David Eisenhower

I haven't taken a commercial flight in approximately forever, but even I know there's quite a flap at airports these days due to the installation of new "body scanner" machines that reveal boarding passengers in varying degrees of nudity, depending on the sensitivity of the scanner. And apparently, passengers who are apprehensive about undergoing such a revealing procedure (and the accompanying X-rays) haven't been thrilled by the Transportation Safety Administration's alternative: a pat-down by a same-sex TSA employee that outdoes many first dates for physical intimacy. Not long ago, one such aggrieved passenger summed up the opposition to the new rules for boarding an aircraft with his now-famous rallying cry, "Don't touch my junk."

Hence the protests, the "opt-out" movements and the resulting arguments playing out on blogs and newspapers' opinion pages everywhere. Criticisms of the scanners and pat-downs have largely boiled down to two main strands: that the high-tech imaging still doesn't prevent would-be terrorists from bringing dangerous substances onto airplanes; and/or, that the new security measures are invasive of personal privacy and in violation of the Constitution.

I'm sympathetic to both arguments, particularly the latter (which was recently laid out quite articulately by George Washington U. Professor Jeffrey Rosen). But I'm also sympathetic to the more nuanced observation, made by the New York Times' Ross Douthat, that opposition to new security measures often depends on one's support for or opposition to whichever political party is currently setting the agenda on national security. After all, good policy is good policy, whoever occupies the White House.

But I posit that there is a much simpler, much more elemental way to view the whole controversy, one that doesn't depend on upholding constitutional principles or staying loyal to your narrow political affiliation. The scanners and pat-downs are a mistake, for the simple reason that they seek to reinforce the idea that the government can do something that is patently impossible: methodically eliminating every conceivable method of committing violence. The longer that fallacy is official TSA policy, the more severe will be the public consternation when the next terrorist strikes.

Airport security in America is an utterly reactive enterprise. The hijackers on the 9/11 flights used simple box cutters to take over their airplanes; so now the TSA throws a fit if you happen to have a nail clipper in your carry-on bag. A few months later, a would-be terrorist tried to smuggle a bomb onto a flight in his shoe; so ever since, passengers must remove their shoes and send them through X-ray scanners. A few years later, a group of terrorists almost succeeded in smuggling explosive chemicals onto multiple flights and blowing them up mid-air; so now all liquids are treated as contraband and severely restricted (as I learned first-hand when Scottish security at Glasgow airport wouldn't let me bring half a bottle of blue Gatorade on my flight home three summers ago).

And now, because a Nigerian terrorist tried to blow up a plane last Christmas with a bomb sewn into his underwear, the TSA wants to see (or feel) what's inside your underwear. Is this starting to feel like the old arcade game Whack-a-Mole to anyone else yet?

When a pattern emerges, there are only two possibilities: the pattern will continue, or it won't. Either the TSA will continue trying to ban whatever method of attack the last terrorist used, with ever-greater intrusions into the privacy of air passengers, or they will be forced to draw the line somewhere, and admit they can't stop every form of attack.

Or in other words, either body imaging scanners will give way to body cavity searches after some enterprising jihadist inserts a bomb in some private bodily orifice; or the government's dedicated travel safety agency will have to admit there are some lines it cannot cross, some forms of attack it cannot prevent, and that there are no absolute guarantees of safety it can make. Neither is a particularly appealing prospect, but in the long run, those are the only plausible outcomes.

If today's security lines and procedures make travelers irritable and cranky, just wait until the day when a terrorist uses a previously unheard of method to blow up an airplane that TSA cannot or will not defend against. Irritation will quickly turn to widespread fear if the agency has to concede that the government security blanket has holes that can't be patched.

Not that I favor some sort of laissez-faire approach that abandons airport security entirely. While there are limits to the scrutiny the government can or should apply to passengers as they board airplanes, I see no reason to make the terrorists' lives easier by removing metal detectors or other sensible, unobtrusive measures. But we as a society ought to be able to distinguish between metal detectors that might reveal a harmless belt buckle or wedding ring in the process of screening for guns and knives, versus X-ray machines that reveal (and potentially, save, and disseminate) low-grade centerfolds of law-abiding travelers who already have enough reasons to resent the experience of flying in coach.