John Tyner, the person who opposed having the TSA either porno scan him or grope him has been fielding questions from people who say things like “So if next time a terrorist successfully hides “devices” to kill Americans on a plane, because you seem to think TSA or airport security is over-excessive…What will you say?”

The questioner usually thinks this is a killer argument and that anyone who speaks up for freedom from this kind of government abuse will backpedal when confronted with the question: what if we do as you say and a terrorist exploits this very feature to kill people?

My answer would be: That’s tough. People die tragic deaths all the time. We have to learn to live with this risk just the way we live with the many and much greater risks that we face every day. We cannot avoid all risks to people. It is never a question of zero risk versus maximum risk. Risk lies on a continuum and we have to decide on the level of risk that is acceptable, and not focus on the kind of risk. Why is it worse to die in an airplane crash caused by a terrorist act than an airplane crash caused by pilot fatigue or engine failure? Why is it worse to be killed by a bomb than it is to die in a car crash or be hit by lightning or be killed by a deranged killer on a murder spree?

If we decide, against all reason, that airplane terrorists have to be foiled whatever the cost, then we are doomed because we are at the mercy of whatever crazy scheme they come up with next. For example, the TSA’s porno scanners cannot detect devices that are stored inside body cavities. Suppose yet another stupid suicide terrorist is discovered with a bomb secreted inside his rectum. Does that mean that we should submit to body cavity searches? Why not?

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) speaks out against the absurdity and introduces legislation that would make the TSA subject to the same laws as everybody else.

The goal of terrorists is not to kill people. Their goal is to terrorize people and killing people is just one means to that end. If they can terrorize without even killing, so much the better. And here they seem to have succeeded. By deploying incompetent people to attempt half-baked plans to blow up planes (the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, etc.), they have managed to get this country to spend vast amounts of money to harass perfectly ordinary law-abiding people.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg thinks that all these harassing security precautions are pure theater to give the public an impression that the government is doing something and being careful when the methods are totally ineffective. He gives a shocking account of all the deliberately suspicious acts he has committed and all the forbidden things he has managed to get through airport security (many of which were deliberately chosen to arouse suspicion) without setting off alarm bells. He quotes security analyst Bruce Schneier as saying that any half-way intelligent terrorist plot can foil these security devices. “The whole system is designed to catch stupid terrorists…. Counterterrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better. Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.”

It turns out that former Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, who has been going around promoting the porno scanners as a so-called expert on this topic by virtue of his former post in government, is the head of a consulting company has as one of its clients the company that makes the porno scanners.

It looks like trouble is brewing over the so-called ‘porno scanners’, the new full-body scanning devices at airports that provide screeners with naked images of people. John Tyner, a resident of Oceanside, California near San Diego, refused to go through the machine or submit to the groping alternative. He was not only not allowed to get on the plane, he is now being investigated by the TSA because you are apparently not allowed to leave the airport if you refuse to be scanned, although he was initially escorted out. He could face a $10,000 fine. He has written about the encounter and posted the video on his blog and has now become something of a folk-hero.

November 24 has been declared National Opt Out day when travelers are being urged to refuse to undergo the full-body scans. Pilot associations are urging opposition, civil liberties groups are taking legal action, and petitions against them are being circulated. There are suspicions that the groping pat downs that are the alternative to those not wanting to submit to the full-body scanners are being used as a way to coerce people to use the porno scanners as the less humiliating option.

The promise that the images will be kept confidential have been shown to be false when the website Gizmodo released 100 images that they had been able to obtain. These images are of lower quality resolution than the new x-ray backscatter machines being used at airports. There are also concerns about the health effects of the radiation. A new site called Fly With Dignity has been started to collect horror stories about the TSA’s actions.

Ivan Eland describes another security measure that even I was not aware of.

Another bizarre security addition that I have recently experienced is the plastic cage. Last week I was flying and was randomly selected for the dreaded “secondary screening” (it sounds ancillary but is just annoying). The security woman put me in the cage (fortunately it had air holes), locked it, and told me that I wasn’t getting out until she swabbed my hands (presumably for potential chemical residues from bomb making).

Art Carden at Forbes calls for the abolition of the TSA. Carden also makes a point that has been known for a long time but which only now is being widely voiced, that the threat from dying in an airplane terrorist attack is far less than the threat of dying on the drive to and from the airport, so why are we so freaked out about airport security? Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, in this interview with Stephen Colbert, gets really worked up over the porno scanners.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'TSA Full-Body Scanners – Jeffrey Goldberg

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

The American people have for a long time ignored blatant abuses by their government of the constitution and basic human and civil rights. They have condoned wars started on false pretences, torture, denial of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial or access to lawyers and family, kangaroo courts rigged to produce guilty verdicts, killing of civilians in other countries by predatory drones, murder of American citizens merely on the president’s say so, and so on. Truly horrendous crimes have been greeted with a shrug that ‘they’ probably deserve it and that these actions make us safer.

Could it be that intrusive airport security, of all things, is the issue that awakens people from their stupor and make them finally realize that the national security state is out of control, and that this groping and porno scanning is merely a symptom of a government drunk with coercive power that thinks they can do anything to anyone with impunity? Will people from all over the political spectrum seize this opportunity to join with others and pull on this thread and begin the unraveling of the national security state? Or is it that they are upset because in this case the professional classes are being directly imposed upon and they will become meek and docile again if this particular intrusion is removed and the government goes back to abusing the powerless?

This protest may also fizzle out with the usual sniping based on party labels. Republicans seemed to be just fine with the Bush-Cheney regime violating their rights but now that Obama is in the White House they are starting to grumble. Will the Democrats who protested loudly against Bush-Cheney now meekly support the Obama regime on this issue?

I hold out a slim hope that this is the beginning of a new valuing of personal liberty and privacy and the rule of law.

Another Glenn Greenwald must-read post about how the government is trying to intimidate and harass people who have supported WikiLeaks or Bradley Manning.

We are slowly but surely sliding towards an authoritarian national security state where people exercising their freedoms in ways that the government does not like will be labeled ‘enemies of the state’ and subject to all manner of harsh treatment.

The infamous Andrew Shirvell, who seemed to be obsessed with the president of the University of Michigan Student Government, has been fired as Michigan’s assistant attorney general.

He will likely soon find a new home in some rabid, Christian, anti-gay group.

After all, how can we call this a democracy if we don’t even have the freedom to choose who collects our trash?

Surely this must be one of the inalienable rights that the founding fathers meant to protect?

Now that the mid-term elections are over, what can we expect to see in the next few months? As I said in yesterday’s post, the advantage to the leadership of the two parties of so-called ‘divided’ government, where one party controls one part and the other party another part, is that they can blame lack of action on the issues their core supporters care about to this gridlock while they can be ‘bipartisan’ when it comes to serving the needs of the oligarchy.
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As predicted the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives, have a smaller majority in the Senate, and lost many governorships. The election results are widely viewed as a major setback for that party, with even President Obama calling it a ‘shellacking’, so why do I think it was a good night for them? For reasons that I outline below and elaborated on in a post at the beginning of this year, this post-election situation will be less embarrassing for them than one in which they control both houses of Congress and the White House.

As I have said repeatedly, the US is a one-party system with two factions, labeled Republican and Democratic. This one party serves the interests of an increasingly rapacious elite that seeks to divert more and more wealth from the public good for their private benefit, and the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic factions seeks to accommodate them. This agenda is profoundly anti-democratic and thus must be covert and is never publicly articulated. One has to infer the existence of this agenda from the fact that since 1980, there has been a steady and massive shift in the income and wealth distribution of this country towards a small elite, irrespective of which party controlled the branches of government, and this could only occur because of policies that both parties collude to create.

The two factions differ on some social issues (abortion, gays, religion, guns, immigration, race, etc.) and it tends to be these issues that are publicly discussed, often at great volume. Each faction also talks in vague terms about jobs and taxes and trade and cutting spending, but never in terms specific enough that one can pin them down to any specific policy proposal. Each party leadership feeds their factional base with rhetoric they do not really support just in order to keep them in line and voting for them, but hopes that they will not have to actually implement them. They try to meet their party supporters’ demands as minimally as possible, but for this strategy to work, they need plausible excuses for why they keep failing to follow through on their promises.

For the Democrats, winning the presidency and big majorities in the House and Senate in 2008 was embarrassing because their supporters now expected them to actually carry out their promises for major health care reform such as a single payer system, wind down the two wars, close down Guantanamo, reverse the trend towards a national security state with all its concomitant violations of the constitutional protections of basic liberties, and so on. The Democratic leadership clearly had no intention of doing any of these things and had to try and deflect blame by pointing to the Republican use of the Senate filibuster rules to explain their failure. But their supporters were not impressed, rightly suspecting that appealing to this arcane and self-imposed rule of the Senate was merely an excuse for a lack of will, and that a forceful president and party would have been able to find ways to circumvent it. After all, George W. Bush never had such control of Congress and yet he managed to get his favored policies passed.

Obama and the Democratic Party, rather than being apologetic about their lack of progress, then deliberately and publicly denigrated their core supporters, the very people who put them into power in 2008, as being ungrateful and having unrealistic expectations, thus further dampening their enthusiasm. Is it any wonder that there was a so-called ‘enthusiasm gap’ between supporters of the two parties when it came to voting? Ted Rall calls this Democratic Party strategy ‘political suicide’.

My main regret with the elections was the defeat of Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the sole Senator to vote against the infamous USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the wake of 9/11, that is responsible for many of the abuses of basic rights and liberties that we now see. That was an act of political courage and history will place him alongside Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who were the only senators who resisted being steamrolled into approving the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 that President Lyndon Johnson then exploited to expand the Vietnam war.

Now that the Democrats have lost control of the House, they can more comfortably repudiate their supporters and capitulate to the oligarchy’s agenda, all the while saying that now they truly lack the power to carry out their supporters’ wishes and thus must compromise with their Republican opponents. This is exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1994, selling out his party’s supporters after losing control of both houses of Congress. Clinton handily won re-election in 1996 and I expect Obama to do the same in 2012, because he can blame the Republican-led house for his inability to achieve anything meaningful.

The Republican Party leadership also faces a similar challenge. They don’t really care about cutting spending or balancing the budget or paring down the debt or increasing jobs, the things they sold to their supporters as key issues. What they want to do, like the Democrats, is cater to the very wealthy even if the country goes broke in the process. They will try and sell their tea party supporters the idea that it was because they do not control the Senate and the presidency that they could not carry out their wishes. How well the tea partiers react to this inevitable betrayal will be interesting to observe.

The main difference between Republican Party rule and Democratic Party rule is that the former will bring the country to fiscal ruin faster and is more openly callous about the harm they inflict on the poor and middle class in their desire to serve the rich. The Democrats do it more slowly and with more hand wringing about how sad it all is. Although the Democrats can stop Republican House initiatives either in the Senate or with a presidential veto, I suspect that they won’t do that with issues that benefit the oligarchy, so the only achievements of the next Congress will be those things that serve the interests of the oligarchy, and these will be done quietly and with little fuss.

Next: So what should we watch for in the coming months?

The plot to blow up a bomb packed in laser printer cartridges and sent via an airmail package fortunately failed. Because the trigger may have been a cell phone, this incident may result in the cancellation of plans to provide Wi-Fi and cell phone access to people on planes.

While the lack of Wi-Fi access is a minor inconvenience, not allowing cell phones on planes is a great relief. I had always viewed with horror the thought of being trapped next to a passenger who yakked loudly on a cell phone for the duration of a flight.