The problem with security… By Jean Christou

April 1 2008 by The Systemic Analyst.

The following article by Jean Christou published in the Cyprus Mail is a must read. Providing an insightful perspective on the unsettling, not mention unnecessary, direction in which security is headed, Jean draws from traveller anecdotes, links to which have been added here.

TRAVELLING back to Cyprus on a British Airways flight from London recently, I had a run-in with a flight attendant over a pair of headphones. As a regular sufferer during depressurisation before landing, I listen to music, which helps my ears to cope with the sometimes excruciating pain.

Aware of the rules about using CD players on take-off and landing, I always use a non-digital tape recorder and leave it on until the plane reaches around 10,000 feet, some ten minutes before hitting the runway and so posing no danger to the aircraft, or so I thought.

I saw the stewardess coming, and instead of trying to explain all this, I switched it off, unplugged the phones from the machine, but left them on my head as they still helped. Predictably she asked me to remove them. I showed her the wire attached only to fresh air. She was having none of it and insisted I take them off. I asked her why. The answer was essentially: “Just because”.

I told her she was paranoid. She stomped off. If she had given a logical explanation such as the heavily padded phones could… umm… damage my head in a crash landing, I would have complied.

Then of course I would have been compelled to ask her why other passengers were not being asked to remove their hairbands, glasses and jewellery, and also perhaps whether a crash landing was imminent by any chance.

The point of this diatribe? Not the non-logic of airport and airline rules – although some of them might qualify – but the lack of common sense and worse, in those tasked with implementing those rules.

So far in Cyprus we have escaped horrors like those perpetrated on passengers by some officials in the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), but if the EU starts stepping up its security under the new convergence agreement with Washington, running into these kinds of power-tripping individuals will be inevitable.

Just last month in the US, a 37-year old woman was made to remove her nipple rings with a pair of pliers in front of sniggering TSA staff because for some unimaginable reason they posed a security threat. After the humiliation, they allowed her to board her flight…while still wearing the same kind of ring in her navel. Breasts probably are more dangerous than navels when you think about it, and probably more titillating too, but that’s just a coincidence.

Another incident saw a pregnant woman made to lift up her shirt in front of other passengers to prove her condition because terrorists might just hide a bomb in a pregnancy suit. Yes it’s a possibility, but when the crying woman’s husband took issue with a female TSA agent for feeling up his wife’s breasts, he was thrown in the airport jail and later charged and taken to court for shouting abuse at TSA staff. The video tape of what actually happened had conveniently disappeared.

In an even worse case, a woman who was carrying a sippy cup with water for her toddler was told to hand it over. She needed the cup for the child for the flight ahead and offered to drink the water. She was told she could but would have to come back through security again with the empty cup. As she was being escorted back, she accidentally spilled the water. She was threatened with arrest “for endangering other passengers” with the spilled water and told to clean it up.

“I was ordered to apologise for the spilled water, and again threatened with arrest. I was threatened several times with arrest. A total of four police officers and three TSA officers reported to the scene where I was being held. I was also told that I should not disrespect the officer and could be arrested for this too. I apologised to the officer and she continued to detain me, despite me telling her that I would miss my flight. The officer advised me that I should have thought about this before I ‘intentionally spilled the water!’”

There is an endless list of such incidents, and more than 7,000 complaints are currently pending against the TSA, which is part of Homeland Security. This includes complaints by people who are listed for extra checks and those not allowed to fly at all. The TSA currently has 900,000 names on its “watch list”. That translates into almost a million potential ‘terrorists’. Yet according to recent figures, screeners failed to find 75 per cent of dummy explosives in 70 tests at LA airport, and those at Chicago failed to spot 60 per cent. No doubt they were too busy harassing members of the public over bottles of water or groping their breasts.

That’s not to say airport security is a bad thing, or that all TSA staff are sadists and perverts. Security is absolutely necessary, but what has become unacceptable is the way fare-paying passengers are treated, and the way we allow ourselves to be treated, queuing up like cattle to be herded together by power-trippers in uniforms. And more than 7,000 complaints do not constitute ‘isolated incidents’. But we just take it all lying down because it’s often hard to argue on personal privacy issues when it comes to the greater good.

How do you answer when the obedient citizens spout the: “I have nothing to hide” argument as they bend over for the uniforms.

Daniel J. Solove Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School suggests those who value their privacy should respond: “So you don’t have curtains then?” or “I don’t have anything to hide. But I don’t have anything I feel like showing you, either.”

Solove says the right to privacy recognises the sovereignty of the individual, but that most people associate it with hiding bad things about themselves. “The harms [here] consist of those created by bureaucracies – indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability,” he says.

In other words the problem lies not with the surveillance and checks themselves, which are legitimate enough at times, but in the flawed or even malicious interpretation of the information and how it can be used against someone if an airport or airline employee is having a bad hair day or doesn’t like your face… or even your headphones.

Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2008

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