Security guru and scanner suit plaintiff Bruce Schneier calls it “magical thinking . . . Descend on what the terrorists happened to do last time, and we’ll all be safe. As if they won’t think of something else.” Which, of course, they invariably do. Attackers are already starting to smuggle weapons in body cavities, going where even the most adroit body scanners do not tread. ...Wired
Listen, I've read about it as we all have. We've heard the explanations about scanners and intimate pat-downs. I'd ask for three serious considerations before allowing the Department of Homeland Security to go further overboard with its "security" claims.
1. Ask whether America isn't "over" when we so willingly move from being free to being "secure." Quite apart from anything else, saying we're "secure" or that this or that procedure will keep us "secure" is counterfactual. It's unprovable. We have known freedom. It's almost impossible to know or predict "security." The best we can do is say we feel secure. But being alive is existing in a unavoidable state of insecurity.
2. Ask whether, if we choose "security," we haven't been reduced to childish wimps, willfully detached from reality, and whether that's who we want Americans to be.
3. Ask ourselves who is in greater need of a revealing electronic stripdown plus some intimitate internal probing. You and me and other travelers? Or the Department of Homeland Security?
