Starboard Broadside

The Times has an interesting article today about the renewed debate over full-body scanners in airports.

Screening technologies with names like millimeter-wave and backscatter X-ray can show the contours of the body and reveal foreign objects. Such machines, properly used, are a leap ahead of the metal detectors used in most airports, and supporters say they are necessary to keep up with the plans of potential terrorists.

“If they’d been deployed, this would pick up this kind of device,” Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary, said in an interview, referring to the packet of chemicals hidden in the underwear of the Nigerian man who federal officials say tried to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight.

But others say that the technology is no security panacea, and that its use should be carefully controlled because of the risks to privacy, including the potential for its ghostly naked images to show up on the Internet.

Now, the Dutch are planning on using them for all flights to the US. It seems to me that as long as the technology is carefully controlled so it can't store images, there shouldn't be a problem. Yes, somebody is going to see you naked. But so does the doctor. And the screener will see so many people that it really won't be a big deal.

There is a larger point here, however. No matter how many common-sense or high-tech security measures we put in place, we will never be 100% safe. That is the price of having a free and open society. We can take steps to protect ourselves and reduce the threat, but the terrorists will probably always find another way. If we ban knives, they will put explosives in shoes, water bottles, and underwear. If we use full-body screeners, they will swallow the explosives and set them off with cell phones. We have to start accepting that from time to time shit will happen and cannot let ourselves be scared senseless by terrorism. The Bush Administration was able to exploit that fear to enact disatrous policies. We cannot let that happen again. Al Qaeda is a dangerous organization, yes. But they were also massively lucky on 9/11. As Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent put it on MSNBC:

ACKERMAN: Except for all of the hundreds of terrorists that we've convicted in Federal courts over the years. They were able to hold. They were able to incarcerate successfully and they were able to get information out of. I mean, the fact is is that al Qaeda is a dangerous and really important threat. But they're also not a super army of supermen with Muslim Heat Vision and so forth. It's ludicrous to think that we should inflate how dangerous they are because that's exactly what they want us to do.

Barring acquiring and detonating a weapon of mass destruction (something that is probably unlikely, but nevertheless possible), Al Qaeda does not pose an existential threat to the US. I'm not particularly scared of them. Are you?



Some good lines: "I ain't scared of Al Qaeda, I'm from Brooklyn I don't give a fuck about Al Qaeda...I'm scared of Al Cracka."

"It was like 'We gotta go to Iraq cuz they they the most dangerous country on earth, the most dangerous regime in the world.' If they so dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole fuckin' country? Man, you couldn't take over Baltimore in two weeks."