Evaluating Complex Arguments

The essays

If you don’t like it, don’t fly

by Brian Costello

No one enjoys waiting in security lines, empty pockets, removing shoes, and the rest of the airport routine, including body scanning and pat downs. But sensibly people accept the procedures as necessary in the age of terrorism. They regard the inconvenience as the price of safety.

Alas, not everyone is sensible, many people are so obsessed with their rights, imagined as well as real, that they can’t appreciate that the scanning procedures protect them. They worry more about people seeing beneath their close or putting their hands to close to their private parts than about being in blowing 2 bits at 40,000 feet. That’s beyond paranoia. It’s insanity.

Ironically, if there were no such procedures and terrorists cause the plane to crash, those same nuts, who are now protesting about invasion of privacy would be the first ones to blame Congress and the president for not protecting them.

Instead of assuming the worst about the TSA and the entire Homeland Security Agency, we ought to acknowledge that everything they do is based on information that has not been made public -intelligence reports about the latest terrorist tactics and even specific threats to security. The body scanners and pat-down procedures were not designed to create pornographic images or provide sexual gratification, as some critics claim, and there is not the slightest danger that they will be used in that way. After all, the procedures take place in full view of other travelers. No, the new procedures were designed to protect our lives, TSA has its priorities right, for without life,” liberty and the pursuit of happiness “are meaningless.

Will never win playing catch-up

By Joshua Levy

The full- body scans and pat- downs used by TSA officials at airports are an outrage. They treat everyone in a way no court of law would as guilty until proven innocent. Ironically, that is the very kind of regime that terrorist would like to impose on us. We have let fear change America for the worse.

If my opposition to TSA procedures seems extreme, consider this: many members of Congress hold similar views, notable representative John Mica, who was instrumentally in creating the TSA. He believes the TSA has become both bloated and ineffective. As a result, he claims that while screeners have been casting a suspicious eye on grandmothers, nuns, and children, real terrorists have slipped past them, unnoticed.

It’s bad enough that TSA screening waste innocent people’s time and assaults their dignity. Worse is that they are reactive rather than proactive. Someone carried liquid explosives, so TSA banned liquids. Someone else put a bomb in a shoe, so TSA made us all remove our shoes. A 3rd person had a bomb in his underwear, so TSA started more intrusive searches. The next strategy for terrorist, experts warn, is to carry explosive materials and body cavities or in implants. I shudder to think of how TSA will respond to that.

What we desperately need is a more intelligent and effective approach. We needn’t invent it, it already exists. EL AL, the Israeli and airline, developed what it calls “behavioral profiling “not to be confused with ethnic or racial profiling. They train their agents to detect people who seem nervous or suspicious and subject just those people to searches and in-depth interviews. By adopting that approach, we both preserve our liberty and increase our safety.