Today on twitter I disagreed that security pat-downs that happen in American airports constitutes sexual assault. At times it seems that as a male it’s hard to even talk about sexual assault/rape in anyway, without being shouted down as anti-women or pro-rape. So I will try and use this blog to clarify my views.
The current airport security screening procedures are ridiculous. Travelers either have a choice of a full body scan that is a virtual strip-search, or a pat down that is invasive to the extreme. I dont think these measures are necessary.
Anti-terrorist security is a careful balancing act, on one hand governments want effective measures in place to discourage terrorists and make the populace feel safer. But on the other, if anti-terrorist security is so invasive it may take away too many civil liberties of the populace. What is the point of protecting freedoms if you have to take those freedoms away to do so? Or as others have put it in an already overused term “teh terrorists have already won !q!”.
No country can ever truly be safe from terrorism, as long as their is a will for pissed of randoms to kill a bunch of civilians there will be a way. Planes might be too hard, but that isn’t stopping anyone from doing something similar with a backpack of explosives on a train, bus or any other crowded area. This doesn’t mean we should cower in fear at modern life, whatever can go wrong could potentially happen, but largely it doesn’t. We shouldn’t have our lives dictated by a fear of the worst thing that potentially could happen.
Governments should realise that there are companies that get very, very rich by scaring the bejesus out of us and selling lots of unnecessary technology to bely our fears. I would say virtual strip-searches and pat-downs for every single passenger is in the “too far” category.
So why don’t I think it is sexual assault? Because it is consensual. People in America may not like it but they do know that the potential of these invasive searches are a pre-condition of airtravel. Shit, invasive, a complete crushing of civil liberties and a slow move towards a police state, yes. Sexual assault, no. People have the choice of not travelling by plane, its a shit choice but a choice nonetheless. Sexual assault is not consensual, thats the difference.
Another problem I have with attacking the increased security as sexual assault is it focuses the anger at a single member of the TSA staff rather than the system that allows it. I don’t think its fair that a poor unsuspecting worker of the TSA has more or less been labelled a sexual predator for doing the same thing as everyone else who works security for the TSA. Criticism should be directed at the government who legislated for this ridiculous charade to happen rather than one single person.
So where is this going? I am of the view that terrorism is such a random occurrence that worrying about it is similar to worrying about being struck by lightning. It could happen, it probably wont but it could, but there is no use of worrying about what is essentially random. I also think that these security measures are counter productive because they keep terrorism freshly in our minds. The people who want to blow up randoms want us scared that it could happen to us, there is no need to help their cause by scaring ourselves silly already.