Scenes from the Culture of Fear: Bagel-wielding professor removed from plane

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Hey, maybe this should be a new series here at The Reaction: Scenes from the Culture of Fear.

They're not really Signs of the Apocalypse, a series we've been doing for years, more signs that society is going crazy as a result of manufactured terror.

Last week I wrote about a model North Carolina high school student suspended for accidentally having a paring knife in her lunchbox, today it's this:

A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment.

That "suspicious package" turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.

Ognjen Milatovic, 35, was flying from Boston to Washington D.C. on US Airways when he was escorted off the plane for disorderly conduct following the incident.

Monday's incident is another example of other passengers essentially becoming the authority on terrorist activity on planes.

Recently, passenger complaints have resulted authorities taking action against innocent passengers who went to the bathroom too often on a flight and who were just being annoying.

In the hyper-sensitive world of flying, sneezing too often could get you kicked off a flight and questioned by the FBI.

I mean, I can see if it was a Cinnabon or something, or maybe an explosive jelly doughnut, but this is just crazy.

Welcome to the Culture of Fear.

Groping for consensus

By Carl 

There's a real irony in the outcry over the new TSA body-scanning, junk-touching protocols.

It's united the right and the left.

Let's sum up the conservative (and, by extension, the purported American) mindset here:

Invading a sovereign people innocent of any wrongdoing against us? Well, that's OK, I suppose.

Bombing the ever-living fuck out of civilians in the name of "fighting terorrism"? Cool. No problem.

Waterboarding and torturing enemy combatants? Bring it on!

Raise taxes a fraction just to pay for all this? No!

The left opposed all those, of course, and I'm proud to have been among that number.

I part company on this one, however. Perhaps it's the libertarian streak in me.

Flying an airline is a voluntary activity, driven by private enterprise. You pays your money, you takes your chances. The alternative is to let the airlines decide what security protocols to insitute, which means things will range from "Why, yes, Mr. bin Laden, we do in fact have a seat for you!" to "I don't care if you're the President and you're on Air Force One! It's in our terminal, so you'll be cavity searched!"

No one's made the case for any alternatives, although personally I'd prefer the Israeli system, and frankly, I can't see why it hasn't been adopted here. It's efficient and much less intrusive than the American system.

Of course, it would cost real money and involve trained personnel who would require higher pay and benefits and all that goes with that. We could hire Blackwater (or Xie or whatever name it goes by this week).

But I digress...

Maybe I'm just more comfortable about my naked body. Maybe it's that I ride the NYC subway on a daily basis, so I'm used to having my junk groped, or at least rubbed.

Maybe I'm just an adult. I don't know.

All I do know is, apart from the radiation risk (in my case, a real one, as I've had more X-rays than you've had hot meals, and have already developed at least one cancer), I have no problem with this.

I purchase my ticket to fly to my destination with the understanding that, indeed, I will get there. At 35,000 feet, I do not want any preventable risk. I see enough human error on a daily basis to know my chances are already less than 100% but they'd be lower if I was to drive to where I needed to be.

Especially if I had to cross an ocean!

We just went through eight years of the most egoistically driven administration since, well, Reagan/Bush. In that time, we drove up our national debt six trillion dollars, almost doubling it. We weren't asked to make sacrifices, like the U.S. did in World War II. Instead, we were warned to go shopping, or the terrorists win. We were coaxed into borrowing more money than we could possibly pay back in two lifetimes to buy houses that were way too big for our families. All this time, it was Christmas every day, as companies came out with new toys and gizmos that barely improved our lives.

And we spent. And spent. And spent. And the bill is coming due, right at the time that we can least afford to take our eye off the ball. The national government is in a real struggle between the haves and have-mores, while we the people dread going to the mailbox, not because of anthrax but because of Amex.

And we all get angry at a government that can do this to us, and in the next breath mock a government that can't get its act together over something as simple as the Zadroga bill. You can't have it both ways. Either the government is this well-oiled conspiratorial dictatorship (which I believe is an aspiration, but not a reality) or an incompetent boobish puddle of contradictions (more likely).

As to the National Opt-Out Day, I will be watching the news to see how it breaks. My guess is that there will be a few handfuls of people who will resist, but eventually, the added delay and the realization that it's the single biggest traffic day of the year will either cause fistfights among the would-be passengers, or force most people to chicken out of opting out.

For me, well, I won't be flying next week, but I will be and soon, and I want that TSA agent touching my junk, because for the first time since 9/11, that man will be as uncomfortable screening me as I am being screened.

As Lewis Black put it so succinctly this week on The Daily Show: "I get to fly five hours AND someone's touching my balls?"

Where do I sign up?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Airline security, international diplomacy, and you

By Peter Henne

It's not often that European debates over airline security get much attention, but two articles on this topic have come out in the past two days. One, in The Washington Post, discusses the European Parliament's authority under the Lisbon treaty to handle issues such as airline passenger information-sharing deals. With this power, European officials are pushing back on US efforts to track possible terrorist threats through such information. The other, from the BBC, discusses calls by the British airline industry to simplify security checks in the country, especially for flights involving the United States; they want to get rid of the extra security measures placed on flights going to America.

These stories touch on several issues. The first is the perennial debate over the appropriate level of counter-terrorism preparedness. US officials believe that extra security checks for people traveling to the United States and sharing passenger information are the best way to prevent terrorist attacks. Many others disagree, and argue that these represent half-thought out reactions that serve mainly to inconvenience passengers and increase costs to the airlines. There are also concerns about the level of privacy passengers are allowed.

The second has to do with broader relations between Europe and the United States. Not all of the justifications given for Europe's potential blocking of information-sharing measures had to do with privacy concerns. Some argued that US security demands were forcing Europe to tacitly adopt US tactics to counter terrorist threats, which some find morally-questionable. There was also a concern about the United States imposing power over Europe through domestic airline standards, which Europe must follow. So the controversy does not only involve ethical concerns about counter-terror strategies, it is also an issue of Europe asserting itself in the face of US hegemony.

Finally, there are the complications over authority within Europe itself. The United States has made information-sharing agreements with individual European countries, agreements whose validity may now be in question. European Parliament members believe a panoply of separate agreements would greatly complicate Europe-wide information-sharing standards. It is likely European officials also worry about their authority being undermined if state-level agreements stand. Debates over counter-terrorism tactics are thus caught up in broader struggles between parties in Europe desiring a stronger European Union, and parties preferring states maintain control of certain issue-areas.

So what is the point of all this, besides semi-academic musing? It shows the complicated nature of any element of international relations. If this was just a question of divergent views on privacy standards, we could negotiate an agreement or the United States could proceed as it wishes and trust that its market power will force Europeans to go along. But because this also involves European attempts at self-assertion, the harder the United States pushes the more the Europeans will push back. Add in the complexities of intra-European power struggles, and the situation becomes even more unpredictable.

Something like airline security may seem trivial or boring, but it makes up a significant element of the US counter-terrorism strategy. And this strategy will be undermined without careful, intelligent diplomacy on this and numerous other issues. The Obama Administration seems well suited to such diplomacy, but any international accords must also meet the approval of Congress, and Congressional intransigence or ignorance has sunk important international agreements before.

Just something to think about as we go to the polls next week.

Information sharing critical for airline security

Guest post by Jared Stancombe 

Jared Stancombe, a 2009 graduate of Indiana University, is currently an analyst for a U.S. government agency responsible for national security. He is also in the officer selection process for the U.S. Marine Corps. He lives in Washington, D.C. 

Ed. note: This is Jared's fourth guest post at The Reaction. His first three were on Afghanistan and the Afghan War. You can find them here, here, and here. -- MJWS

**********

Republicans are chomping at the bit to blame the latest terrorist incident on President Obama. They claim he let it happen because he has failed to take security seriously. However, I argue that it is much more complex than that. No one person is to blame here. This problem reaches into the depths of government bureaucracy.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was on a terrorist watch-list in the U.K. and his father called the U.S. State Department claiming his son had been radicalized and could possibly be a threat. Despite being on a terrorist watch-list, he was able to keep his visa and get on a plane.

This latest incident shows how the various processes responsible for protecting our nation have become outdated and insufficient. Information sharing between government agencies tasked with protecting our nation has become extremely difficult.

Databases with names of "known or suspected terrorists" [KSTs] have been neglected and are virtually impossible to query upon because bureaucrats with little or no technical skills manually input the data. Information systems are disjointed because of convenience and "ease of access" by senior government employees who have little incentive to actually learn how to use a computer. Some systems checks for these employees may take hours or days. Also, some bureaucrats may be unable to find the right information during an investigation or a data search because the data may be in another system or the data may be insufficient or too garbled to use. Bureaucratic "red tape" and politics may also prevent adequate information sharing as innovative techniques are dismissed because they do not fit into the bureaucratic framework.

These problems are not political problems -- they are technical, training, and performance management problems. Some of those who are in positions tasked with administrating the data, investigating leads, and notifying law enforcement when necessary simply do not have the tools -- intellectual or technical -- to do their jobs effectively.

For airlines to be truly safe, information must flow at the rate in which TSA employees can disseminate and analyze the data as passengers are screened. A cost-effective and mostly automated process that takes out of the equation the human factor should be created, such as a system that automatically checks various government databases when someone purchases a ticket and notifies TSA personnel if anything is flagged. Prevention should become the keyword of airline security.

Taking away people's pillows and preventing them from using the lavatory an hour before landing are not security policy, they are illusions of security. The Obama Administration has called for approximately $7.79 billion to be spent on airline security, but these funds are being spent on processes that rely too much on the screeners' ability to check baggage and items on the passenger's person. Potential terrorists can and will take advantage of any security hole, and information must be shared on who is a threat and who isn't and allow TSA personnel to make more informed decisions.

The key to airport security is multi-agency information sharing and training those across the agencies on how to maintain the integrity of the information and how to use it quickly. Having the correct information to make split-second decisions is critical in protecting airline security. With the correct information, TSA personnel can prevent attacks, rather than react to them. There is no excuse for a known or suspected terrorist to fly to or from anywhere in the United States.