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The Pretense of Airport Security
By Robert Higgs

College student Nathaniel Heatwole's recent, highly publicized hijinks in deliberately and successfully flouting airline-security rules illustrate once more the realities of the government's sham program to protect the commercial airline industry from terrorists.

The Transportation Security Administration is a joke, and not a funny one, either. As you pass through the TSA's airport checkpoints, you can expect to overhear mutters about the "gestapo," the "morons," and similar commentary from outraged but powerless travelers who have chosen to swallow their self-respect and submit to pointless, degrading invasions of their persons and property in order to avoid offending the thugs who, whenever they choose, can prevent passengers from proceeding with their travel. Something is horribly wrong with a population willing to tolerate such routine degradation and thuggery, especially when the alleged benefits of the humiliation are entirely bogus.

Deputy TSA Administrator Stephen McHale, behaving as a bureaucrat is bound to behave, dismissed the significance of the Heatwole incident. "Amateur testing of our systems do [sic] not show us in any way our flaws," he said. "We know where the vulnerabilities are and we are testing them . . . . This does not help."

Well, yes, it does not help to improve a bureaucrat's day when a college student carries out with such ease multiple evasions of forbidden-item interdiction, immediately alerts the authorities to every detail of his actions, then has to wait a month for an official reaction. McHale's dismissal notwithstanding, this incident does highlight flaws that have been disclosed repeatedly by others, including agents of the Transportation Department's inspector general, ever since the feds rushed to nationalize airport security screening in the wake of 9/11....

...Ultimately, however, the TSA's program serves one political purpose above all others. It routinely abases and humiliates the entire population, rendering us docile and compliant and thereby preparing us to play our assigned role in the Police State that the Bush administration has been building relentlessly. For Attorney General Ashcroft, the federal prosecutors, and the thousands of bully-boys at the FBI, the BATF, and all the other, similar bureaus, nothing could be finer than a system whereby the entire population without exception is treated as suspected criminals and made to feel like inmates in a concentration camp.