Who doesn’t love the TSA?

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Well, most people at the moment. My experience passing through on my recent book trailer jaunt was fine, but others have had painful and humiliating searches or been faced with the petty indignities of low-level bureaucrats anxious to exercise their power.

The media mostly brushes off these complaints. A large number of the public doesn’t care or is contemptuous of people’s complaints–one NPR caller responded to a question about backscatter machines by saying “Go to the gym and give them something worth looking at.” And the government has no plans to stop.

It’s because we, as a nation, expect politicians to protect us from terrorism.

When the guy who torched his underwear on the plane was arrested, the media and the public was boiling over with questions about how he got through security, who let this happen, what precautions were in place? Can the Obama administration protect us? Geo. Bush never allowed a terrorist attack on U.S. soil (except for that one)

Truth is, no politician is going to care about complaints of intrusive searches when the alternative (in their minds, at least) is an election season attack of being “soft on terror.” No politician wants to face those questions.

4 thoughts on “Who doesn’t love the TSA?

  1. I wonder if a large part of the apathy of Americans to the scanners is not enough of them fly enough to give a damn. I know that only 22% of Americans own a passport for example so they’re certainly not travelling overseas. By contrast around 70% of us Aussies have a passport and we do a lot of travel – internationally at least. Interestingly most Australian airports have just received or are about to install the new backscatter scanners but not to scan bodies. They’re going to be used to scan liquids. Hopefully this will ease some of the draconian restrictions on liquids.

  2. It’s true that few American’s own passports, but a great many of them fly each year. This is a big country with a (supposedly) mobile populations–we fly home to see family or on vacation all the time. I hate traveling, and I fly twice a year, just about.

    To be honest, I have no idea why so many people accept the TSA rules. I think it’s the proverbial boiling frog.

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