The TSA and Me

How We Got Here

I hate flying.  It wasn't always this way.  Before the PLO began hijacking planes in the 70's, there were not even x-ray scans at airports.  In 1973, a White House directive charged airports with scanning all passengers and baggage with electronic weapons detectors.  There were occasional pat-downs when metal detectors sounded the alarm and the reason wasn't obvious.  Many were angered by the inconvenience and assault on privacy; some were totally fine with the new measures, and felt safer because of them.

Hijackings decreased.  Air travel was affordable.  Those were the halcyon days when you could walk to the gate to meet your family and friends, or shed a few tears saying good-bye.  You could watch the plane come into or leave the gate.  Your valuables, including your body, were safe from assault.

But just as violence happens outside of an airport, it was inevitable that there would be another airline attack, and it was massive.  9/11 changed America's sense of invulnerability.  The cluelessness of the George W. Bush administration ignored all the signs that would have prevented 9/11, while the paranoia of the Dick Cheney contingent ushered in the Patriot Act of 2001 and all its abominations.  It took the weenies in Congress less than two months to pass the law, and no amount of protestation over the loss of constitutional freedoms could stop them.

Imagine the chaos.  And the horror stories.

And yet, with the security business booming and Americans as insecure as ever, in 2009 the TSA got away with adding full body scanners to the myriad tortures of proceeding onto an aircraft.  Initially, they were to be used only when the walk through x-ray machine set off an alarm.  But when you've got a really fancy-ass hammer, everything looks like a nail, so in no time everyone was required to submit to having their body perused.  I said "got away with," but it wasn't easy.  People were appalled that the scanners showed their naked image.  And then there were those who were just appalled at the unnecessary invasion of privacy.   So -- being the Obama administration -- the problem was investigated and full-body scanners were walked back.  But, being the Obama administration, the problem was pursued until a new, improved full body scanner, that did not show us standing there, arms up, naked, became the new toy at the airport.  I hate to say it, but Obama did continue the march toward cutting back on freedoms in the name of security; he just did it in a more studied, scientifically researched manner.  The body scanner was once again a thing, although not used consistently, and the busier airports were far more pragmatic about enforcing their use than others:  like, for example, the Charleston International Airport, which just can't believe we aren't next on the terrorist to-do list.

So back to me.

I am 67 years old, and a New Englander.  As such, I've never been much for uninvited touching.  The TSA attacks appalled me for civil rights violation reasons, and also for personal privacy reasons.  I pretty much stopped flying after 9/11 when we all had to stand in line in order to have our suitcases opened up and watch our items fondled by gloved screeners before they were checked.  So even before the obscene full-body scanners.

I would prefer to drive two days each way to Chicago than fly.  I will in an instant choose the 23-hour Amtrak travel to Rhode Island than fly.  I miss the days of walking freely through an airport as though it was just a public building, but don't at all miss air travel as it exists today.

So there I was, this summer, with a pregnant daughter all the way over in Denver.  I honestly looked into cars and trains.  The only not-insane way to get there is flying.

And then, a month before my grandbaby made her appearance, my sister in Rhode Island died suddenly.  I booked a flight for the next day.

And had myself patted down for the first time ever at Charleston International.  The culprit appeared to be the metal in my bra.  I was upset about my sister's death, and rather than being silently stoic (which is what we are supposed to do), I said, "My sister died yesterday; I really don't need this."  The TSA agent did not respond verbally, but made sure to give me a thorough check before allowing me to put my shoes back on and get on my way.  On the way back, in Rhode Island, there was no such idiocy, and I was able to walk through the x-ray screener without incident.

A month later, my grandbaby was born, and I was once again booking a last minute flight.  I had only a short time to obsess about the upcoming screening and happier things to think about.  I was not surprised when we were all slowly and systematically herded through the body-scanners.  But, having been sure to wear a bra that while less personally secure would not be likely to set off alarms, I was still patted down.  This time not only my breasts but both my ankles.

And after a lovely week with my beautiful new grandbaby, frisked once again by what I had thought of as the more reasonable Denver TSA.

It appears to me that since Trump began his ham-fisted reign, the slippery slope of the TSA during the Obama years has become free to stomp on our privacy with abandon.  The full-body scanners are either more sensitive or set to be more sensitive, TSA agents instructed to "search" far more freely than in the recent past.  Not just an overweight woman in a bra with metal snaps, but the bulge of socks fallen around the ankle will also do it.  I don't know how many of us are chosen for this, but I finally decided to stop obsessing and just watch the last time I was in line.  Way too many pat-downs, way, way too many false positives.  And way too many rights being violated.

Like the frog that is put in the pot while the water is still cold, we are now quietly allowing our bodies to be handled in a way that would have caused outrage and rebellion a few years ago.

And why should that surprise me?  There are babies being torn from their parents and put in cells and African Americans being shot for traffic violations.  We live in a country being led by a cretin that aspires to being a dictator, and is right this very minute working to close our borders, keep the press out of the White House, and cut off ties with our allies.

What is happening at our airports seems small next to having a baby torn out of your arms or being shot by a poorly-trained and/or racist cop.

But we let the "small" liberties go in the name of security.  We kept sliding down that slippery slope, at first protesting and then just shrugging and going along with the intense scrutiny required just to travel.  We have been allowing our purses to be ravaged just to go to a sporting event for years.

This in a country that won't even allow a background check before buying a gun, or restrict the sale of bump stocks and silencers.

I know this has been a long blog, but I have been thinking about this TSA thing and how it has gotten away from us for a long time.  So it is going to get longer.  Go grab a cup of coffee or a beer and bear with me.

The TSA and Breast Milk

I now have a grandbaby and a daughter who has begun to travel with her.  On her first flight, over Thanksgiving, Denver TSA agents were befuddled over how to deal with her pumped breast milk.  Obviously, she had a baby with her, what nefarious plot would require such a cover?  And yet, they sniffed, opened and had meetings over how to proceed.  It was upsetting to the point that she did not carry breast milk on the trip home, in order to avoid what should be a totally avoidable fiasco.  Which made even more burdensome the feeding a three-month-old infant in a world where nursing moms get hassled by dirty-minded wingnuts.

A quick google search located another instance of the TSA assault on breast milk, amazingly also at Denver International, you know, where you can probably smuggle out legally purchased marijuana with ease.  The blogger suggests ways to more easily get through screening, like bringing in printed TSA information to show the agent so they can learn the rules about breast milk on-the-job.  The saddest thing about this particular post, however, is that she ends by suggesting paying for the use of a transportation service to carry your milk, if you are a traveling mom with a baby at home. 

IF YOU ARE 75 OR OLDER, YOU CAN GET THROUGH TSA SCREENING WITHOUT TAKING YOUR SHOES OFF.  This means that in the defective yet watchful eyes of our government, a 75-year-old is less likely to be a terrorist than a woman with an infant.

In 2013, the TSA even changed the rule about knives in order to allow small folding knives to be carried onto a plane.  Until that decision proved so wacky that the outcry caused them to rethink it.

So women are once again singled out for the kind of personal scrutiny that is an embarrassment and a violation.  Not to mention the incredible disruption of an already burdensome process of traveling with a small child.  Why have we put up with it?  Because women have always put up with special rules and restrictions.  Just as we have put up with sexual discrimination at work, and inappropriate sexual approaches and assaults.  If this isn't an issue to be taken up by #MeToo I don't know what is.

I Decide to Sell Out

I hope to visit my grandbaby every couple of months.  In the interest of not having to deal with the abomination of a pat-down at the beginning of every trip, I decided to look into TSA Precheck.

Turns out for the low, low price of $85 for five years, you can apply for a precheck that will allow you to avoid the most humiliating and infuriating aspects of TSA screening.  I wondered just how intensive this screening would be, if it really screened out those who might be dangerous on a flight.  It seems that they run your name and fingerprints through their national database, looking for criminals and terrorists!  The good news is, if you haven't yet been up to any criminal activity, not only are you good for prescreening, I'll bet there are terrorist organizations that would love to recruit you.

The difference that getting "awarded" TSA Precheck (for the low, low price of $85 for five years) is that next time you are at the security line at the airport you don't have to take off your shoes or light jacket.  Then you get to go through a regular x-ray machine instead of a body-scanner, like we used to do in the old days.  And you send your carry-ons on the belt through the x-ray scanner.  In other words, you are allowed to do the perfectly adequate screening that you were allowed to do before 9/11 (except no box cutters or knives).

Here are some other effects of the Precheck:  1.  There is a lot of money to be made by security companies, and our government loves to give money away to big corporations, as with private prisons.  2.  As an added bonus, the government gets to add lots of non-criminals and their fingerprints to its database, and even better, voluntarily.

Precheck doesn't mean your privacy won't get invaded when you're not looking.  We have known since the post 9/11 days when we stood and watched that our suitcases would be opened and inspected.  I knew that checked luggage continued to be "checked" because the tie I used to minimally safeguard my suitcase from opening was frequently retied in a different way.  But after my first precheck trip, I found this brazen confirmation, kind of a TSA "Fuck You and Your Rights":

It says:  For your own safety we have the right to rummage around in your stuff.  If you tried to lock us out, we busted our way in.  And there ain't nothing you can do about it.

Think about it.  I can carry on stuff that merely gets x-rayed.  But my checked bags need to get opened.  They honestly don't have and can't create the technology for seeing what is in our bag without opening it?  Or they just want us to know they can....

When I got to Denver and was bitching about the TSA, my daughter told me about a TV series that most of you probably already know about called Adam Ruins Everything.  In this episode, he ruins the myth that the TSA screening keeps us all safer and he does it with facts and experts.  It's a great episode, and I knew it all along.

It's a sad day when intelligent Americans have willingly abandoned such critical freedoms as being able to travel without assaults on our privacy, and on our very bodies.  Young adults are submitting to these atrocities because they have grown up in a 9/11 America in which privacy has been and is being subverted going on two decades in the name of security.  Young women carrying babies are having to submit their breast milk to inspection and us older women to getting parts of our bodies touched that we wouldn't allow to happen in any other circumstance.  And I have not even addressed the horrors that minorities, especially Muslim men, have had to endure since 9/11.

These days we are feeling overwhelmed by ever more horrendous attacks on civil liberties; mostly, they don't directly involve us, unless we are a minority, in which they have become a way of life.  It is way past time we resensitize ourselves to the violations by our government to our rights.  The Trump era is nothing but a really, really red flag of what we stand to lose, and each day we are losing just a bit more of it.

When you are at the airport, and standing stoically in line waiting to see if you will be frisked, look around.  Be aware of how unlike a free democratic society this process has become.  We don't make jokes or laugh.  We don't debate, question or complain.  We stand there trying not to be noticed and singled out.  How un-American we have become.

In the words of John Oliver:  "This is NOT normal."