Life is About Risk: What the TSA Ignores

The prevailing conventional wisdom in the general public (the 64% that support the Full Body scanners, but far less are hot to trot about the patdowns) is that the full body scanners are fine if they make us more secure.

Of course, it’s an open question if they do provide any more security. Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests candidly in an interview with Popular Mechanics that it simply won’t make travel more secure and suggested the entire affair was a matter of politics, “It’s politics. You have to be seen as doing something, even if nothing is the smart thing to do. You can’t be seen as doing nothing.”

Let’s say for the sake of argument, though, that full body nudity and government-endorsed gropes do reduce the threat of terrorism somewhat, the big question is how much risk does it actually mitigate.

Under any reasonable consideration, I would suggest that the answer is very little. Consider the countless thousands of flights that have taken off and landed since 9/11 without a terrorist hijacking. The past 9 years have gone pretty well for airport security. You can’t go much lower than zero deaths in a 9-year period.

But there are things we could do to make ourselves safe that would make us safer that would do far more to reduce risk than these scanners.  We could greatly decrease the risk of terrorism by ensuring the government monitors all electronic communications. We could ban Yugos, bring back the H1 Hummers, and require that everyone drive them. We would all be safer if we had a cop car parked on every block and a policfemen on every corner.  

Even without government, a life of absolute safety is only chosen by the mentally insane. We take risks getting married, getting pregnant, going skiing, driving down to the store, some of us take risks by living in cities, and other take risks by living in the country.

We don’t always do what’s safe because playing it safe often costs too much in terms of money, time, or quality of life. And in the case of these TSA measures, they cost too much in terms of liberty. The TSA security measures violate that spirit of American liberty and move us towards a police state, such as existed behind the iron curtain. Whatever gains are to be made in security come at too high a cost.

Read more at Adam’s Blog