The Things He Carried - The Atlantic (November 2008)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security


November 2008

Airport security in America is a sham “security theater” designed to  
make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can  
get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of  
prohibited items as our correspondent did with ease.

by Jeffrey Goldberg

The Things He Carried

If I were a terrorist, and I’m not, but if I were a terrorist a  
frosty, tough-like-Chuck-Norris terrorist, say a C-title jihadist with  
Hezbollah or, more likely, a donkey-work operative with the Judean  
People’s Front I would not do what I did in the bathroom of the  
Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which was to place myself  
in front of a sink in open view of the male American flying public and  
ostentatiously rip up a sheaf of counterfeit boarding passes that had  
been created for me by a frenetic and acerbic security expert named  
Bruce Schnei er. He had made these boarding passes in his  
sophisticated underground forgery works, which consists of a Sony Vaio  
laptop and an HP LaserJet printer, in order to prove that the  
Transportation Security Administration, which is meant to protect  
American aviation from al-Qaeda, represents an egregious waste of tax  
dollars, dollars that could otherwise be used to catch terrorists  
before they arrive at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport,  
by which time it is, generally speaking, too late.

I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the  
privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was  
the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and  
since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular  
bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it  
from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow  
passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a  
public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to  
get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by  
the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport. Suspicious  
that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to  
prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for showsecurity  
theater is the term of art I have for some time now been testing, in  
modest ways, their effectiveness. Because the TSA’s security regimen  
seems to be mainly thing-based most of its 44,500 airport officers are  
assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs,  
three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers,  
Snapple, and so on I focused my efforts on bringing bad things through  
security in many different airports, primarily my home airport,  
Washington’s Reagan National, the one situated approximately 17 feet  
from the Pentagon, but also in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago,  
and at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport (which is where  
I came closest to arousing at least a modest level of suspicion,  
receiving a symbolic pat-down all frisks that avoid the sensitive  
regions are by definition symbolic and one question about the presence  
of a Leatherman Multi-Tool in my pocket; said Leatherman was  
confiscated and is now, I hope, living with the loving family of a TSA  
employee). And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on  
terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of  
branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda  
T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable  
Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me  
through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various  
times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust  
masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce  
tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which  
is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary  
screening four times out of dozens of passages through security  
checkpoints during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was  
relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving  
cream.

<snip>


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