IP: Naked Air

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

December 26, 2001
Naked Air
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/26/opinion/26FRIE.html?todaysheadlines>

[I] n the wake of the attempted bombing last week of the American Airlines 
flight from Paris by a terrorist nut with explosives in his shoe, I'm 
thinking of starting my own airline, which would be called: Naked Air. Its 
motto would be: "Everybody flies naked and nobody worries." Or "Naked Air - 
where the only thing you wear is a seat belt."

Think about it. If everybody flew naked, not only would you never have to 
worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding 
shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught 
dead flying nude, or in the presence of nude women, and that alone would 
keep many potential hijackers out of the skies. It's much more civilized 
than racial profiling. And I'm sure that it wouldn't be long before 
airlines would be offering free dry-cleaning for your clothes while you fly.

Well, you get the point: if the terrorists are just going to keep using 
technology to become better and better, how do we protect against that, 
while maintaining an open society - without stripping everyone naked? I 
mean, what good is it to have a free and open America when someone can 
easily get on an airplane in Paris and bring a bomb over in the heel of his 
shoe or plot a suicide attack on the World Trade Center from a cave in 
Kandahar and then pop over and carry it out?

This is America's core problem today: A free society is based on openness 
and on certain shared ethics and honor codes to maintain order, and we are 
now intimately connected to too many societies that do not have governments 
that can maintain order and to peoples who have no respect for our ethics 
or our honor codes.

Remember the electronic ticket machines that were used for the Boston-New 
York-Washington shuttles? Ever use one? Not only were you automatically 
issued your ticket with a credit card by pressing a touch- screen, but they 
asked you - electronically - "Did you pack your bags yourself?" and "Did 
any strangers give you anything?" And you answered those security questions 
by touching a screen! Think about the naïve trust and honor code underlying 
those machines.

If I had my way they would now take all those machines and put them in a 
special room in the Smithsonian museum called: "Artifacts From America 
Before Sept. 11, 2001."

We're not alone. I just flew in and out of Moscow, where you now have to 
fill out a detailed customs form. It asks the usual questions: Are you 
carrying any fruits, plants, large amounts of foreign currency, special 
electronics or weapons? But there was one box that unnerved me a bit. It 
asked: Are you carrying any "radioactive materials?" Hmm, I wondered, how 
many people (i.e. smugglers) are going to check that box? Can you imagine 
going through Moscow customs and the couple in front of you turning to each 
other and asking: "Dear, did we pack the nuclear waste in your suitcase or 
mine?" Or, "Honey, is the plutonium in your purse or the black duffel?" I 
don't think so.

Which is why we are entering a highly problematic era, one that we are just 
beginning to get our minds around. We are becoming much more keenly aware 
of how freedom and order go together (see the Ashcroft debates). For 
America to stay America, a free and open society, intimately connected to 
the world, the world has to become a much more ordered and controlled 
place. And order emerges in two ways: It is either grown from the bottom 
up, by societies slowly developing good democratic governance and shared 
ethics and values, or it is imposed from the top down, by non-democratic, 
authoritarian regimes rigidly controlling their people.

But in today's post-cold-war world, many, many countries to which we are 
connected are in a transition between the two - between a rigid 
authoritarian order that was imposed and voluntary self-government that is 
being home-grown. It makes for a very messy world, especially as some 
countries - Afghanistan being the most extreme example - are not able to 
make the transition.

"The problem with top-down control is that more governments around the 
world are fragmenting today, rather than consolidating," said the Israeli 
political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "At the same time, America's technologies 
are being universalized - planes that go faster and faster and electronics 
that are smaller and smaller - but the American values and honor system 
that those technologies assume have not been universalized. In the hands of 
the wrong people they become weapons of mass destruction."

So there you have our dilemma: Either we become less open as a society, or 
the world to which we are now so connected has to become more controlled - 
by us and by others - or we simply learn to live with much higher levels of 
risk than we've ever been used to before.

Or, we all fly naked.


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