How much of your freedom are you willing to give up in the name of your personal safety?
That question is prompted by the latest news about the Transportation Security Administration, which has reportedly been contemplating expanding its controversial X-ray body-scanning program from airports to public events, mass transit and possibly even the streets where you live.
According to documents obtained by the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, the TSA in 2006 began planning pilot programs that, if ever fully implemented, would expand its reach into the everyday lives of American citizens.
The idea was to develop a credible “response package” to a threat like the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the attack on the London Underground the following year by Muslim terrorists.
Phase One was tested in February 2006 at the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City, using metal detectors and X-ray machines. Phase Two tried out “in several locations” video-surveillance cameras, still photography and whole-body imaging.
Still other projects bruited involved mobile vans equipped with backscatter X-ray scanners to detect weapons and explosives in cars and on pedestrians.
Do we really want to go down this road?
The Fourth Amendment states explicitly: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”
Hard to square that with the mission of the Homeland Security Department and its intrusive TSA, which treat every American equally — as a potential criminal and terrorist.
Meanwhile, the TSA has now told its 40,000 airport screeners that they have the right to unionize on a limited basis — defeating the Bush administration’s original insistence that the DHS should be nonunion in order to ensure maximum flexibility and accountability.
In a politically correct attempt at perfect egalitarianism, we’ve created a bureaucratic monster. And, like all bureaucracies, it really has only one imperative — not defending the homeland, but protecting itself and expanding its reach, in order to justify its $56 billion budget.
It doesn’t matter whether the administration is Republican or Democratic. It doesn’t matter who’s president. Poorly conceived and hastily created in the aftermath of 9/11, the leviathan DHS — with more than 200,000 employees, it’s the third-largest Cabinet department — is a conceptual and practical disgrace to the American tradition of ordered liberty.
This isn’t to say we should have no defense against the very real threats in an asymmetrical war against radical Islam. And it’s also true that the Islamic threat may be changing from immigrant jihadis to American-born agents, like Maj. Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
But it’s absurd to argue that random “militias,” white-supremacist gangs or other groups pose a significant effect to the republic, much less grandmas in wheelchairs and yeshiva students.
The farce that is our security policy will come back to haunt us unless we shake off the PC shackles and start taking more proactive security measures.
And that starts with whom we let into our country. We know, for example, that the 9/11 hijackers were largely from Saudi Arabia, some of them fast-tracked under the now-discontinued Visa Express program. We also know that the kingdom is the world’s foremost exporter not only of oil, but also of radical Wahhabism.
Last month, in a story that got almost no notice, a Saudi Muslim named Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, here on a student visa, was arrested by the FBI and charged with attempted use of a “weapon of mass destruction” — a chemical improvised-explosive device — in a plot to kill “the tyrant” George W. Bush. What was this man doing in our country?
The place to stop terrorists is during what should be a rigorous, need-based visa process in countries in the Arab and Muslim world, not when they’re in Texas buying Hazmat suits.
If that offends certain “sensibilities,” tough. The impossibly perfect can’t be the enemy of the good enough for right now — not as long as the war continues.
It’s time to get the DHS and the TSA out of their defensive crouch. It’s past time to expand our forward perimeter to our embassies and consulates, instead of waiting for the enemy to strike here.
And unless the Constitution no longer means anything, it’s way past time to insist that our government stop treating us as potential bombers and murderers.
Michael Walsh, a former associate editor of Time, is the author (writing as David Ka hane) of “Rules for Radical Conservatives.”