I Get Nostalgic for East Germany

Flyers must surrender their privacy with their boarding passes

If you use hand sanitizer when traveling, the Transportation Security Administration can badger you as if you were a terrorist suspect. TSA is one of the biggest hassles many Americans will encounter this holiday season. I learned that firsthand while flying home from Portland, Ore., on Thanksgiving morning.

I arrived at the airport two hours before my flight. As usual, I opted out of going through TSA’s Whole Body Scanners. The agency’s prize possessions are incompetent at detecting terrorist threats; the inspector general reported that they fail to detect 96 percent of weapons and mock explosives in smuggling tests. The machines take birthday suit snapshots of each traveler; TSA claims photos are not retained, but the agency has less credibility than Congress.

Perhaps I was targeted because I have repeatedly criticized TSA in articles and was denounced last year by TSA chief John Pistole for a Washington Times op-ed I wrote. Or perhaps such punishment is routinely dished out to people who opt out from Whole Body Scanners. I have filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking all TSA documentation on me and on the Portland incident, but TSA is renowned for scorning its legal obligation to respond.

On the Monday after the Thanksgiving encounter, I e-mailed the TSA, asking how often its explosive detectors generate false alerts and how often alerts identify bona fide threats to air travel safety. TSA “national spokesperson” Mike England replied: “I’m unable to answer these questions as the answers are security sensitive information.” This cloak of secrecy is convenient for a process plagued by failures and abuses for more than a decade. The TSA press office was unable to provide a single example of the explosive detection tests exposing someone who intended to detonate a device on an airplane.

A friend recently told me that she felt like she was in East Germany when a TSA agent kept barking at her to raise her arms higher while passing through the scanner. Actually, I crossed East German borders many times before the fall of the Iron Curtain and always received better treatment than I experienced in Portland. Even when I was detained and interrogated for three hours near the Czech border in 1987, East German border guards were models of courtesy compared to the TSA.

Americans should be able to go home for the holidays without getting molested by federal agents. How many more people will be unjustifiably grappled after bogus TSA explosive alerts? The TSA continues operating on the level of the troll in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who blocked a bridge while asking idiotic questions.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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