You hate to take a “What, me worry?” attitude towards any aspect
of the war on terrorism, but it’s hard to get too worked up over
the results of a study, released recently by the Transportation
Security Administration, which found that screeners at airport
checkpoints failed to detect one in four weapons carried by
undercover testers.
Why?
Because the study did not take into account the demographics of
the undercover testers.
What we know about international terrorism, at least so far, is
that the threat comes from two relatively recognizable groups: (1)
Middle-Eastern males; (2) fidgety dupes who have fallen in with
Middle-Eastern males.
So how many of the undercover testers used in the TSA study fit
either profile? The fact that a quarter of the weapons slipped past
screeners, in other words, begs several questions: How many of the
weapons that got through were actually carried by guys named Ahmed,
Mohammed or Nasir? How many were carried by guys who paid for their
tickets in cash? How many by guys who bought one-way tickets? How
many by guys who were sweating profusely? How many by guys who were
muttering to themselves?
The case can be made, of course, that if even an elderly
grandmother from Kansas manages to board a 747 with a nail clipper,
the screener who allowed her to pass has screwed up. But if the
screener’s attention was distracted at that moment by the passenger
behind her, the swarthy guy kissing the Koran and glancing
nervously side to side, I’d be reluctant to fault his priorities.
The truth is that an elderly grandmother with a nail clipper poses
a negligible security risk; in fact, I’d be willing to declare an
immediate immunity for elderly grandmothers who board planes with
nail clippers.
The fact that one out of four weapons were slipped past
screeners is, in the final analysis, only significant if the study
replicates real world conditions. If, on the contrary, the study is
premised on the liberal lie — and that’s what it is — that
terrorists come from a random cross section of humanity, then the
results are meaningless. They may even be worse than meaningless if
they are used against the screeners; indeed, punishing screeners
for failing to pretend that terrorists crop up equally among every
demographic will likely cause them to adopt the pretense
thereafter. And if training screeners means instructing them to
scrutinize all passengers equally, to ignore their altogether
natural inclinations to stereotype terrorists according to ethnic,
gender, age and behavioral markers, then the rest of us would be
better off with untrained screeners.
This is, in a sense, a rerun of the propaganda of the AIDS
crisis. The media’s insistence that AIDS was an egalitarian threat,
that it was as likely, for example, to strike heterosexuals as
homosexuals, succeeded only in diverting finite resources away from
the high-risk community and towards the low-risk community. (And,
no, for those readers who are ritually disposed to read between the
lines, I did not just compare AIDS victims to terrorists.) Deciding
policy based on how we’d like the world to be, rather than on how
the world actually is, inevitably leads to self-defeating
policy.
Maybe, in the future, the Transportation Security Administration
will conduct a study that accurately reflects what we know about
the demographics of terrorists — rather than maintaining the
pretense that terrorism is an equal-opportunity enterprise. Until
then, it can spare us the alarmist results.
