Introduced in 2005 to combat the waves of terrorists thronging our shores, REAL ID was supposed to thwart the bad guys by transforming our drivers’ licenses into a national ID card. We’d have submitted this card on demand to government’s agents—as do the victims in totalitarian regimes. Never mind that “almost no empirical research has been undertaken to clearly establish how identity tokens can be used as a means of preventing terrorism,” according to Privacy International, or that “terrorists have traditionally moved across borders using tourist visas,” unless they “are equipped with legitimate identification cards.” The 9/11 hijackers and the Madrid bombers, respectively, provide two recent examples.

Any Pretext Whatsoever

Governments itch to tag their subjects like so many cattle, on any pretext whatsoever. Ours thought it had a dandy excuse in the attacks of 9/11, and who can blame it? Many Americans would eagerly sell their few remaining liberties so long as a politician assured them that said sale secured the homeland. Ergo, the feds invented a bogus link between terrorism and America’s freedom from a national ID. They swore they’d prevent another 9/11 so long as we followed orders to carry “enhanced” drivers’ licenses.

Surprisingly, rebellion bloomed—and this among states that have supinely obeyed any number of anti-constitutional decrees since 1865. Fifteen passed legislation prohibiting their DMVs from turning licenses into a de facto national ID; another ten officially denounced REAL ID.

No matter: The feds slapped an alias on their failed legislation—PASS ID—and reintroduced it. But in case such cosmetics can’t con us, a couple of senators are aiming at the same goal via another American bugaboo: immigration.

Increased Workplace Patrols

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) propose to “reform” yet again the feds’ cruel and unconstitutional policies on immigration. Their national ID card piggybacks on Social Security cards rather than drivers’ licenses.

“The plan calls for a big increase in immigration agents patrolling workplaces,” the New York Times reported. The Bush administration already tried such raids; their inhumanity devastated whole towns, not just immigrants, and Obama’s government supposedly discontinued them. But senators seldom boast an enviable learning curve. Graham and Schumer would also “require all workers, including legal immigrants and American citizens, to present a tamper-proof”—that is, biometric—“Social Security card when they apply for jobs.”

In propaganda the Washington Post obligingly published, the senators wrote, “A tamper-proof ID system would dramatically decrease illegal immigration, experts have said, and would reduce the government revenue lost when employers and workers here illegally fail to pay taxes.” But, “there’s no such thing as a foolproof ID system,” as experts have also said. And “reducing lost government revenue” as a reason for national ID adds insult to injury. We should pack papers so the government can keep more of what it loots from us?

The senators also promise that though “we would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card,” we’re safe from bureaucratic prying because “no government database would house everyone’s information.” If you believe that, you no doubt believe as well that these politicians have only our best interests at heart, have studied rather than exploited this topic, and are competent to decide for us who our future neighbors, friends, and relatives will be.

Certainly, Graham and Schumer don’t have immigrants’ best interests at heart. Indeed, whether immigrants can live here is determined solely by whether we can use them to “ensur[e] America’s future economic prosperity.” Ergo, the senators’ “legislation would award green cards to immigrants who receive a Ph.D. or master’s degree in science, technology, engineering or math from a U.S. university. It makes no sense to educate the world’s future inventors and entrepreneurs and then force them to leave when they are able to contribute to our economy.”

Nationalist Agenda

Forget about those hungry, tired, and poor yearning to breathe free; the persecuted; and the tortured. If you can’t advance politicians’ nationalistic agendas, you won’t find a toe-hold here.

The senators aren’t content to menace only immigrants; they also threaten and penalize Americans who, unlike themselves, are productive: “Prospective employers would be responsible for swiping the [national ID] cards through a machine”—and who pays for the gizmo?—“to confirm a person’s identity and immigration status. Employers who refused to swipe the card or who otherwise knowingly hired unauthorized workers would face stiff fines and, for repeat offenses, prison sentences.”

Our rulers have spent the last 150 years ginning up fear of immigrants, pitting established Americans against newcomers, contriving a hobgoblin from which they squawk about rescuing us. They’ve succeeded so well that modern Americans happily don chains so long as it means immigrants wear them, too. National ID, raids on offices and factories, a wall on our southern border: Nothing is too dictatorial when it comes to controlling migration.

Schumer and Graham are betting Americans’ fear of immigrants outweighs their love of liberty. Tragically, that looks like a winning wager.

Not only did these policy-wonk questions intrigue pundits, they inspired such events in British history as the Long Parliament, the Puritan Revolution, the Commonwealth, and so on. In The Politics of Liberty, Professor Lee Ward, who teaches political science at Campion College, University of Regina (Canada), correlates his philosophical history to the political one and coincidentally proves how very much ideas really matter. He traces the development of thought, repellant though it is, on the extent and morality of the state’s authority from Sir Robert Filmer, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes through Samuel Pufendorf and such Whig philosophers as James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Cato (that is, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato’s Letters). His book concludes with the transformation of these ideas by James Otis, Thomas Paine,Thomas Jefferson, and other Americans.

And thank heaven they were transformed. Filmer argues unabashedly that the monarch is sovereign. Indeed, his king sits so far above the law that the royal nostrils may bleed. Filmer credits the biblical account of Adam’s creation for this. Supposedly, when God gave Adam dominion over the earth (Gen 1: 28–29), Adam became a literal and utter dictator.

Never mind that the context of these verses is dominion over the natural world, not the political one. God is not establishing Adam as a sort of primeval Stalin; rather, Adam is humanity’s representative, with God offering nature to mankind so that we may harness it for our advantage.

Ward next shows how Hobbes and Grotius fine tuned Filmer’s points. For example, they debate endlessly whether subjects have any right to rebel, even under the worst of conditions, including the threat of imminent death.

The early Whigs don’t offer much refuge from such lunacy. James Tyrrell wastes time and energy proving that Adam’s authority over his sons was a general one common to all fathers, rather than a specific right granted to Adam alone. He frets over whether human liberty is alienable and decides it is, though no man would be foolish enough to give away his freedom. Perhaps not, but some philosophers are foolish enough to abet those who steal it.

To this point, the quibbling resembles that between modern Republicans and Democrats, with all the nonsensical nuances of the argument over Social Security, for instance. And just as the parties don’t step back from the trees long enough to recommend clear-cutting the forest, neither do these philosophers. Bit by bit, they feed off and slightly temper the others’ enthusiasm for government. Along the way, almost accidentally, they take baby steps toward stifling the state.

With Algernon Sidney, however, comes a giant leap for mankind. He slashes and burns Filmer with a point-by-point refutation from the Bible. Locke, Cato, and the Americans take an even bigger leap into territory more familiar to us and far more palatable.

Professor Ward tells a tale that begins so sickeningly it makes tough reading for anyone who loves liberty. But hang in there: things improve in the middle and wax positively rosy by the time Locke and company ride to the rescue.

The Politics of Liberty explains some of the baffling reverence for government plaguing us today. Much of it can be traced to Filmer, Hobbes, and the other apologists for government whom Ward discusses. Their pernicious presuppositions still stalk among us like vampires. Understanding these presuppositions allows us to track the vampires to their lairs so we can drive stakes through their hearts. This book provides not only a map to the lairs, but the stakes as well.

Even passengers who most fear terrorism might object that exposing ourselves and our children to government agents is too high a price for safe skies. But whole-body imaging, like all technology, ultimately relies on human operators–such as the ones who missed the many obvious signs that Abdulmutallab wasn’t planning a fun-filled vacation in Detroit.

The TSA already subjects your carry-on bags to X-ray scanning that penetrates the “skin” to show what’s beneath. Yet screeners routinely fail to discern the guns, knives, and other contraband their monitors show. Sometimes undercover federal investigators are smuggling those weapons to test screeners; other times, passengers who’ve forgotten the pistol or ammunition in their knapsack turn themselves in when they reach their gate. Expecting screeners who overlook the hunting knife beside a paperback novel to find the explosives taped near a woman’s . . . well, let’s just say the distractions of whole-body imaging are considerably greater than anything in the average carry-on.

And those distractions will be the stars of the show since scanners are “unlikely” to highlight the plastic and liquid explosives terrorists prefer. That’s according to a British MP and “ex Army officer” who once worked for a manufacturer of whole-body imagers. Ben Wallace told BBC Radio 4 that “the scanners would probably not have detected the failed Detroit plane plot of Christmas Day[,] . . . the 2006 airliner liquid bomb plot and . . . the 2005 bombings of three Tube trains and a bus in London.” He continued: “[T]here is a big but, and the but was in all the testing that we undertook[. It] was unlikely that [this technology] would have picked up the current explosive devices being used by al-Qaeda. . . . This is not necessarily the big silver bullet that is somehow being portrayed.”

The TSA has been aiming that bullet at us since 2002. (Abdullmutallab simply provided the latest excuse for denuding passengers.) To that end, it has long insisted that it protects our privacy even as it virtually strips us naked. But its spurious fig leaves also work against the success of its peep show.

For starters, the agency asserts that the “facial features [of the] three-dimensional image” are “blurred for privacy.” It’s sung a similar song since at least 2006, when USA Today claimed “the machines will show only blurred outlines of travelers but will enable screeners to see weapons.” Supposedly, “‘edge detection’ technology looks for changes in density or molecular structure on the person and draws outlines around those areas [while] eras[ing] anatomical details.” So “a metal object, far more dense than human tissue, is highlighted by a heavy black line. But body contours, if they register at all, appear as faint gray lines because ‘they don’t have edges,’ said Daniel Strom, a scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. ‘It only shows anomalies, like metal and ceramics.’”

Alas, those “modifications could create problems in detecting some plastic explosives that have a density similar to human tissue, said Andrew Karam, a physicist and fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a national-security think tank. ‘I can smooth [plastic explosives] out like spackle so there really is not a sharp edge. That’s something I think is going to be really hard to find,’ Karam said. [Whole-body imaging] ‘will find obvious stuff,’ Karam added. ‘I don’t know if it will find anything else.’”

Ogling naked passengers is as unnecessary as it is ineffective.

Sharper Images Coming

Nonetheless, we can expect sharp pictures to replace blurred ones. Richard Mastronardi, a vice president at American Science and Engineering (AS&E) in Billerica, Massachusetts, another manufacturer of this equipment, explained, according to a press report, that “the modifications made for the TSA ‘trade off detection for a level of privacy’. . . . When the machine is programmed to maximize privacy protection, ‘you start to lose the ability to see’ plastic explosives.” Regardless of how thoroughly the TSA searches us, prohibited items will still surface aboard planes thanks to human error and corruption. Look for the agency to cover its rear by uncovering ours: It will blame “privacy protection” and push for full clarity.

The TSA has long denied that its gadgets retain the pictures they snap of us. Amy Kudwa is one of the TSA’s many spokespeople insisting that the machines “have zero storage capability, so the images cannot be stored, transmitted or printed.” She told technewsworld.com in 2007 that “once the image is determined to be clear of any threat, it is deleted from the screen forever.” But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), set the record straight: “TSA saying these machines cannot store images is a little like saying a camera can produce pictures without storing an image. . . . We know from the [website of] one of the vendors that these machines can indeed store images.”

We also know they store images from the specs EPIC’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit pried from the TSA last January. “In the documents,” CNN reported, “The TSA specifies that the body scanners it purchases must have the ability to store and send images when in ‘test mode.’” CNN noted that these “written requirements . . . appear to contradict numerous assurances the TSA has given the public about the machines’ privacy protections.”

How long before images of famous passengers, or buxom, expectant, or terribly obese ones, find their way to the Internet, blackmail schemes, or court, as cops try to prove their case against a high-flying drug dealer? Celebrities who cheerfully doff all or some of their clothing for Hollywood’s megabucks may object to doing it gratis at the TSA’s command. The resulting lawsuits may very well sideline these contraptions–but only after the TSA has wasted billions of our taxes on them.

Then there’s the agency’s assurance that “The officer who views the image is remotely located in a secure resolution room and never sees the passenger.” But journalist Charles Leocha of Consumer Traveler “had an opportunity to step into the small video viewing room manned by a single TSA officer” at Reagan National Airport. He estimates the space as measuring “5-feet by 5-feet, a big telephone booth really . . . one wall [was lined] with a table with a monitor, keyboard and communications equipment and a government-issue desk chair. The monitor being used had about a 17-inch screen. . . .” He concludes that fatigue will be an overwhelming occupational hazard: “For me a half-hour shift in this cell would be 30 minutes alone in hell.”

Still, the TSA should have no shortage of eager applicants. Being paid to view naked men, women, and children certainly reverses the usual arrangement and will no doubt appeal to a great many folks–the sort Leviathan otherwise locks up. Indeed, one of the TSA’s employees at Orlando International was “arrested in connection with the molestation of a girl, Orange County sheriff’s deputies said. The man told investigators he planned to make her his ‘sex slave,’ according to a [sic] arrest report uncovered by Florida Today news partner Local 6” earlier this year. Naturally, “TSA takes the allegations very seriously,” TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz wrote. “We will take all appropriate action to address this situation.” The agency has since gone mum on the matter.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Guardian reported that “Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.” How long until American parents demand similar exemptions? And when they do, will that rescue the rest of us from our compulsive striptease since terrorists would then naturally recruit kids? Or will the TSA continue to humiliate us out of bureaucratic inertia and power lust?

There’s a far simpler, constitutional, and less offensive way to protect aviation than photographing two million passengers in their birthday suits each day: Free the airlines from the federal government’s stranglehold on security. Let each company determine what works best for its routes, customers, and specific risks. Does anyone seriously believe that politicians and bureaucrats know more about securing planes than pilots and executives who’ve spent their lives in the industry? Even baggage handlers could give Congress a lesson in preventing terrorists from hiding bombs in checked luggage–yet the Feds dictate to them instead.

Indeed, federal regulations enabled the 9/11 attackers to kill thousands in the first place. Screeners working that tragic day were “private,” it’s true, but only in the sense that private companies hired them and issued their paychecks. Everything those screeners did, from wanding passengers to confiscating knives while permitting box cutters, came from the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) playbook. Had each airline set its own policies, had it relied on serious security rather than the charade that satisfies political pretenses, 3,000 people might be alive today.

Returning responsibility for protecting its customers and inventory to the airlines also keeps everyone happy. Passengers who will rest easy only when we all fly naked can patronize See Everything Airways, with its motto No Place to Hide . . . Anything. Those who prize dignity and convenience over safety may prefer Tough Guy Air, where pilots not only arm themselves but also welcome passengers to pack heat as well. Since profits nosedive after any attempted skyjacking, let alone terrorism, airlines have all the incentive we could ask to institute practical, effective security.

The government failed to prevent 9/11, failed to thwart shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and failed to intercept Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab even after his own father reported him. Isn’t it time we entrusted our safety to professionals rather than politicians?

Introduced in 2005 to combat the waves of terrorists thronging our shores, REAL ID was supposed to thwart the bad guys by transforming our driver’s licenses into a national ID card. We’d have submitted this card on demand to government’s agents – as do the victims in totalitarian regimes. Never mind that “almost no empirical research has been undertaken to clearly establish how identity tokens can be used as a means of preventing terrorism,” according to Privacy International (pdf), or that “terrorists have traditionally moved across borders using tourist visas (such as those who were involved in the US terrorist attacks)” — unless they “are equipped with legitimate identification cards (such as those who carried out the Madrid bombings).”

Governments itch to tag their subjects like so many cattle, on any pretext whatsoever. Ours thought it had a dandy excuse in the attacks of 9/11, and who can blame it? Many Americans would eagerly sell their few remaining liberties so long as a politician assured them that said sale secured the homeland. Ergo, the Feds invented a bogus link between terrorism and America’s freedom from a national ID. They swore they’d prevent another 9/11 so long as we followed orders to carry “enhanced” driver’s licenses.

Surprisingly, rebellion bloomed – and this among states that have supinely obeyed any number of anti-constitutional decrees since 1865. Fifteen passed legislation prohibiting their DMVs from turning licenses into a de facto national ID; another ten officially denounced REAL ID.

No matter: the Feds slapped an alias on their failed legislation – “PASS ID” – and reintroduced it. But in case such cosmetics can’t con us, a couple of senators are aiming at the same goal via another American bugaboo: immigration.

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) propose to “reform” yet again the Feds’ cruel and unconstitutional policies on immigration. Their charade prominently features a national ID card – though this time it piggybacks on Social Security cards rather than driver’s licenses.

“The plan calls for a big increase in immigration agents patrolling workplaces,” the New York Times reports. The Bush administration already tried such raids; their inhumanity devastated whole towns, not just immigrants, and Obama’s government supposedly discontinued them. But senators seldom boast an enviable learning curve. Graham and Schumer would also “require all workers, including legal immigrants and American citizens, to present a tamper-proof” – that is, biometric – “Social Security card when they apply for jobs.”

In propaganda the Washington Post obligingly published, the senators themselves write, “A tamper-proof ID system would dramatically decrease illegal immigration, experts have said, and would reduce the government revenue lost when employers and workers here illegally fail to pay taxes.” First, “there’s no such thing as a foolproof ID system,” as experts have also said. Second, “reducing lost government revenue” as a reason for national ID adds insult to injury. We should pack papers so the government can keep more of what it loots from us?

The senators also promise that though “we would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card,” we’re safe from bureaucratic prying because “no government database would house everyone’s information.” If you believe that, you no doubt believe as well that these politicians have only our best interests at heart, have studied rather than exploited this topic, and are competent to decide for us who our future neighbors, friends, and relatives will be.

For sure, Graham and Schumer don’t have immigrants’ best interests at heart. Indeed, whether immigrants can live here is determined solely by whether we can use them to “ensur[e] America’s future economic prosperity.” Ergo, the senators’ “legislation would award green cards to immigrants who receive a PhD or master’s degree in science, technology, engineering or math from a U.S. university. It makes no sense to educate the world’s future inventors and entrepreneurs and then force them to leave when they are able to contribute to our economy.”

Forget about those hungry, tired, and poor yearning to breathe free, the persecuted, the tortured, and the fact that the Constitution never empowered the Feds to control movements across the country’s borders. If you can’t advance politicians’ nationalistic agendas, you won’t find a toe-hold here.

The senators aren’t content to menace only immigrants; they also threaten and penalize Americans who, unlike themselves, are productive: “Prospective employers would be responsible for swiping the [national ID] cards through a machine” – and who pays for the gizmo? – “to confirm a person’s identity and immigration status. Employers who refused to swipe the card or who otherwise knowingly hired unauthorized workers would face stiff fines and, for repeat offenses, prison sentences.”

Our rulers have spent the last 150 years ginning up fear of immigrants, pitting established Americans against newcomers, contriving a hobgoblin from which they squawk about rescuing us. They’ve succeeded so well that modern Americans happily don chains so long as it means immigrants wear them too. National ID, raids on offices and factories, a wall on our southern border: Nothing is too dictatorial when it comes to controlling migration – including ours.

Schumer and Graham are betting Americans’ fear of immigrants outweighs their love of liberty. Tragically, that’s a winning wager.

Even passengers who most fear terrorism might object that exposing ourselves to government agents is too high a price for safe skies. It’s also ineffective. Whole-body imaging, like all technology, ultimately relies on human operators – like the ones who missed the many and obvious signs that Abdulmutallab was planning more than a fun-filled vacation in Detroit.

The TSA already subjects your carry-on bags to X-ray scanning that penetrates the “skin” to show what’s beneath. Yet screeners routinely fail to discern the guns, knives, and other contraband their monitors show. Sometimes undercover federal investigators are smuggling those weapons to test screeners; other times, passengers who’ve forgotten the pistol or ammunition in their knapsack turn themselves in when they reach their gate. Expecting screeners who overlook the hunting knife beside a paperback novel to find the explosives taped near a woman’s… Well, let’s just say the distractions of whole-body imaging are considerably greater than anything in the average carry-on.

The TSA continues to insist that it protects our privacy even as it virtually strips us naked. But its spurious fig leaves may work against the success of its peep-show. The agency’s website assures us that “The officer who views the image is remotely located, in a secure resolution room and never sees the passenger.”

Journalist Charles Leocha of Consumer Traveler “had an opportunity to step into the small video viewing room manned by a single TSA officer” at Reagan National Airport. He estimates the space as measuring “5-feet by 5-feet, a big telephone booth really … one wall [was lined] with a table with a monitor, keyboard and communications equipment and a government-issue desk chair. The monitor being used had about a 17-inch screen…..” He concludes that fatigue will be an even bigger occupational hazard than distraction: “For me a half-hour shift in this cell would be 30 minutes alone in hell.”

Still, the TSA should have no shortage of eager applicants. Being paid to view naked men, women, and children certainly reverses the usual arrangement and will no doubt appeal to a great many folks – the sort Leviathan otherwise locks up. In Britain the Guardian reports that “Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.” How long until American parents demand similar exemptions? And when they do, will that rescue the rest of us from our compulsive strip-tease since terrorists would then naturally recruit kids? Or will the TSA continue to humiliate us out of bureaucratic inertia and power-lust?

There’s a far simpler, constitutional, and less offensive way to protect aviation than photographing two million passengers in their birthday suits each day: Free the airlines from the federal government’s stranglehold on security. Let each company determine what works best for its routes, customers, and specific risks. Does anyone seriously believe that politicians and bureaucrats know more about securing planes than pilots and executives who’ve spent their lives in the industry? Even baggage handlers could give Congress a lesson in preventing terrorists from hiding bombs in checked luggage – yet the Feds dictate to them instead.

Indeed, federal regulations enabled the 9/11 attackers to kill Americans in the first place. Screeners working that tragic day were “private,” it’s true, but only in the sense that private companies hired them and issued their paychecks. Everything those screeners did, from wanding passengers to confiscating knives while permitting box-cutters, came from the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) playbook. Had each airline set its own policies, had it relied on serious security rather than the charade that satisfies political pretenses, 3,000 people might be alive today.

Returning responsibility for protecting its customers and inventory to the airlines also keeps everyone happy. Passengers who will rest easy only when we all fly naked can patronize See Everything Airways, with its motto No Place to Hide…Anything. Those who prize dignity and convenience over safety may prefer Tough Guy Air, where pilots not only arm themselves but also welcome passengers to pack heat as well. Since profits nosedive after any attempted skyjacking, let alone terrorism, airlines have all the incentive we could ask to institute practical, effective security.

The government failed to prevent 9/11, failed to thwart shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and failed to intercept Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Isn’t it time we entrusted our safety to professionals rather than politicians?

We can assume it fell short since the federal government is ever incompetent and has been tight-lipped about how many miles it has completed.

More people cross this international boundary each year than any other in the world—250 million with government permission, a fraction of that without. (Estimates range from 400,000 to a million.) Patches of the border, particularly urban ones, have been fenced and policed for decades. But this dotted line inconvenienced rather than stopped folks who neglected to secure a bureaucrat’s consent for their trip: Travelers trying to exercise their inalienable right to free movement simply went around the barriers. The feds never like being outfoxed, so they extended the fencing beyond populated areas. This drove migrants into increasingly remote and hostile terrain. There they not only had to survive encounters with America’s Border Patrol but also dehydration and other dangers in the desert. No More Deaths, a group that caches food and water along routes migrants are likely to take, estimates that at least 238 travelers perished in Arizona alone in 2006, with more than 4,000 “men, women, and children [losing] their lives in the deserts of the US-Mexico borderlands” from 1998 to the present.

Walling off Rights

You might think that would be tragedy enough for anyone. But as former President George W. Bush said when he signed the SFA, “We have a responsibility to enforce our laws. We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility seriously.” Apparently far more seriously than we do corpses or constitutional limits on government. And so the Act “authorize[d] the Department of Homeland Security to increase the use of advanced technology, like cameras and satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles to reinforce our infrastructure at the border.”

Authorizing DHS to grab more power is about as necessary as authorizing sparks to fly upward. Nevertheless, Congress exempted DHS from all federal laws as part of its 2005 REAL ID legislation. All it has to do is claim that a law impedes progress on the wall. Section 102 (c)1 of the REAL ID Act says, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section.”

This immunity extends all the way to judicial review: Judges can’t “order compensatory, declaratory, injunctive, equitable, or any other relief for damage alleged to arise from any such action or decision,” according to Section 102 (c) 2B. So far the unrelieved victims have been mostly Americans whose property the agency has seized or destroyed. Surely even those most opposed to immigration would agree that stopping it does not excuse such tyranny and injustice against citizens.

Environmental Destruction

Among the many regulations DHS is ignoring are environmental ones. But Mother Nature isn’t as easily overridden. There are consequences for flouting the laws of physics, for example. And DHS’s insouciance towards things like gravity and water has already hurt the government’s own property.

On July 12, 2008, a heavy rain near Ajo, Arizona, clogged drains in completed sections of the fence, damming the downpour and flooding Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the only area in the United States where the plant grows wild. Park superintendent Lee Baiza told the Associated Press, “[We] had suggested that [DHS] take into consideration everything that can happen with a weather event. . . . We had a concern that this was going to happen.” And this storm wasn’t even a hurricane such as frequently roars through the Gulf and neighboring Texas.

The Rio Grande River separates Texas from Mexico for 1,254 miles before heading north. It waters a huge variety of wildlife, and that abundance draws conservancies to the area. Some are private, such as the Sabal Palm Audubon Center in Brownsville, Texas. Others are government-held lands that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife or National Parks Service manage. Over the decades, these organizations have cooperated with one another and the Mexican government to form a “wildlife corridor” so animals can range freely even if people can’t. The corridor also acts as a sanctuary for rare or endangered species. But DHS seems as hostile to animal life as it does to human life. It is hacking through this territory with a wide corridor of walls running parallel to one another, asphalt roads between, and hundreds of yards of cleared land to the north and south.

Barriers for stopping bipeds stop quadrupeds, too. This imperils animals that wander widely to feed or mate. Audubon Magazine points out that the inbreeding the wall compels will weaken if not exterminate America’s last colony of ocelots. This cat once roamed the Rio Grande and southern Arizona but now counts fewer than 100 members on the Texas side of the border.

A biologist at the University of New Mexico worries about other predators as well. Dr. Joe Cook told the Inter Press Service, “There is no quetion that jaguars . . . in the U.S. and northern Mexico would be significantly affected by the wall. . . . The only hope to preserve large carnivores in the wild is to have large areas of continuous, unfragmented habitat.”

The Mississippi and Central migratory flyways meet at the Rio Grande. Birds that once rested there during thousand-mile journeys will now contend with barren, paved land instead of trees, bushes, nuts, and seeds. Floodlights that turn desert night into day to discover migrants are already disorienting not only birds but bats and butterflies as well.

Financial Destruction

Matching the wall’s environmental disasters are its financial ones. In January 2007 the Congressional Research Service figured that 700 miles would cost about $49 billion, including maintenance. But as usual with the state’s estimates, this one probably isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, especially if the rest of the barrier is anything like the 14 miles that wind inward from the California coast at San Diego. The first fence there—ten-foot-tall walls of welded steel—went up in 1993. Next came a “secondary” wall, this one 14 feet high, about 103 feet to the north. A chain-link fence runs parallel to that, with “stadium lighting” throwing every ugly detail into sharp relief. This monstrosity was supposed to cost $1 million per mile, but that skyrocketed to $3.8 million. And construction isn’t yet finished, in part because the California Coastal Commission frets about erosion. The bit that remains unfenced meanders through more challenging terrain, with construction estimated to reach $10 million per mile. If the price for the other 700 miles escalates proportionally, we are looking at an outlay of anywhere from $200 to $490 billion.

There are other, more hidden expenses. For example, the Fish & Wildlife Service has spent $100 million of our money over the last three decades to buy and replant land near the Rio Grande. The wall will ruin that investment. It will also end “eco-tourism” and the $125 million that 200,000 visitors annually spend in the hopes of glimpsing an ocelot or a Muscovy duck.

Naturally, while most Americans pay for the fence, a select few profit. DHS hired Boeing to implement its Secure Border Initiative (SBI) in September 2006. The company will install 1,800 towers as a “virtual fence” on our northern and southern borders within three years to “detect and track intruders through the use of cameras, sensors and motion detectors,” as Federal Computer Week puts it—all for only $2.5 billion. Needless to say, Boeing and DHS trumpeted their lucrative deal as a revolutionary, unprecedented, sure-fire solution for the “border problem” the feds have created. But the Washington Post took a more jaundiced view, citing the government’s “series of failures [in] control[ling] U.S. borders.” So did agents on the ground. Rich Pierce, executive vice president of the Border Patrol’s union, told Federal Computer News, “[SBI]—it’s been tried and it’s failed. . . . They’re not going to try anything new. . . . The people in the field know it’s not going to work.”

So did the legislators voting the funds. Rep. Harold Rogers was chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee from 2003 until January. According to the June 26, 2006 issue of Government Computer News, he “noted that spending on border security since 1995 has ‘quadrupled from $5.1 billion to over $17.9 billion,’ and the number of agents has jumped from 5,000 to 12,319. ‘However, during this same period, the number of illegal immigrants has jumped from 5 million to an estimated 12 million,’ Rogers said. ‘The policy of more money and no results is no longer in effect. We will not fund programs with false expectations.’” That would explain his subcommittee’s handing $39.9 billion to DHS in FY2009 with Rogers’s “support,” as he proclaimed on his website, despite the agency’s reputation even among the feds as one of their most wasteful and dysfunctional bureaucracies.

Sending Property Owners to Limbo . . .

Knowing that the fence won’t stop immigration, that it merely allows politicians to look as though they’re fixing an issue they’ve ginned up into a crisis, must particularly gall the property owners losing homes and businesses. Most of those victims live in Texas since the feds already own much of the land along the other states’ borders.

The barriers have always been more of a sieve than a fence since they proceed in fits and starts with long gaps between. The new miles of fence will not be much different, according to the Border Patrol: Tom Rudd, the Patrol’s chief in Brownsville, Texas, is “expecting a total of nine miles of fence segments,” according to PBS. “The segments, Rudd says, will act like funnels, pushing migrants into areas where his agents will be waiting to capture them.”

Those funnels bisect plenty of private property, including homes, farms, businesses, and nature preserves, as well as national parks and even towns. Stunningly, they don’t line the actual border. Some of the wall lies as much as two miles north of it. Landowners whose properties fall within that region face a bizarre limbo, severed from the rest of the country—and from the services their taxes supposedly buy them. Audubon Magazine quotes the Society’s executive director in Texas, Anne Brown, on the fate of its Sabal Palm Center: “From what we’ve heard, we’ll have to close. We can’t figure a way to keep it open, because we’ll be cut off from the rest of the United States. Will we be insured? Will we receive city services? We can’t let Ernie [the caretaker] live here anymore.” The magazine adds, “The sanctuary and its unique plants and wildlife will be taken from the American people, and what survives will be, for all intents and purposes, ceded to Mexico.”

Ordinary owners in Limbo Land also face extraordinary challenges. Pamela Taylor is an elderly émigré from England who married an American soldier 50 years ago, then moved to Brownsville with him. If anyone should welcome the protection the wall allegedly provides, it would be Mrs. Taylor. She once arrived home to find a migrant hiding from the Border Patrol in her living room. But she fears DHS and its fence far more than she does people looking for jobs and better lives. “They said the fence was gonna go right across the street,” she told PBS. “And . . . my son-in-law asked, ‘Well, do you mind, how are we going to get out?’ And the fellow from the Corps of Engineers said, ‘Well, you know, we hadn’t really thought about that. I guess you’re gonna have to follow the border patrol out.’” Obviously, that enormously complicates even the simple errand of buying groceries. And it could be fatal should Mrs. Taylor need a doctor.

PBS asked the Border Patrol’s Rudd about ingress and egress for the Americans caught in this quandary. Rudd said there will be “gates” and that “we’re still lookin’ right now—at different—locking mechanisms of what’s gonna work best in certain areas. . . . [O]ne approach that I’m lookin’ at . . . is—a push-key type, you know, the—the number system, a push pad . . . enforced with a camera—so we can make sure that that number or that combination—doesn’t get compromised . . . basically work with the owner to find out who’s gonna be in that area, what kinda vehicle they’d be driving.” The government hasn’t touched Mrs. Taylor’s property and so isn’t offering even eminent domain’s pittance, but it robs her nonetheless. Her land will be worthless. What buyer wants a hassle every time he needs a quart of milk?

DHS plans to swipe some properties lying directly in the fence’s path in their entirety, particularly when the parcel is small because the owner is poor. Other times, the fence threatens only a portion of the property—but it might as well take the whole piece because once again it’s destroying the land’s value. Leonard and Debbie Loop and their children own a 1,000-acre farm in Brownsville. But the wall will exile 800 acres to Limbo Land.

. . . Unless They’re Rich or Connected

Given that the wall doesn’t follow the border, as well as its frequent stops and starts, its placement is arbitrary at best. Many victims have noticed that while DHS expects them to sacrifice their interests, it is skirting property belonging to wealthy, politically connected neighbors. One victim, Eloisa Tamez, is a 72-year-old woman who still lives on some of the 12,000 acres her ancestors received in a Spanish land grant. She’s been down this road before. The feds stole more than half her holdings in the 1930s to build levees, and they didn’t pay a dime for any of it. The Texas Observer reports that now they want more. But the wall gobbling Ms. Tamez’s home stops short two miles down the road. That just happens to be the edge of Sharyland Plantation, 6,000 acres that billionaire Ray L. Hunt is developing into a luxurious, gated community of million-dollar homes. Hunt, of course, is not only George W. Bush’s buddy but his benefactor, too, since he’s kicking in $35 million toward the presidential library. The wall resumes on the other side of Sharyland.

Under former secretary Michael Chertoff, DHS refused to answer questions from folks like Ms. Tamez. But silence has long been one of the agency’s favorite tactics. It almost always withholds information on the grounds that telling the citizens who pay its bills what it’s doing with their money would jeopardize national security. It will neither confirm nor deny who’s on its notorious Terrorist Watch List, for instance, not even to the victims themselves. And so it goes with the wall. DHS refuses to verify its plans or discuss its rationale for the wall’s route. That leaves many owners grappling with rumors and stomach-churning uncertainty. Others are fairly sure DHS will steal their holdings because it has already ordered them to sign waivers allowing surveyors to measure their property. Those who refuse find themselves facing condemnation of their land.

Chertoff tried to cast cooperating with the agency’s theft as a patriotic duty. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, he announced in February 2008, “I respect private property. But you cannot make border security and national security an individual choice for each individual landowner. . . . [W]hen people are smuggling drugs and human beings across the border, for an individual landowner to say, ‘I don’t care. I want to make sure that my view of the river is unobstructed,’ is not an acceptable answer.”

Dictatorical and Dishonest

That’s not only arrogant and dictatorial, it’s also profoundly dishonest. Protestors do not mourn vanishing vistas. They are instead defending their homes and businesses, some of which have been handed down through their families for generations. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s unconstitutional jihads against those drugs and people it doesn’t like forces folks who want to transport either to smuggle them. Politicians have tried to control people’s movements and have failed at this immoral task; nevertheless, they expect the rest of us to cooperate with their new, desperate, criminal measures. Why?

Unfortunately, Leviathan has convinced most Americans that its campaign against “illegal” drugs justifies any and all abuses. So now it excuses its militarization of the Mexican border because of the marijuana crossing it. The feds take the same tack with “illegal” immigration. But they also spin things a bit differently to hide their heartlessness. They bewail the “smuggling of human beings,” conflating immigration with—incredibly enough—slavery.

In a speech on September 9, 2008, at the “Stop Human Trafficking Symposium,” conveniently sponsored by Customs and Border Patrol, Chertoff announced that “the line between so-called voluntary migration and human trafficking is not a very bold line. It is often the case that people who begin the movement across the border in a voluntary way . . . quickly turn into victims when they are held for ransom, or when they are required to work off the cost of the smuggling by paying off the vast majority of their wages to the smuggling organizations.” That may be exploitative, but it isn’t slavery since slaves seldom receive wages and so can’t “work off” any “cost.” And Chertoff ignores the fact that the government’s criminalization of migration gives those few entrepreneurs who do victimize their clients the chokehold they need: A “restaurant owner” who allegedly “trafficked hundreds of adults and children into the United States . . . threatened to turn them in to the authorities as illegal aliens if they tried to escape,” according to the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune.

DHS portrays as vicious criminals guides who conduct people through hostile terrain and help them avoid the Border Patrol. The agency then presents its own ferocious attacks on immigrants, its armed patrols and cameras, its dogs, handcuffs, and holding pens, its hunts through the desert in air-conditioned ATVs for exhausted, fleeing families, as “rescuing” them from “human traffickers.” Odd, isn’t it, that migrants pay these “traffickers” to chaperone them across the border but try to fend off their “rescuers” by throwing rocks. They seldom succeed. Rather, they play right into the government’s hands: it charges them with the “crime” of self-defense, AKA, “assaulting a federal officer.” This inflates the number of “felons” crossing the border so that the feds “save” us from an even bigger menace.

An Unconstitutional Line in the Sand

Whether they’re between states or countries, borders soon cease to be noticed by most people living along them. They marry one another, establish businesses, visit, laugh, cry, agree, disagree, and dream together. So it is along the U.S.-Mexican boundary. The wall will sunder these families and friends as mercilessly as Berlin’s barricade did Germans.

The Founding Fathers understood government’s essence, its cruelty and callousness, far better than do modern Americans. That’s why their Constitution never empowers politicians to regulate anyone’s movement into or out of the country (except for slaves, fittingly enough: What else are we when we beg a bureaucrat, “Please, may I enter?”). Article 1, Section 9 bars Congress from “prohibit[ing]” the “Migration or Importation” of “such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” until 1808. If we dismiss the doctrine of enumerated powers, this implies that Congress may prohibit all the migrating and importing it likes thereafter. And if we also dismiss the literary and historical context that limits Article 1, Section 9 to slaves, it appears the feds may indeed control anyone’s immigration after 1808—but only in those states existing at the Constitution’s adoption. None of those border Mexico, and mighty few do Canada. DHS needs to relocate its wall down the Atlantic coast.

Nor does the Constitution deputize the central government to “protect” the country’s borders, much less build walls “funneling” migrants through deadly desert where cops lurk to kidnap them. Immigration ought never to have been federalized in the first place; government had no business arrogating an “interest” in it during the 1870s, then tightening its vise each decade since. Immigration is an issue of property rights—not the DHS’s infernal abrogation of them, but a decision by the folks Michael Chertoff so despises, “each individual landowner,” as to whether migrants may cross his property.

Despite its utter lack of constitutional authority, DHS will probably continue militarizing our borders. Its current secretary, Janet Napolitano, opposed a physical wall when she was governor of Arizona. As she told AP, “You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border.” Heavily implied is her support for more border agents as well as more high-tech surveillance. Napolitano is as implacable an enemy of freedom of movement as her predecessor Chertoff was, even if her methods differ.

Meanwhile, America has another border to the north, which Boeing’s contract covers as well. Landowners there should be very worried, given the abuses their southern brothers have suffered.

Indeed, all of us should worry, if not panic, when we remember that the walls keeping others out also keep us in.

A case study from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) puts flesh on these theories. Imposed on American aviation after 9/11, the TSA operates airport checkpoints in defiance of the Constitution, common sense, and consequences. Though its screeners have squeezed more taxpayers than the IRS, it has yet to find a single terrorist.

Nor will it. The TSA was a political rather than a practical response to 9/11. It was established not because experts in aviation identified terrorism as an overwhelming threat to the industry, studied ways to combat it, and invented checkpoint searches. Instead, politicians foisted the TSA on us. Their dictates, rather than research, analysis, and innovation, drive it. For instance, both the TSA and its predecessor, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), assume that disarmed passengers survive hijackings better than armed ones. But no data confirm that. And if some did, there’s still no proof that checkpoints are the most effective way to discover weapons. Furthermore, screeners routinely flunk tests of their performance at those checkpoints-and we’re not talking marginal failure, either. They miss 60, 75, even 90 percent of the guns, knives, and simulated bombs undercover investigators smuggle past them.

No Protection for Passengers
Though startling, none of this is new. No research justified the TSA when the Bush administration spawned it in November 2001, and the government’s screeners have bombed tests since the very beginning. Clearly, the TSA cannot and does not protect passengers; if security were truly the goal, the Feds would never have established the agency in the first place or, having erred so colossally, they’d abolish it pronto. But don’t look for the TSA to disband anytime soon because it performs another task indispensable to the American empire: subjugating citizens. It trains them to obey their rulers without question, no matter how ridiculous, insulting, or immoral the order may be.

Which brings us to one of the agency’s most unpopular edicts and the lies that hatched it: the jihad against liquids and gels in carry-on bags. The TSA imposed the ban literally overnight, on August 10, 2006. Lotions, potions, pastes, and gels that had been innocuous on August 9 suddenly endangered American aviation so seriously that the TSA ordered screeners to steal them from passengers. Many travelers had no idea Cover Girl and Crest were now illegal until they arrived at the checkpoint that morning.

The victims didn’t take this lying down. Passengers may stand impassively while screeners grope them, but they rebelled against spending hours in a jet’s dry air without lip balm and eyedrops. One business executive told the Washington Post that he would continue smuggling hand sanitizer in his pocket “because he worries about germs on planes. He has made about 10 trips since the restrictions went into effect and hasn’t been caught.” A woman with Chanel perfume in her carry-on laughed at the idea of entrusting it to her checked bag since that would give the TSA’s baggage screeners a crack at it, while another admitted to sneaking body lotion onboard. Such insouciance set TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe to scolding, “Travelers must realize this isn’t a game. The threat is real. . . .”

But is it? The TSA inflicted the ban after British authorities claimed that they had foiled an imminent plot to bomb ten flights leaving London for the United States. Supposedly, some

of al Qaeda’s operatives planned to hide “peroxide-based liquids” in bottles of Lucozade, Britain’s equivalent of Gatorade. Once aboard their respective planes, they would mix the solutions into a combustive cocktail and then, high above the Atlantic, detonate it.

But explosives experts and the British media quickly realized that the authorities were snookering folks. When “police sources” named triacetone triperoxide (TATP) as the explosive terrorists were dying to produce at 30,000 feet, chemists hooted.

Manufacturing TATP is a complicated feat. The difficulties begin with one of its three ingredients: Concentrated peroxide is hard to find and even harder to make. Terrorists game to try would have to buy gallons of ordinary hydrogen peroxide and boil off the water; most likely they’d blow themselves up before enough condensed. But presuming they survived and had plane tickets in hand, they’d be ready for the next step: smuggling the peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid in separate bottles aboard the plane for combination mid-flight.

Alas, the final step requires a lab with precise, freezing temperatures-not the airplane lavatory authorities implied the terrorists would requisition. Otherwise, the liquids overheat and explode. A mishap, certainly, but one too weak to hurt anyone other than the terrorist mixing the concoction. That’s because the TATP crystals the liquids yield must dry before they’ll ignite-a process that takes another couple of hours while passengers waiting for the restroom crowd the plane’s aisle. They’re not only shifting from foot to foot, they’re also complaining about the fumes billowing from the lav-turned-lab. All in all, while it’s theoretically possible that someone could smuggle ice, beakers, and chemicals into a jet’s toilet, it’s virtually impossible for him to concoct TATP there, let alone bring down the plane.

The story’s silly science wasn’t its only gap in credibility. Many of the 25 “terrorists” British cops rounded up seemed unlikely suspects. First, their neighbors and friends agreed that these were fine, upstanding folks, not radical ideologues. All had been born in Britain, mostly to Pakistani families. Few held plane tickets or even reservations. It seems their plans for ”mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” as Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London put it, were just that: unimaginable and therefore unfulfilled.

One of those arrested was the mother of a six-week-old baby. Another was a biochemistry student, and a third, a 17-year-old boy, had only recently converted to Islam. Tayib Rauf, not only a plotter but the brother of alleged “key person” Rashid Rauf, was 22 years old, deaf in one ear thanks to a childhood illness, and “very, very polite, the kindest person you could hope to meet,” according to his great-uncle, Qazi Amir Kulzum. Others were so obviously innocent that cops had to release them after a few days.

Eventually, even Rashid “the Key” Rauf himself walked free. Born and raised in Britain, with dual Pakistani citizenship, 25-year-old Rashid had been living in Pakistan since 2002. He was arrested and tried there as one of the plot’s ringleaders. But even Pakistan’s courts, with their lax definitions of “evidence” and “guilt,” had to admit that a few bottles of hydrogen peroxide in his medicine cabinet weren’t enough to convict him of terrorism.

By now, the original 25 suspects had dwindled to eight. They went on trial last April.

Far from being terrorists, the defendants countered that they were merely filmmakers producing a documentary about American and British abuses in the Arab world. They never aspired to hurt anyone, much less blow up jetliners. Instead, they were concocting a PR stunt for their movie: a series of small explosions, with perhaps one or two detonating in trash cans around airline terminals. That explained their interest in aviation, which the prosecution had emphasized. The martyrdom videos they had filmed, which the prosecution also stressed, were faked for the documentary.

Their explanation seems not only stupid (what docu-dramatist wants to spend opening night in jail?) but far-fetched. Yet the jury found the government’s scenario even more so; as the New York Times put it, the trial’s “testimony has shown little evidence that the suspects were prepared to strike immediately, or of any link to Al Qaeda.” After five months of trial and 56 hours of deliberation, jurors convicted only three of the men-of lesser charges. They found them guilty of “plotting to kill people using homemade liquid bombs,” according to Reuters, not of “intend[ing] to blow up transatlantic airliners.” The jury reached no verdict on four other defendants, and it cleared the eighth of all counts.

The final debunking of the liquid-bomb hoax came with the question, “Cui bono?” Skeptics answered: “Bush and Blair.” In August 2006 both President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair faced sagging polls as well as challenges to their totalitarian tactics. Bush openly hoped that reports of Muslims conniving yet again to kill Westerners would quell resistance to his War on Terror: “The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world, but our government will do everything we can to protect our people from those dangers.” Indeed, with midterm elections looming, he hailed the scheme as “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.” Britain’s Home Secretary, John Reid, went further. He cast the plot as part of the immemorial battle of good against evil: “We are involved in a long, wide and deep struggle against very evil people.” And only very evil people will object to that struggle.

Speculative Exaggeration
Unfortunately for Reid, the Frankenstein science, improbable suspects, and obvious political benefits compelled British authorities to backpedal. Within a fortnight, they were admitting that their hypothesis of ten bombed flights was “speculative and exaggerated.”

But speculative exaggeration was good enough for the TSA. It threw American aviation into bedlam by suddenly changing checkpoint rules. Fliers confronted a new and draconian prohibition on the morning of August 10: They could carry absolutely no liquids or gels aboard their planes. No toothpaste, shaving cream, shampoo, or hand sanitizer in carry-on bags, no cups of coffee or tea in hand, not even water in sealed and clearly labeled bottles. Lines at TSA checkpoints, merely formidable before the ban, became harrowing as people waited two or more hours. The unconstitutional, warrantless searches for moisturizers and mascara delayed thousands of passengers so long they missed their flights-if those flights actually took off. Hundreds were cancelled, thanks to the TSA’s bedlam.

All for a plot conjured by politicians’ power lust, not terrorists’ bloodlust. Even if the government’s fevered imaginings had been real, the TSA had no reason to ban sunscreen and soda: “Officials” told the Washington Post they were “confident their security efforts in place at the time would have prevented the plotters from getting through security checkpoints at U.S. airports. But they said they couldn’t take any chances and hastily enacted the ban early on Aug. 10.”

There’s plenty of research in the aviation industry on liquid explosives; perhaps the TSA’s too busy groping grandmothers to study the literature so it can discern credible threats from comic-book ones. But let’s pretend that the agency acted in good faith here, that it believed this tall tale of terrorism, and that it wasn’t “confident its security efforts in place at the time” would have thwarted the threat. That explains, though it doesn’t justify, the ban for the first few days-but years after the British authorities admit they hyperventilated?

Initially, the TSA prohibited all liquids and gels from carry-on bags. Passengers’ outrage and mutiny soon softened that to the infamous “3-1-1 for carry-ons = 3-ounce bottle or less (by volume); 1 quart-sized, clear, plastic, zip-top bag; 1 bag per passenger placed in screening bin.” But despite massive publicity and months of bagging gels and liquids, “3-1-1″ continues to confuse: “After a year and a half, people still have no clue about the liquids (limitation),” Kimberly Kraynak, a screener in Pittsburgh, told USA Today. That means the TSA continues to rob passengers daily of thousands of dollars in cosmetics, toiletries, and beverages, even uncorked bottles of wine.

Perhaps “people still have no clue” because 3-1-1 makes no sense, as countless commentators and passengers have pointed out. It pesters but does not protect. Anyone determined to sabotage a flight could fill a few three-ounce bottles with gasoline, lighter fluid, or any other common flammable; this would be especially effective if several terrorists booked the same flight.
The plot on which the TSA bases 3-1-1 was a fraud, as even the British government admitted. And the TSA’s extreme reaction to it was overkill, as even the agency admitted to the Washington Post (see above). Yet the TSA refuses to leave the bunker and rejoin reality. It still insists that terrorists are trying to sneak liquids onto planes for bathroom bomb-making, despite experts’ blowing so many holes in this claim it looks like Swiss cheese.

All the debunking hasn’t swayed TSA chief Kip Hawley. In September 2007 he repeated this line to columnist Joe Sharkey at the New York Times. Sharkey swallowed it whole, holes and all, then passed it on to the rest of us: “. . . Mr. Hawley explained that . . . the liquids explosion plot was ‘chillingly real.’” Hawley also tried to rationalize 3-1-1 by claiming that “the science . . . is clear. [He said,] ‘With certain explosives you need to have a certain critical diameter [amount] in order to achieve an explosion that will cause a certain amount of damage. The size of the container itself . . . is part of the security measure.’”

The following month he assured the International Air Transport Association, “This plot was real. It was imminent.” But how imminent was it if most of the “terrorists” had no tickets?

The TSA’s parent bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), also swore that ten planes had narrowly escaped a cataclysm. DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff told ABC News, “I think that the plot, in terms of its intent, was looking at devastation on a scale that would have rivaled 9/11. . . . [T]he time frame within which the attack was going to take place, would not be a matter of months but . . . a matter of weeks or even days. . . . [W]e’re going to be back and forth with terrorists on this kind of cat-and-mouse process for years to come.” So of course we’ll need the DHS for years to come at $40 billion annually.

Who Pays?
Meanwhile, we ignorant passengers scorn “3-1-1″ because we can’t concentrate for longer than 15 seconds: Hawley told the Times, “[The science] is incredibly complex and doesn’t lend itself to a sound bite. And we’ve certainly paid the price for that.”

Actually, passengers pay the price, not only in the fees and taxes that allow the TSA to perpetrate this scam, but also in long lines and lost time, aggravation, frustration, and inconvenience-to say nothing of the ocean of liquids and gels we forfeit to the TSA. And we’ll continue to pay because the TSA is too arrogant to admit its mistake, according to its website: “It is unlikely that we will make changes [to 3-1-1] in the near future. These changes [allowing three ounces of liquids and gels as opposed to none at all] represent a sustainable level of security for the TSA, passengers, airports and airlines.”

Another consequence of 3-1-1 is that more passengers are checking more bags so that they can shave and brush their teeth when they reach their destinations. All that gives the airlines a new excuse for losing luggage, according to the Washington Post: “In 2002, 3.84 reports of mishandled bags were filed per 1,000 passengers. In July [2007], the figure was 7.93. . . . Airline representatives and analysts cite a variety of factors [to explain this]. Restrictions on gels and liquids in August 2006 have led to a surge in the number of checked bags.”

Stress, inconvenience, and waste for passengers, and overloaded baggage systems for the airlines. In the government’s hands, a cock-and-bull tale of terrorism is almost as dangerous as an actual bomb.

Comprising just 16 names on September 11, 2001, this modern blacklist now functions as a catchall and cover for federal intelligence agencies. Since no one wants to be accused of overlooking a terrorist, bureaucrats have added names willy-nilly over the last seven years, to the tune of 20,000 a month. The ACLU maintains a website with a counter (http://tinyurl.com/2sz52g): it has now hit the magic million.

If you’re the unlucky millionaire, you’ll find yourself among the rich and famous. Senator Ted Kennedy (D–Mass.) and Representative John Lewis (D–Ga.) both made the roster at one point, as they discovered when they were denied boarding at airports. This must have come as a surprise since neither man realized he was an enemy of the United States until he tried to fly commercially. In fact, that’s how most victims learn they’ve been promoted from American citizen to terrorist so dangerous they can’t board planes. Some, like Kennedy, work to prove their innocence so that the government will admit it erred and remove them from its blacklist. You might think this would be fairly easy for politicians, given their pull. But it actually took Kennedy’s staff three weeks of calls to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and a chat with Tom Ridge, then the secretary of homeland security, to smooth his travels. It took Lewis even longer—“months,” according to the Washington Post. Imagine what the ordinary “terrorist” endures as he tries to re-establish his air-worthiness.

Many Americans don’t take well to the news that they’re on the list. Edward Allen of Houston broke into tears. The four-year-old boy whimpered, “I don’t want to be on the list. I want to fly and see my grandma.” Screeners stopped another child, this one all of five years old, at Seattle’s airport last January. They searched him as though he were al Qaeda’s newest recruit while forbidding his mother to comfort him with a hug. No inanity is too heartless when national security is at stake.

Inclusion on the list does more than keep you off flights. Companies that check your financial history, such as car dealerships and mortgage brokers, may refuse to deal with you since the credit report will mention that the Office of Foreign Asset Control is monitoring you—along with other alleged terrorists and drug dealers. A place on the list can even earn you a beating. Akif Rahman is a computer consultant who was born in Springfield, Illinois. He says he was trying to return home from Canada a few months ago when “he was held for five hours, shackled to a chair and kicked by a Customs Service agent. . . . ‘I was fearful for my own safety and that of my family,’ said Rahman. . . . ‘I simply could not believe that I, a born U.S. citizen, was going through this experience simply re-entering my own country.’ ”

Top Secret Process

How is the list compiled? Who’s on it? What did they do to land there? No one knows because the list and all procedures relating to it are top secret. We wouldn’t want Osama bin Laden to know we’re onto him, now, would we?

It’s also virtually impossible to get off the list regardless of how thoroughly you prove you aren’t scheming to blow up jets. John Lewis finally outsmarted the TSA by adding his middle initial to his name when he buys airline tickets. But this doesn’t always work, as any “Robert Johnson” can tell you. “60 Minutes” assembled a dozen men with that name in its studios last year and taped their horror stories—everything from strip searches at airports to interrogations that humiliate and delay them so long they miss their flights. Even the original “Robert Johnson,” the one who’s actually supposed to be on the list, seems unworthy of such effort: CBS reported that he’s “a 62-year-old black man who was convicted of plotting to bomb a Hindu temple and a movie theatre in Toronto. After serving 12 years, he was deported to Trinidad.”

A catalog of “individuals known to pose, or suspected of posing, a risk of air piracy or terrorism or a threat to airline or passenger safety” has been around since 1990. But it did nothing to stop the 9/11 hijackers. It’s done nothing since then, either, but harass innocent Americans: it hasn’t enabled the Feds to capture a single terrorist.

Which doesn’t keep the government from praising this anti-American abomination. “The list is very effective,” says FBI spokesman Chad Kolton. “In fact it’s one of the most effective counterterrorism tools that our country has.” And here you thought “counterterrorism tools” didn’t get any “more effective” than forcing passengers to pad barefoot through airport checkpoints. To quell such cynicism, Kolton cited a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that found “general agreement within the federal government that the watch list had helped to combat terrorism.” It’s a good bet the GAO would find general agreement among foxes that henhouses need four-legged guards, too.

Targeting Innocent Americans

Like the rest of the domestic War on Terror, the “Terrorism Watch List” supposedly targets terrorists while actually preying on innocent Americans. It penalizes people for an attribute they can’t help: their names. Then it excuses the government for treating these folks as if they are guilty of terrorism without ever having proved those suspicions in a court of law. A hallmark of a free society is living your life without impediment unless the state shows at an open trial, according to fair and established procedures, that you have committed a crime heinous enough to justify depriving you of your rights. When we allow the government to abandon this standard—when it can hassle hundreds of thousands of people because their names resemble a suspected terrorist’s—we empower a police state.

And that’s far more dangerous than any terrorist.

That’s enough of a plurality to support several organizations. One is U.S. English, founded in 1983 by the late S. I. Hayakawa, a semanticist and one-time U.S. senator from California. It boasts 1.8 million members and lobbies to enshrine English as America’s “official” language, by which it means that “official government business at all levels must be conducted solely in English.” Another association, Pro-English, “work[s] through the courts and in the court of public opinion to defend English’s historic role as America’s common, unifying language, and to persuade lawmakers to adopt English as the official language at all levels of government.”

Both groups bravely and vehemently object to the infamous “Executive Order 13166. Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency.” President Bill Clinton foisted this on the nation in August 2000 when he fretted lest folks who weren’t fluent in English forgo their share of federal freebies. The order requires both Leviathan’s agencies and “recipients of Federal financial assistance,” such as hospitals, schools, and colleges, to “ensure that the programs and activities they normally provide in English are accessible to LEP [limited English proficiency] persons and thus do not discriminate on the basis of national origin in violation of title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Thanks to its unconstitutional presumptions, let alone its vague and expansive wording, this spawn of the Civil Rights Act may have wreaked as much harm as its parent. Complying with its open-ended orders has cost taxpayers billions. For example, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles alone pays $2.2 million annually in translating costs. Thirty states now limit such damage with “official English” laws. And while economic self-defense seems to require these measures, a far better response is to shrink and defang government. We ought to prohibit it from interfering in our lives rather than allowing it to ensure that every serf understands its dictates and snits.

Most Americans who tout “official English” conflate the concept with “Americanization.” They not only want immigrants to speak English; they also expect them to assimilate. Conservative activist and ex-bureaucrat Linda Chavez recently advocated “giv[ing] priority to immigrants” who want to live here when they “already speak English, since this is a key factor in their successful integration into American society.” Furthermore, “successful assimilation should be the goal of US immigration policy.”

No doubt Ms. Chavez believes her former employer, the federal government, should decide which immigrants will best assimilate—a vague term with different definitions for different people. She chillingly advises, “We could also give priority admission to immigrants willing to serve in the US military. . . .”

Distrust of Immigrants

Whatever they mean by “assimilation,” Americanizers distrust immigrants who persist in their native customs while living among their kindred and countrymen in a bewildering new land. U.S. English warns that “the lack of an assimilation policy for immigrants to the United States is rapidly changing the successful integration ways of the past. Gone are the days of the American Dream and the upwardly mobile society for immigrants. In its place are low expectations and government policies that encourage Americans to learn the language of the immigrants, instead of the other way around.”

Pro-English also bundles speaking English with assimilation. It blames mandatory “multilingualism” for “causing a growing underclass, which is segregated and walled off into linguistic ghettos. A century ago such immigrant ghettos were marked by extreme poverty, 80-hour workweeks and child labor.” Though we might credit liberty for unleashing the innovations and technology that ended those hardships, Pro-English instead praises “mandatory public education and reduced immigration” because they allowed the “successful assimilation of ethnic communities into American society.” It also extols those long-ago immigrants for realizing that “language skills were the key to entering the emerging ‘middle class.’ ” If only modern migrants were as astute.

Yet the politicians of that halcyon age saw immigrants as anything but cooperative and compliant. In fact, they frequently castigated them for spurning English “language skills” and the “emerging ‘middle class,’ ” that is, assimilation. Yesteryear’s officials complained as much as today’s Americans about newcomers who stubbornly preferred their own language and lifestyle—so much that contemporary Americanizers still quote them approvingly. One of their favorites is the neoconservative icon Theodore Roosevelt.

On January 3, 1919, the former president wrote to the American Defense Society as its honorary head. This letter of regret at missing one of the Society’s events became his last public statement; he died three days later. The rich, retired ruler didn’t blush at beating up on people fleeing persecution, disease, war, and wretched poverty: “In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else. . . . But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American.”

That would be news to the Founding Fathers, who recognized our rights as “inalienable,” endowed with our humanity and independent of anything we say or do. Nor does it matter whether immigrants are—or aren’t—good for America. Whether they depress labor markets, enlist in the armed forces, or pay more in taxes than they send home to impoverished families is all irrelevant. Immigrating and emigrating are natural rights belonging to individuals; whether immigrants benefit a nation is as immaterial as whether free speech does. Governments may not restrict a person’s freedom to speak his mind—in whatever language he pleases—and they may not restrict his freedom of movement. Those that do are tyrannies.

But Roosevelt disdained natural rights and a government too limited to threaten them. His letter next attacked freedom of association.

“If [an immigrant] tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag . . . and we have room for but one, soul loyalty, and that loyalty is to the American people.” (Many commentators excuse “soul” as a typo for “sole”—but we’ll accept the sentence as he wrote it.)

Joining the president in his preoccupation with immigrants’ souls was Louis Brandeis, future Supreme Court justice. On July 4, 1915, Brandeis decreed, “However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this—he must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American.”

Naturally, good Americans speak English. Even if an immigrant “adopt[ed] the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here,” he was only a “superficial” American in Brandeis’s opinion. “Far more important is . . . when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.” Roosevelt emphatically agreed. The 48-state union of 2,917,652 square miles that he judged too tiny for multiple flags and loyalties couldn’t accommodate multiple languages, either: “We have room for but one language here and that is the English language. . . .”

State Compulsion for English

Roosevelt also advocated compulsory English education. In 1916 he declared, “Let us say to the immigrant not that we hope he will learn English, but that he has got to learn it. Let the immigrant who does not learn it go back. He has got to consider the interest of the United States or he should not stay here.”

Talk about setting a high bar! If we’re going to eject residents who consider their own interests instead of the country’s, let’s begin with politicians and bureaucrats.

When either group grouses that immigrants must learn English, they mean that Leviathan will teach it to them. Requiring English in 21st-century America implies that government will operate centers to teach it; U.S. English believes that “teaching newcomers English is one of the strongest acts of inclusion our government can provide.” And Pro-English cites another poll from Zogby in which “78% of Americans believe that the government should do more to help immigrants learn English.” It’s too bad 78 percent of Americans don’t realize that “helping immigrants” helps the state far more: it benefits from yet another program, with more jobs to dispense and taxes to collect, as well as the chance to indoctrinate victims.

There are the demagogic advantages, too, of pitting people against one another: Politicians encourage natives to fear newcomers with their incomprehensible languages and to turn to government for protection. Roosevelt exploited those fears on July 4, 1917, when he implied that God alone knew what treason German immigrants were plotting: “During the present war all newspapers published in German, or in the speech of any of our foes, should be required to publish, side by side with the foreign text, columns in English containing the exact translation of everything said in the foreign language. Ultimately this should be done with all newspapers published in foreign languages in this country.”

Ninety years later the same attitude flourishes, though with even less excuse. The justification this time is not that a warring nation must know what those sneaky foreigners are plotting, but that red-blooded Americans aren’t comfortable confronting the unfamiliar. New York City Councilman and mayoral candidate John Avella represents a district of multiple ethnicities in Queens. He has repeatedly attacked his Korean constituents for posting Korean signs advertising their Korean shops to Korean customers. “I don’t think there’s racism here,” Avella averred in 2004, “but people [as opposed to Koreans?] really feel discriminated against when they suddenly see a store sign in the neighborhood they grew up in, and can’t understand it. The obvious response is to say, ‘They don’t want me in their store; they don’t want me here.’ ”

And the obvious response from a politician is to say, “There oughta be a law.” So it’s no surprise Avella announced “he was preparing a bill requiring all signs in the city to be ‘at least half in English.’” This inversion of Executive Order 13166 went far enough that a councilman who opposed it, John Liu, led a task force that surveyed 293 businesses in the suspect neighborhood. It concluded that only 5 percent of the signs included no English—though another 12 percent boasted some English words without actually describing the shop. Those inscrutable immigrants are a wily bunch.

Government and Xenophobia

Xenophobia seems to be part of the human condition. Newcomers have always struggled with the suspicion and dislike most people harbor for those who look, act, or speak differently. The federal government endorsed these dark emotions in the 1870s, when the Supreme Court discovered a constitutional “interest” in immigration. Curiously, the feds had somehow overlooked that “interest” for the nation’s first century. It’s even more curious that despite pressure from Westerners who resented the cheap Chinese workers flooding their states, the Court couldn’t come up with the constitutional clause concerning this “interest,” either. The justices compensated by citing “national sovereignty” and other euphemisms for “wink-wink-the-Constitution-actually-prohibits-federal-interference-here-but-who-cares?”

Meanwhile, with the rise of the welfare state, immigrants’ alleged greed for “public services” has also earned Americanizers’ wrath. They forward emails (“WAKE-UP FOLKS. A REAL EYE OPENER”) warning that “$12 Billion a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English.” The eye-openers rightly resent Leviathan’s theft of our money to brainwash kids, but where those children were born and what they speak are irrelevant to that crime.

Rather than immigrants, Americanizers ought to attack government for sponsoring the programs—public schools, Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid—they claim newcomers abuse. (Our friends are on thin ice here: Every study proving that immigrants disproportionately abuse the taxpayers’ largess has an equal and opposite study crowning born-and-bred Americans as welfare kings and queens.) When the state dangles free money in front of people, almost everyone will grab it, regardless of nationality or citizenship.

The reality also differs from the stereotype regarding English. Most immigrants want to learn English and struggle valiantly to do so. Common sense tells them that communicating with employers and clients is requisite for prospering in their new home. A Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation poll in 2002 reported that 90 percent of Latinos believe Latino immigrants must learn English to succeed here. Yet Americanizers slander immigrants as too stubborn and unpatriotic to bother. Jingoists who have never tried to master a foreign language themselves apparently forget that children pick up new lingo far more easily than adults do. Older immigrants who aren’t verbally facile strain to understand English, let alone speak it; they may want to learn it every bit as much as the Americanizers want them to. There’s added incentive if they need to converse with other immigrants who don’t come from their country or sometimes even their particular region: people newly arrived from China have to learn English if they expect to do business with their Mexican neighbors.

English also enjoys cachet as an international language, the patois of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, rock music, and Hollywood’s glitter. Plus it’s easier than other languages, with straightforward, uninflected grammar. Philip Sidney rejoiced in 1598 that English is “void of those cumbersome differences of cases, moods, genders and tenses, which I think was a piece of the tower of Babylon’s curse that a man should be put to school to learn his mother tongue.” Kids immediately grasp this. When I asked a little girl born in New York City to Spanish-speaking parents which language she uses with her Hispanic friends, she gave me a look that showed how dumb my question was. “English, a course,” she said. “It’s faster.” Life’s an exciting whirl when you’re six years old; who has time to spout ten Spanish words when only three or four English ones convey the same idea?

The Paternalism of Americanizers

But none of these advantages deflect the Americanizers from enforcing English. They often cloak their insistence with the excuse that they want to help new citizens take advantage of all America offers. (“Illegal” immigrants are another matter. The only help Americanizers would spare them is a ticket home. People who hope to live in the land of the free must first obtain a bureaucrat’s permission.) If newcomers are too stupid to understand their own best interests, Americanizers stand ready to assist them—by force, if necessary.

But why measure patriotism with language? How does vernacular determine devotion to the American ideals of liberty, private property, and equality under law? The Americanizers, with their faith in compulsion, betray freedom far more than the non-English-speaking immigrant.

Language is a deeply personal trait that shapes the very way we think. No wonder the state tries to insinuate itself here—which makes it all the more imperative that we grant government no say in something so subjective, essential, and vital. Encouraging immigrants to speak their native tongues at home, as the Los Angeles Unified School District did in the 1990s, is every bit as offensive as forcing them to speak English. (We won’t even start on bilingual education in Leviathan’s schools: Why inveigh against that detail when the whole structure is rotten?) If we must have a government, its sole purpose is to protect our rights to life, liberty, and property; it has no place promoting one language over another. Lovers of liberty should object strenuously each time the state intrudes in this area, whether on behalf of English or any other tongue.

John Milton wrote in Areopagitica that English is “the language of men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty.” Let’s keep it that way.

Millimeter waves bombard passengers with beams that penetrate clothing to show the body beneath. Victims don’t undress: the rays do it for them so screeners can find the weapons so many of us tape to our torsos. Never mind that no TSA employee anywhere has discovered a single terrorist, despite wandings, pat-downs, and the agency’s foot fetish. Passengers may now have to perform a virtual strip tease, too.

Currently, the agency subjects only folks “selected” for “secondary screening” to a millimeter-wave scan, and then it offers Leviathan’s version of a choice: They can be groped by a screener in the traditional pat-down or they can pose for pictures that might earn them big bucks from Playboy. The TSA claims that 90 percent of passengers prefer a millimeter-wave scan over a pat-down, but perhaps that’s due to the agency’s bland description: “Millimeter wave detects weapons, explosives and other threat items concealed under layers of clothing without any physical contact. It is a promising alternative to the physical pat-down.” No wonder Peter Bibring of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says, “I don’t think people are really aware of just how accurate and detailed the images are of their naked body.”

Big Plans

The TSA hopes to eventually scan everyone boarding a plane, not just those unlucky passengers who lose the pat-down lottery. In fact, the agency’s been trying to dose us with millimeter waves and a sister technology, backscatter X-rays, for its entire six years of existence. Public outrage kept it dithering like a dirty old man awaiting the right moment to pounce: the “strikingly graphic images . . . reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags,” the ACLU warns. “That degree of examination amounts to a significant assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate.

To lull such prudes, the TSA promises to “remotely locate” the monitors revealing our nakedness so that the screeners leering at them can’t see us in person. They supposedly can’t save the images, either. And the agency claims our faces will be blurred, as if that somehow excuses stripping us of both our clothing and our constitutional freedom.

But TSA might as well stand for “Truth Seldom Appears.” Screeners at checkpoints and monitors can communicate; only TSA honchos pretend they’ll be saying, “No weapons detected on this suspect, Howie,” instead of, “Whoa! What a bod! Get her name off her ticket, will ya?”

Alleging that the machines can’t save images is just as preposterous. Initially the TSA insisted the contraptions “have zero storage capability, so the images cannot be stored, transmitted or printed.” But manufacturers’ websites touted their products’ “storage capability” (though the feature can be disabled). Ergo, TSA chief Kip Hawley now asserts that our naughty pictures “will never be stored, transmitted or printed, and [they] will be deleted immediately once viewed.” But how can he guarantee that screeners won’t figure out how to enable “Save”? Employees could also photograph their monitors unless the TSA searches them for cell phones and cameras. That isn’t very likely: despite the agency’s penchant for searching us, it has refused to so abuse screeners—even when passengers accuse them of stealing jewelry or cash. At Boston Logan one summer day in 2005, John Wright put his $7,000 diamond wedding ring, Rolex watch, and wallet in a plastic bin while he walked through the metal detector; only his Rolex and wallet were still in the bin a few moments later. He figured one of the three screeners manning the checkpoint swiped his ring because no one else other than his wife was around. But authorities declined to search the trio because, says TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis, “employees aren’t searched if there’s insufficient evidence to warrant it.”

Passengers should be that lucky. Meanwhile, how will a bureaucracy that can’t keep screeners from swiping our belongings stop them from exploiting us with this newest toy?

Privacy at Risk

Look for a brisk business in bootlegged pictures of celebrities or folks whose bodies intrigue in some way. Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU believes that “you’re going to start seeing those images all over the Internet. These images are going to have high commercial value.” They may have high vengeance values, too. An angry ex could post his former wife’s image on a webpage, whether he works for the TSA or pays a friend who does to pirate the image.

At present, the agency pledges to choose passengers “randomly” for millimeter-wave scanning. But in 2004, screeners at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., “randomly selected” passengers for pat-downs by kicking the magnetometers when attractive women walked through. They then forced these victims to strip for searches in stairwells. A horrified employee told ABC News, “That really incensed me that someone felt that they could just put on some gloves and they could just violate someone to that degree.”

Tragically, the idea allowing these assaults—that passengers deprived of all weapons, and therefore of all self-defense against terrorists, are safe passengers—is merely an assumption. No research substantiates it. Ditto for checkpoints: three American researchers could find “no comprehensive studies that evaluated the effectiveness of X-ray screening of passengers or hand luggage, screening with metal detectors, or screening to detect explosives.”

There may be less expensive, more efficient ways to secure planes, but no one knows because Congress unilaterally imposed a security system on aviation. The TSA is flying blind. It does what it does because it wants to, not because analysis shows that forcing passengers to pose for virtual nude photographs reduces the incidence of onboard weapons by, say, 58 percent.

The TSA’s false dichotomy—that screeners must either molest us or see us naked—is as absurd as the agency itself. There’s a third choice: abolish the TSA. That would free the airlines to protect their customers effectively—and inoffensively.