Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard
2015-12-26 · Guest: Jim Bovard (Investigative journalist) · 52:00
TSA systemic failures and civil liberties violations
Bob Zadek and investigative journalist Jim Bovard discuss the systemic failures and civil liberties violations of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). They explore the agency’s history of “security theater,” its high failure rates in detecting weapons, and the invasive nature of body scanners and “Viper” teams.
Topics: TSA, civil liberties, security theater, 9/11, body scanners, Viper teams, government accountability, privacy
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Jim Bovard
Introduction to the TSA Support Group [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, every Sunday at 9:00 AM, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Hard to believe, but this is it. Your one-stop shopping for liberty in America. Thanks so much for listening. I am your eponymous host, Bob Zadek.
Today we have a special—this is our annual psychological help show. We only do this once a year. We are going to run a one-hour support group. So this is the station to listen to and the number to call if you have been groped at the airport and want to share your experience and want help in overcoming the experience. To help you overcome your life as a gropee, I’m happy to welcome to the show Jim Bovard. Jim is an investigative journalist and author of eight or 10 or 20 books—I’ve kind of lost track. Jim is a professional self-identified troublemaker. His particular target of choice is TSA and Homeland Security. Jim is on the phone with me for the entire hour to help you get over the trauma that you may have experienced by having your junk befondled at the airport. Jim, welcome this morning, and thanks for providing all of this help to our listeners.
Jim Bovard: Hey, Bob. Thanks for having me on your show. I appreciate that.
The Formation and Mission of the TSA [01:58]
Bob Zadek: Now, Jim, the subject this morning is TSA, which of course is yet another government anagram, which was formed as the deck chairs on the Titanic were moved around in the aftermath of 9/11. It was not really a new agency created, just a lot of boxes moved around and, most importantly, tons of money put into the newly formed TSA box. Now, TSA is formed—its mission is to make travel safe. And their primary presence, but not their only presence, is at the airports. They, of course, have SWAT teams crashing into Greyhound buses on surprise checks and checking trains as well. But most Americans experience TSA and the attendant groping and X-raying at the airports. Now, TSA is a pretty large agency, isn’t it?
Jim Bovard: Yeah, it’s got about 45,000 TSA screeners who work at the airports and do hassle folks. And, you know, it’s a little bit similar to the Folsom Street Fair, except that people that go there volunteer.
Bob Zadek: Now, for those people who have the misfortune of not living in San Francisco, the Folsom Street Fair—which I drive through once a year when I drive home from the station—it is an annual, if you can imagine it, black leather, basically a gay men’s party on Folsom Street, which is kind of ground zero for black leather gay men’s life in San Francisco. And probably the most important feature in the black leather Folsom Street Fair is that while they are wearing black leather clothing, parts of their body are, not by accident, left uncovered. It’s a pretty unpleasant thing to drive through, actually. But that’s the Folsom Street Fair. Now, Jim, TSA has a pretty large budget, don’t they?
Jim Bovard: Oh, yeah. Quite a few billion dollars, which they are very proud of, which they defend. But it’s interesting that the agency is very arrogant and arbitrary. If someone gets abused by them, the chance of getting any answers or justice are almost nil. But it’s interesting because this is an agency that’s been hammered by the Inspector General for the Homeland Security, by the Government Accountability Office, a lot of private investigation. You have all these screeners, you have these very fancy whole-body scanners, and they are almost completely incompetent at discovering weapons and mock explosives when the IG agents choose to smuggle them through in a test of the system.
Security Theater and the Lack of Value [05:10]
Bob Zadek: Now, the racket or the cover that TSA has is that it is impossible—other than the Inspector General report that we’ll get back to in a second—it is fairly impossible for the average American, if there is such a thing, for the average American to determine whether they are getting value, because every day that there is not something bad which happened in the air, that sort of could, by TSA’s own count, inure to their benefit. That is, something didn’t happen because of TSA. So how can one determine if we are getting any value for the enormous sums we are spending and, to me far more importantly, for the incredible compromise in our liberty and our privacy that we surrender? So not only do we surrender big bucks, we surrender huge swaths of liberty. How can we tell if we are getting any value at all for that surrender of money and liberty?
Jim Bovard: Well, the first thing that’s important is to not trust the government as far as their own claims, because there are so many different things that the government has already been caught lying about for the TSA and other programs. And it’s very important to see how the government has basically covered up so many of its biggest failures. There have been over 400 TSA agents who have been fired because they were caught stealing from luggage, stealing from people who were going through the screening process. And yet the agency insists it’s doing a very careful job of choosing the people who would protect us from all harm. TSA’s history is like an unending series of scandals, and yet many of the TSA officials and agents talk as if they are entitled to perpetual deference even though, in spite of all the screw-ups.
Bob Zadek: Now, give us some examples, if you will. You mentioned in general various screw-ups and, I don’t know if you used the word scandal, but that was the implication. Give us some examples of that, just so our friends out there don’t understand you’re just lobbing out invectives, to borrow a phrase from my Jean Shepherd, that you’re not lobbing out invectives without any support.
Jim Bovard: Well, I mentioned the IG report. The IG found that TSA failed 95% of the time to detect the weapons and bombs. There are so many different levels of BS here. There’s something that TSA runs which is called the SPOT program, which is the screening of passengers by observation techniques, which they’ve got thousands of TSA agents…
Bob Zadek: Notice the acronym. I am amazed at how skillful government is at designing acronyms. The Patriot Act was an acronym—each letter of Patriot was a word, first word of an acronym. It’s astonishing to me how good government is at building acronyms. Go ahead, the SPOT program.
Jim Bovard: Yeah, well, it’s too bad the government spends more time crafting the acronyms than designing good programs. But this SPOT program, they’ve got thousands of TSA agents going through airports doing chat-downs and watching for micro-expressions of travelers that might signal someone’s a terrorist or planning to bomb an airplane. But if you look at the actual list of the warning signs for terrorists these agents look for, it’s things like yawning, wringing of hands, widely open staring eyes, gazing down. But my favorite warning sign that TSA uses for a terrorist is someone who has excessive complaints about the screening process, which is probably not the first trick that the people in Al-Qaeda test their would-be hijackers.
The Suppression of Free Speech [09:47]
Bob Zadek: So if you thought you enjoyed freedom of speech in America, if you thought that was ensured by the First Amendment to the Constitution—and it was first for a reason, that is the most important of the Bill of Rights protected in the Bill of Rights—you don’t have it because somebody, some TSA agent wearing a blue uniform, can punish you for exercising your free speech rights and merely complaining about the process. So that is one of the official, if you will, hallmarks that these people who are trained in psychology by the TSA to spot terrorists look for as being a sign you’re a terrorist. So if you are out there and you have complained about TSA, please turn yourself in.
Jim Bovard: That’s good advice. It’s about as good as it gets. Yeah, and it’s just—I mean, there are so many things the agency does that simply are a mockery of common sense. And yet the agency has been able to maintain its power. Congress pisses and moans every now and then, but it really has not put the shoulder to punishing the agency for its abuses of the American people. And you know, it’s funny, the founding fathers expected Congress to be a watchdog for the American people, to keep a leash on the executive agencies, which from the history of King George, it was the King’s agents that tyrannized the Americans, it wasn’t the King himself. But Congress has utterly failed to put a leash on the TSA.
Bob Zadek: Well, nobody does. And we have done here at the Bob Zadek Show many shows on the unaccountability of the agencies in the executive branch. And there has been a profound abdication both by Congress and by the Supreme Court in ceding so much power to the administrative agencies. And this is like perhaps the most significant example of that. Nobody watches them, but and nobody denies them funding. And so they get, because they are keeping the homeland safe, they are given almost a carte blanche in government with no accountability and all the funding they could possibly want.
Jim Bovard: Yeah, and there’s scandals after scandals. I did a story for the New York Times 11 years ago on how the TSA, so many of the TSA agents were thieves, robbing passengers, which kind of made a mockery of the agency’s pretense that they’ve chosen the best and the brightest to be screeners and these people should be trusted with arbitrary power over the rest of us. There was a hubbub on that shortly—when I was doing that, the TSA denied there was any problem. About four to six weeks later, the TSA paid a nationwide class action settlement for people that had been claimed they’d been robbed by TSA agents. But this is a scandal which has gone on and on and on. And there are so many other scandals, and they really haven’t—about the only thing which the agency has learned is to keep lying and covering up its abuses, because that’s the only way it’s been able to preserve its clout.
The Arbitrary Power of a Single Agent [13:30]
Bob Zadek: And one thing, you know, you mentioned in passing, and I want to come back and visit this issue because I consider the issue I’m about to identify as being one of the most significant issues in the whole structure and existence of TSA. If we think back, everybody out there thinks back to their own experience in flying. Now, for sure the right to move freely from place to place is an unenumerated but very important right that we cherish. Indeed, in the world, the right to move from place to place is in all societies valued as an important right. And if you understand that one TSA agent, one agent who is relatively untrained, probably somebody who applied to the TSA when he was rejected by DMV, and he applied to TSA and was given the job and a blue uniform—that individual can almost acting alone, without anything like vaguely resembling due process, can deny you the right to travel. They can kick you off a plane. And think of how much power is concentrated in one unskilled, untrained individual. That statement alone, that concept ought to be a scathing indictment of the whole apparatus. Am I overstating it, or doesn’t a single agent have fairly significant power over you?
Jim Bovard: Well, this is a huge part of the trouble with TSA is there is a lot of arbitrary power that these low-level, not very well-trained and sometimes arrogant and whatever folks are out there doing. And it’s an agency which is trying to make people think that its own arbitrary power is the key to making us all safe. But as usual with a federal agency, once it has arbitrary power, everything is, you know, goes to hell, basically, because the agents are off the leash.
Bob Zadek: They’re totally off the leash with no accountability and, to some degree, their skill is measured by how much travel they prevent. That is, how many possible terrorists, not actual terrorists, but possible terrorists they catch. If they don’t ever catch anybody, they can’t justify their existence. It’s like police officers whose performance is measured by how many tickets they write. Well, of course they will be incented to write a whole lot of tickets. Well, TSA agents are incented to stop a lot of people, or else they can’t justify their existence.
The Evolution of Invasive Technology [16:53]
Bob Zadek: Now, the issue is of course—what strikes me as being strange is here we are with a system, and some of us are old enough to remember pre-TSA. Indeed, Jim, I often will rent or download old 1950 movies just to see with nostalgia Cary Grant getting out of a cab and walking to the airplane directly, uninterrupted, and being treated with great respect by the travel personnel along the way. Most of the people listening to the show, or many of them and an increasing number, never experienced travel without TSA. And the problem is once you grow up with TSA, that becomes the norm, and you don’t even know what life was like pre-TSA, and therefore we become docile and accepting of it because that’s the way it’s always been.
Jim Bovard: Well, yeah. I mean, and it’s interesting to see the evolution of TSA over the last 13, 14 years, because the agency’s become far more aggressive, far more groping, far more punitive power. And a sea change occurred in 2010 with the widespread adoption of these whole-body X-ray things, which could basically take a birthday suit photo of you in the nude. I mean, for instance, the photos are so detailed that it’s possible to tell if a male has been circumcised or if a female has an IUD. So, and the TSA claim, well, you know, they’re sort of vague. Yeah, BS, bunch of nonsense. TSA claims that the photos are not being kept, but similar X-ray machines have been used elsewhere and they were programmed to capture the photos. And even if the TSA software itself is not capturing them, it’s possible to have the TSA agent can be sitting there with his cell phone and snapping pictures of the images on screen. So do you really want a birthday suit photo in your federal dossier?
Bob Zadek: Now, you mentioned the scanners, and we’re going to spend a little bit more time on the scanners. But in merely reading mainstream media, I followed the introduction of the scanners, then the evolution as they reject one scanner in favor of another. And what occurs to me is when they institute a series of scanners and then reject them, each of those scanners that gets rejected must cost an awful lot of money. And what do they do with the rejected scanners? They don’t find their way to Cuba to be used in Cuba. So what happens to all the scanners, and isn’t that a fairly large amount of money that’s being thrown away?
Jim Bovard: Well, the TSA has had a long series of pratfalls on its technology. And again and again, for instance, a lot of the whole-body scanners which they adopted in late 2010 used radiation to supposedly look under people’s clothes and things like that. Well, if you’re a pregnant woman, if you’ve got other health issues, you don’t really want to get radiated by the feds every time that you travel. And it was funny to see the TSA’s how it tried to cover this up. One of my favorite defenses that they used was there was some TSA guy who was saying, well, you don’t have to worry about the radiation level because TSA checks those machines. And for some of them, it turned out that they were being checked once a year to see what their radiation emission level was. So yeah, once a year, that’s close enough for government work. But there were plenty of reasons to object to those. And when I was traveling last month out to the West Coast, watching folks and watching TSA agents bark at people, it was like a bunch of prison guards barking at a bunch of convicts going to the prison shower. “Raise your hands higher, higher!” you know. And if someone chooses to opt out and chooses to go with the pat-down instead of the whole-body scanner, then those people are sometimes targeted for punitive treatment, as I found out out in Portland, Oregon.
Self-Censorship and the Loss of Free Speech [21:35]
Bob Zadek: You know, when you were talking, what resonated with me is here I am, I have a reasonable place in society and within my profession I’m respected and I certainly am law-abiding. And yet I find myself, I’m waiting in TSA line and I find myself monitoring my own speech and I find myself afraid that if I allow my annoying personality to creep out and make a wise crack—sorry, that was unintended and I hope I don’t get thrown off the air by the FCC—I make a wise crack, I could be asked to step out of the line. And what is there about society in America that makes me and millions like me being afraid of my own government for merely speaking? It is astonishing, and yet our country accepts that. And we just—there isn’t an uproar at this incredible loss of free speech, which is not harmful. I’m not saying yell fire in a crowded theater, just making a wise crack and you could miss your plane and not see and not make an appointment. And how we are so accepting of it is scary to me, at how quick we are to with a deep sigh give up core American values.
Jim Bovard: Well, it’s interesting, the kind of reactions and patter that one hears in a TSA screening point waiting line. Most of the time there’s folks in those lines or I can kind of sense that they’re bristling or kind of like a bunch of nonsense. But there are often others, perhaps more of them, who would be happy to do anything, who would be happy to submit to a body cavity search if the federal agents told them it would make them happy—make them safe. There are so many Americans who are willing to give up any and all of their freedom and their dignity and their privacy simply for a bogus promise from the government to keep them safe.
This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Jim Bovard. Jim has made a study of TSA. He has lots of stories to share. Call us with your stories, 800-345-5639.
TSA’s Arrogance and the Rule of Law [24:29]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, every Sunday at 9:00 AM, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Proudly and always the show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening this morning to my conversation with Jim Bovard. Jim is an author and investigative journalist, basically a troublemaker who has made a very productive life’s work out of examining the foibles and the abuses of TSA. Jim, thanks so much for joining us this morning. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Jim at any time.
You know, Jim, as I’m sure you do know, there is a core principle of constitutional law that says basically—and I’m going to paraphrase it of course—when the government is seeking to encroach upon basic core rights, constitutional rights that Americans have, it must do so in the least intrusive way possible, and it must assure Americans constitutionally that there is no less intrusive way to accomplish the goal that government is trying to accomplish. TSA is an example of just the opposite, where anything that the government would do to make us safer would be less intrusive and more effective than TSA. It is like the cop-out, it is the most expensive and the least effective rather than the least expensive and the most effective. And most importantly, it denies the most Americans the most freedom that any measure could possibly do. It is with the broadest brush possible intrudes upon the liberty of all Americans, and yet we like sheep docilely, if that’s a word, accept that.
Jim Bovard: Well, I mean, most Americans submit to it. I’m not sure how many accept it. I mean, there are plenty of folks out there who would like to cast the TSA into the junk bin of history, which I’m certainly one of those, as are you. But it’s, you know, let’s just say it’s not an active majority. It’s too bad some of the presidential candidates haven’t lit up on this because they might be able to boost their poll ratings that way, telling TSA horror stories. But this is the kind of thing which got established after 9/11 when folks had blind trust in government. And in the time since 9/11, we’ve had two presidents and a lot of federal agencies that taught us it was folly to trust the government. And yet because TSA is entrenched, it has blocked a lot of efforts that try to loosen its stranglehold on American travelers. And it doesn’t make us safer to empower federal agents to squeeze your butt or squeeze your boobs or worse. But this is how the agency has evolved. TSA covers up so many abuses, and I’m actually going back and forth with them right now on a situation I had and they haven’t—let’s just say I’ve not got any insight yet.
TSA as a “Terrorist Organization” [28:23]
Bob Zadek: Now, I’m going to make a statement that’s going to make me sound certifiable, as they say, but I’m going to defend it and I think you can help. The TSA is, if you resort to a dictionary, the TSA is a terrorist organization. Now, before you overreact out there, my friends, let me explain what I mean by the TSA being a terrorist organization. The tactic of terrorism is to instill terror for the purpose of accomplishing a political goal. Now, the terrorist, the real terrorist out there in the world, they have spent about $400,000 to bring down the three planes during 9/11, and they put some explosives in somebody’s jockey shorts and they put something in a heel of somebody’s shoe. They probably spent a million dollars. And then they could have, they being the terrorists, having spent a million dollars on underwear, the heel of somebody’s shoe, and a couple of box cutters, they could have all retired and gone to Nice and lived on the beach. Their work is done, and they leave behind a country that for the next 15 years has spent possibly a trillion dollars and compromised many of our most important institutions. Their work has been done, and we will continue to do this terrorism theater maybe forever. Talk about leverage and talk about getting a bang for the buck. So the terrorism continues by us being reminded that we better always feel terrorized, and the reminders are our own government and TSA. So they have created a process that lives for now 15 years beyond the event itself, and it’ll never go away. How will we ever announce, “Okay, we have conquered terrorism, let’s go back to the good old days”? It can never happen. It’s a war we can never win.
Jim Bovard: Um, yeah. Well, I would not call the TSA a terrorist organization. It does rely on a lot of fear-mongering, it does rely on arbitrary power, but it’s sort of more like the secret police that were known in some European nations in the 1800s and a lot of nations in the 20th century…
Bob Zadek: Like the Stasi in East Germany.
Jim Bovard: Yeah, where they have a lot of arbitrary power and you really don’t quite know what’s going to be prohibited this week. All of a sudden it’s small bottles, next week you’ve got to take off your belt, the week after you’ve got to take off your left shoe. And all this uncertainty, and it is as if they are trying to make people believe there’s some secret wisdom behind all their arbitrary policies. But if you follow the agency, if you follow its rulings, if you follow some of the court disclosures, I mean, it’s just one idiotic thing after another. And when the IG comes out and says, well, they have a 95% failure rate…
The 95% Failure Rate [32:01]
Bob Zadek: Now, Jim, explain that. Some folks out there may not be familiar with that IG study. Say a little bit more about that well-reported 95% failure rate.
Jim Bovard: Well, this is a report that was a confidential report which was, I think, not supposed to come out, but somebody leaked it. And so leaked it in late May, early June. And it turned out that the Inspector General had found that their agents who were going through the testing the TSA screening process were able to smuggle weapons and bombs past the TSA screeners and whole-body scanners 95% of the time. So they almost always failed. They almost always failed to catch the real threat. And folks have forgotten, but TSA has not caught any terrorist. They’ve spent all these billions of dollars, they have hassled the hell out of millions of Americans, they have strutted, they have domineered, they have not caught any terrorist in the process of attacking American planes.
Bob Zadek: And of course, TSA will say that the terrorists don’t even try because they know they’re going to get caught. But that’s sort of belied by a 95% failure rate.
Jim Bovard: Right. I mean, the government has a slow learning curve and, you know, I don’t think it’d be that difficult to work around what the TSA does. But for whatever reason, the terrorists have not targeted American airplanes, partly because there are some structural changes like the cockpits being much tighter and much more difficult to enter than they were before 9/11 that have made airplanes safer. Also, the most important change is that airline passengers would no longer be passive in a hijacking attempt like they were on 9/11 based on what the government encouraged them to do. So, but it’s sad to see how much nonsense the TSA gets away with. And it’s a really good example of attention deficit democracy, because you have a relatively small number of Americans who are paying some attention to the agency and realize it’s all a bunch of BS. You have other Americans, perhaps a larger number, who are so docile by nature and who are perhaps sometimes just kind of waiting to roll on the floor if ordered to by government agency, and they insist on seeing TSA as a savior. It’s interesting to see some of the hostile comments which people make on my articles or send me. I mean, some are very vitriolic, but that’s okay. TSA is a good inkblot test for how Americans feel about their freedom and their rights. And there are lots of folks who will look at that inkblot and say, “This is a damn outrage, this is not constitutional.” Others will say, “Well, I don’t quite understand the inkblot, but it makes me feel safe, so go ahead and do whatever you want to do.”
9/11 as an Intelligence Failure [35:21]
Bob Zadek: And the most, to me, one of—a very important reminder out there is let us imagine there never was a 9/11 disaster, that it never happened. But imagine that the government announced, “We are afraid of hijacking, so we will build TSA,” and they built TSA in exactly the model it is now, but without 9/11 as the predicate. Would Americans have stood for that happening? Probably not. Which means the direct cause and effect is 9/11 gave birth to TSA. Now, the point being that 9/11 represented an intelligence failure, and 9/11 could have been avoided. It was a self-inflicted wound by America on itself because it could have been prevented by intelligence agencies being in better communication. So you take a government failure and the fix is yet another failure which costs America profound inconvenience and cost to no benefit. And the link makes no sense. TSA does not prevent 9/11 events from happening. It was an intelligence failure, not an airport security failure.
Jim Bovard: Well, it was an intelligence, it was a law enforcement failure. There were all kinds of warning signs that the feds simply disregarded. Plus, you know, there was the foreign policy—we were making a lot more enemies than what people chose to recognize. And the current policy with the drone attacks and things like that that we’re doing in a whole lot of countries, I mean, this is sowing seeds of hatred that could come back to bite us. There was a book I did a dozen years ago called Terrorism and Tyranny, and I made the point in that that killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans. But many Americans have been as docile on judging US foreign policy as they have been towards the TSA.
This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Jim Bovard. Jim has written eight or nine or 10 books—Jim, I’ve lost track. He writes prolifically on the problems involved and with the structure and the behavior of TSA. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Jim at any time.
The Revolving Door and Viper Teams [38:41]
Bob Zadek: Now, Jim, as a side note, if I am not mistaken, we had a TSA director—it was a guy named Chertoff who was, I think, the first director (director may not be the exact right word). And he then left government, and isn’t he one of the vendors of the scanning machines to the agency he used to run?
Jim Bovard: Yeah, a minor—he was involved in the lobbying or in perhaps the management of one of those companies. But he was certainly tied very closely to the whole-body scanners which have been—which don’t work, which are huge intrusion, and which even the TSA has mothballed many of those, especially the ones that the TSA admitted radiates passengers, which is after a couple years of lies and cover-ups they said, “Well, maybe we don’t need to radiate customers.” But you know, it’s interesting, there was a court ruling a couple years ago, I think in 2013, that compelled the TSA to take public comments on its screening policy and these whole-body scanners and other issues. TSA gradually opened up for public comments, got over 5,000, the vast majority overwhelmingly critical of the agency. But the TSA was also obliged by the court to issue a statement in response to those, a policy justification or adjustment. TSA hasn’t done that. It’s a good example of how TSA thinks the federal law as well as the Constitution simply does not apply to that agency.
Bob Zadek: Well, we know just from casual reading in mainstream media that the executive branch particularly has totally ignored what is called the rule of law. And the executive branch, the Obama administration, has discovered that if the executive branch simply ignores the law, there is no individual or group of individuals or organization who has standing to sue them. So under our system, there is no system by which one can compel the executive branch to obey the law. We read about that with Obamacare, we read about that with the EPA and their administrative processes. So that is simply a constitutional failure that agencies have discovered with more and more boldness that they are immune from the very laws that govern their behavior. So TSA, while they are an abuser of that, they are by no means the only abuser. It is a failure in the system. We rely to some degree upon the executive branch simply understanding they have to obey the law, but Obama more than any of his predecessors—it probably was true in the past, but Obama more than the others has discovered they can simply ignore the law and there is no nobody who can force them to obey the law. So that is simply one example of the TSA of abuses within the executive branch.
Now, Jim, do you envision, do you advocate, would you support having the TSA simply be eliminated and we go back to a pre-TSA, from the taxi cab to the airplane directly system?
Jim Bovard: Oh, I’m certainly in favor of abolishing the TSA. People can go back and forth on what it should be replaced. I mean, I think back to the metal detectors they had prior even to the whole-body scanners, which they used the metal detectors that they had on 9/11 before 9/11. And those things work about as well as the whole-body scanners, but they’re vast—less intrusive. I’m not saying that airports don’t need any security, but if it’s private security, it’s going to be done in a way that respects the rights and the dignity of travelers. When you have it done by federal agencies and you have a lot of federal agents, some of whom enjoy trampling the rights of other Americans, you’re going to have a worst-case scenario. You’re going to have a scenario in which you don’t have good security but you’ve got a lot of rights violated. So get rid of the TSA, move to private solution, let there be experiments, let airlines, let airports set their own standards, and out of that will come a much better system.
The Future of Travel and Security Theater [43:42]
Bob Zadek: To me, you know, the proof—I find intellectual support for your position in the following: If the purpose, if the goal of terrorists, if the tactic is to disrupt American life, well, they have disrupted air travel, but there have not been any similar attempts on train travel, bus travel, sporting events, things of that nature. And all of that have been made—continue to be safe, at least in the minds of the public, despite the absence of TSA. So if terrorists, if I were a terrorist, I would simply take all of the other targets of opportunity that are a lot easier than airlines and use them to disrupt American life. And therefore the fact that hasn’t been done might show that even in the parts of American life that have no TSA protection, everything is reasonably safe. Is that a rational statement, or am I missing something in that logical process?
Jim Bovard: Well, it certainly has not worked out well to create these 45,000 federal agents and give them basically legal immunity for violating people’s rights and pretend that’s going to make us safe. And certainly it doesn’t make sense to have that level of intrusion and heavy-handedness around airports alone and yet have other parts of American life being unhassled by the feds. But the flip side is TSA is starting to use Viper teams, in which they—it’s like a SWAT…
Bob Zadek: Viper is another acronym, is it not?
Jim Bovard: It is, and it’s—I mean, it’s such a BS acronym, it’s hard to keep track of. Let me pull this up with the wonders of Google. But it’s a—here we go. Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response team. This is what TSA Viper acronym is for. And it’s such a load of crap. It has these TSA teams go sweeping in to do, you know, basically random forceful searches on travelers coming off of trains or going on buses. I think they even did it in city transit in Houston. And it’s the ultimate security theater nonsense. But just the fact that someone would have come up with Viper as an acronym shows that a lot of these guys, I don’t know how they can breathe because where their head is. I mean, this is like a child’s game. Viper, Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response team. It’s like, were they all sitting in a circle, shall we say, when they came up with this?
Bob Zadek: But yet the Viper teams are—it’s very random as opposed to airports, which are universal. So no one could argue that these Viper teams are making anybody any safer because the odds of a terrorist, if they had chosen a bus or train as a target of opportunity, the odds are pretty low they would get nailed by a Viper team. So the Viper team is, as you said in the early part of the show, pure theater. It’s “don’t just stand there, do something.” So the government has this aura of doing something, of building dependency of Americans upon their government. “Thank you, government, for keeping us safe,” and therefore we can tolerate the expenditure of time and the loss of liberty because here is a proof, I can see it with my eyes, that you are keeping us safer. And that is the sheep-like approach that Americans have taken to these intrusions.
Jim Bovard: Well, and Viper teams are a good example of how TSA only comforts stupid people. Because for instance, I think there were some train stations in New Jersey that the Viper team went into and required everyone who wanted to board Amtrak at that station to go through a Viper search and take a look at their luggage and pat down and all that kind of stuff, if memory serves. But there was another Amtrak train station 10 or 15 miles away that wasn’t covered. So okay, if you’re a terrorist, instead of going to this station in Jersey, you just go one station down and then you can blow up the train. But it’s this level of idiocy from a policy level, and yet it’s sanctified, people let the government get away with this. Congress pisses and moans, but it keeps financing this nonsense.
Bob Zadek: Jim, we have a minute left. How do our friends out there follow your writing?
Jim Bovard: Well, I’m on the USA Today board of contributors, I write occasionally for other papers. JimBovard.com—the last name is B-O-V-A-R-D. I’ve got a blog, the link to that JimBovard.com site. And otherwise, just kind of raising hell here and there.
Bob Zadek: And you write for The Freeman, don’t you, and The American Conservative?
Jim Bovard: Oh, I’ve written some for them in the past. I write for the Future of Freedom Foundation on a regular basis. So I just kind of make mischief where I can.
Bob Zadek: Are you working on any books right now?
Jim Bovard: Nothing which I would admit.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Jim, for giving us an hour of your time. This is Bob Zadek saying to all of my friends out there as we approach—as we’re in the middle of the holiday season, travel safe. I know you are because TSA has your back. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. I’ll be back next Sunday. Please enjoy the holiday week. So long for now.