As they say in Congress, I would like to expand and clarify my previous remarks on TSA security screening. Abby Wisse Schachter at the New York Post has a thoughtful response taking issue with my endorsement of body scanners and pat-downs. She concedes that racial/ethnic profiling doesn’t work, but goes on to argue:
I differ with Boot when he dismisses behavioral profiling because it isn’t a perfect cure-all. Wouldn’t it be possible to profile everyone in line at security by conducting an interview to suss out an individual [who] seems like they might be a security threat based on their behavior, then have a second layer of pat-downs and nudie screening for those who didn’t pass the interview? Why is it necessary to essentially terrorize children in order to provide security which if we’re being realistic is not going to work 100 percent of the time. I’m not convinced the TSA has exhausted the benefits of other less invasive security techniques that they can plausibly claim this is the only way to go.
I was not dismissing behavioral profiling. I think it is vital and necessary but insufficient. To truly secure anything, you need multiple defenses. Thus military bases have an outer and an inner perimeter so that if the first is breached, the second will stand. In the same way, we need various defenses to stop terrorists from hitting our aviation system. Behavioral profiling is certainly part of it. So is interviewing at least some passengers. But there are limits to how far we can go with interviews. This is something that Israeli airport security personnel do extensively (I always seem to get asked if I’m Jewish and to name my rabbi), but they have the luxury of guarding only one airport. In the U.S., we have hundreds and hundreds of airports with thousands of flights every day. Imagine subjecting every single passenger to the kind of (sometimes lengthy) interrogation that Israeli security personnel do. It would slow the entire system to a crawl and generate more complaints than the body scanners. It would also be much more difficult to do because you would have to train tens of thousands of personnel in very difficult interrogation techniques. Far easier to train them to monitor a body scanner or to pat you down.
Even when done by well-trained Israeli operatives, the interviews are sometimes insufficient. That is made clear by this account (from the website of Israel’s security agency, Shabak) of a 1988 attempted bombing of an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv:
The passenger, a 32 year old Irish woman named Anne-Marie Murphy, who was six months pregnant, arrived at the check-in desk some forty minutes before it closed. She was approached and questioned by the deputy security officer as part of routine passenger security checks.
No suspicious signs were revealed during her questioning. The passenger, who gave the impression of being a simple woman, responded in the negative when asked if she had been given anything to bring to Israel. During the questioning she was calm, and revealed no sign of nervousness. In the check of her baggage, suspicious signs came to light: a Commodore scientific calculator with an electric cable was found; the bag raised suspicion due to its unexpectedly heavy weight. The security officer’s examination of the bag revealed explosives concealed in the bottom of the bag, under a double panel. He called the police, and the passenger was arrested.
Turns out Ms. Murphy — who did not fit the profile of a terrorist or act like one — had been given a bomb by her Jordanian boyfriend. In this case, only physical examination of her luggage revealed the device. But that wouldn’t work with some of the more recent al-Qaeda bombers, who are secreting explosives in their underwear or elsewhere on their person. The only way they can be reliably detected is with the body scanners and pat-downs that the TSA is now rolling out.
By all means, we should do various kinds of profiling and interviewing, but we also need another line of defense. This is it.
The Fed Writes What May Be Obama’s Obituary
Yesterday came the news that the Federal Reserve expects unemployment to hover around 9 percent throughout 2011 and possibly decline to 8 percent by the end of 2012. It’s worth noting that we don’t have much reason to trust that the Federal Reserve knows anything about anything these days. The prognosticative skills of its officials and reports have proved scandalously poor over the past few years, just as its policies have suggested exactly the kind of inconstancy, desperation, and politicization that the Federal Reserve system was designed to avoid.
So with those caveats, which are substantial, we can still be assured of one thing: if unemployment is that high in 2012, Barack Obama will not win a second term. Democrats can intone the words “Sarah Palin” all they want as a desperate hope for salvation from Republican rule. But the simple fact of the matter is that if we enter into a fourth year of unemployment at levels unseen except for periods of a few months since the 1930s — after spending somewhere north of $1 trillion to try to bring the number down and with the Fed printing as much as $2 trillion to pump up growth — any Republican, and I mean any Republican, who can get the nomination will win.
Indeed, if unemployment is higher than the Fed now is expecting at the beginning of 2012, I think it’s entirely possible that Obama would not run for a second term. Continued parlous economic news through 2011 will surely create the condition for a serious primary challenger, as I talk about in my lead article in COMMENTARY’s December issue, as will continued trouble in Afghanistan.
One reason for the depth of the difficulty here is the degree to which the United States remains a consumer-driven economy. If a tenth of the country has little or no disposable income, that limits the possibilities for economic growth and a roaring recovery. Even worse, the psychic effect of years of bad economic news depresses consumer spending in every sector.
And the uncertainty created by the current political-economic climate, in which no one knows what will happen to tax rates and what will happen to health-care plans and what will happen to housing, contributes to the worries of small businesses (traditionally the engines of job growth, especially at the tail end of a downturn) about taking on new workers.
It’s a dangerous loop. So now, having to invest hope in the Fed’s newest round of quantitative easing working in his favor, Obama must simultaneously pray that the Fed is wrong about all that other stuff. Even if it is, he’s going to have a tough road ahead.