My wife and I, along with friends, spent a wonderful week in Arizona.  We admired the Grand Canyon on a perfect April Day.   We toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture school outside Scottsdale.  We visited Sedona, the red rocks canyons, and, the picturesque mountains below Flagstaff.  On four evenings we watched the Cardinals play the Diamondbacks in a domed stadium where parking next door is just $12.00 and $8.00 gets you two and a half scoops of Cold Stone Creamery ice cream in a waffle bowl with fudge and caramel topping.  The week before we got to Phoenix afternoon highs were in the high 90’s.  Our week the thermometers never crept above 81○F.

The week verged on perfect…except for the bookend encounters with the T.S.A.

Yes, the Transportation Security Administration involves itself in every trip involving an airplane.  Once again, they did their utmost to ruin my vacation.

Back in 2009 a complicated chunk of metal and wires went into my upper left chest.  That creates two issues.  My Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator has enough metal mass to set off a standard metal detector several feet away.  It also shows up as a black hole on a backscatter x-ray screen or a millimeter wave scanner used in airports.  Whether that hole is a lifesaver or the latest ISIS suicide toy requires a bit of investigation.  I understand that.

The second, more important issue is that it hurts like hell when my ICD is exposed to high energy electromagnetic devices.  A standard metal detector really gets my attention.  Those backscatter x-rays have almost taken me to the floor twice.  The millimeter wave scanner itself doesn’t use much energy in its scans, but, beneath the device the business part of the machine creates a pretty substantial field which I keenly feel.

On the afternoon of April 23 I went through T.S.A. at the main terminal at Lambert International Airport.  I had my driver license and my I.D. card, issued by the manufacturer of my defibrillator, in my hand when I told the T.S.A. agent that I needed a hand pat-down:  “We’re not doing that here today.”  No pat down, no option.  Wave good-bye to my three traveling companions or go through the millimeter wave scanner.

The tingling calmed down after about a minute, allowing me to put my shoes and belt back on before I had to walk to the gate.

The trip home came in two segments, Phoenix to Denver, then Denver to St. Louis.  Sky Harbor Airport will never be my happy place.

Even on a clear Saturday morning, the security line crept slowly.  Oh, off to my left they did do a long hand pat-down on a tall, attractive young blond woman in a tank top.  (After a long time in line even prurient entertainment is welcome.)  The T.S.A. staffers handling the item x-ray lines seemed a bit over zealous, even when iPads or smartphones or other items were very spread out in the bins.  The conveyor belt stopped, retreated and moved forward time after time.  That slowed the proceedings.

Finally, I got to the metal detector and millimeter wave machines where – as instructed – I asked for my hand pat down.

Now, T.S.A. agents don’t like pat-downs.  After all, they take more work than nodding as people walk through technology.  And, the job of a T.S.A. screener sucks.  The hours are long and the pay mediocre.  The people you screen won’t like you.  Despite limited representation by the American Federation of Government Employees, they serve pretty much at the whim of mid-level bureaucrats.  Per Glassdoor.com, full time pay for experienced screeners is in the $37,000 a year neighborhood:  who goes after a $37,000 job with a lot of hassles?  Someone making $25,000 a year in another job with a lot of hassles.

So, you have a mess of people struggling to stretch for the bottom rung of the middle-class watching people who can afford expensive trips to fun places saunter past you.  Putting travelers in their place is one of your few work place pleasures.

In Phoenix that meant I had to wait, crammed into a non-space between a x-ray conveyor and a metal detector as dozens of other travelers squeezed by me.  The wait is standard, the nine minutes in Phoenix pretty much standard.  Then things went downhill.

First, as they do, they isolated my bins off the x-ray belt from the good people’s stuff.  Only isolated isn’t the proper word.  My stuff was out of my sight (but within reach of all the other travelers) while the screener got up close and personal with all the inside surfaces of all my clothes, including my Dockers and my all-cotton briefs.  After being probed once in front of the crowd, the screener rubbed a special strip of paper over his gloves, then fed the paper into a machine – which gave him the wrong answer.  That meant a call for a supervisor, a move to a private room and a second, even more personal pat-down.

Meanwhile, my lovely wife was told she couldn’t fly because her stylish top had a metal zipper front.  That encounter got heated when her pat-down screener said she didn’t like my wife’s tone and the screener invoked the trump card – we can keep you from your flight.

In my little space they repeated the paper strip test, again failing.  The third pat-down was getting pretty close to my annual prostate exam.  The screener and supervisor then gave up.  They couldn’t get the machine to like the paper strips but they couldn’t find anything.  Besides, the loud lady in line was making them uncomfortable.  (They finally relented and let her head for the gate.)

We changed airlines in Denver.  Unfortunately, after disembarking at one of the fringe gates (meaning we had to walk through a snow shower to get into the terminal), we had to get our bags, re-check them and again go through security.

That airport security staff was not having a good weekend:  TSA Admits mistake after Amy Van Dyken-Rouen said she was ‘humiliated’ by agent at Denver airport.  [www.thedenverchannel.com  5/2/16]  Amy won six Olympic medals before an ATV accident put her in a wheelchair.  Still, she travels extensively as a motivational speaker.   As she put it, “They go around your breasts, they basically go under your butt and they just grab things, not grab, they touch things that are not appropriate…”

Again, crammed into the narrow space between electromagnetic energy emitting technology, I waited and waited and waited for a pat-down.  Then I waited some more.  I could see my friends and my wife across the terminal, watching for me to emerge.  My iPad, phone, wallet and other personal property was in some unseen place as scores of other travelers picked-up their gear and moved through.  I waited some more.  A gentleman came up behind me.  The screener/hall monitor asked if he wanted to go through the millimeter scanner.  “I decline,” is all he said.

With two of us filling the space, after a couple of more minutes, they finally brought over staff to do the pat-downs.

Last week The New York Times headlined a long piece, Catching a Flight?  Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security [ www.nytimes.com  5/2/16].  The article quoted the head of the Charlotte airport calling the T.S.A. ability to screen passengers on Good Friday a “fiasco.”  The number of screeners has declined by about 5,800 due to budget cuts.  Washington’s answer is to hire 768 screeners.  That will still leave airlines with unhappy passengers missing flights, “But, there’s not much airlines can do, except warn passengers to show-up three hours before takeoff…”

My group had almost three hours between flights in Denver.  Our overpriced late lunch got delayed while I waited and finally went through my pat-down.  The screener was less intrusive than his Phoenix colleague but added a new wrinkle.  My bins of items, including a canvas bag for under the seat with my Cardinals road hat, part of a newspaper, my iPad and other items were all spread out on a steel counter and individually examined:  what the screener hoped to see that had escaped many rads of x-rays baffled me, but it took another five minutes.

I was asked why I wasn’t TSA-Pre, paying the $85 to avoid some of the hassles (the theory being that people with extra money are less likely to blow-up airplanes?).  Well, my friends were TSA-Pre – and were signaled out for ‘extra screening,’ including pat-downs (even after they chose a line as far from me as they could).

When I was a kid I have a vague memory of an American propaganda film telling us how bad things were in the Soviet Union.  The prime example was that Soviets couldn’t move about their nation without special permission and special identification.  In the Clint Eastwood Cold War flick Firefox (1982), the hard part of getting old stone eyes in position to steal a revolutionary Soviet fighter plane prototype was getting him through the internal checkpoints with a dead man’s I.D.  (Yes, Clint’s friends wasted him for his I.D. but he was a bad guy so it was cool.)

Here we are in the United States now tolerating a system where low-level agents of the government decide if we get to exercise our constitutional right to travel freely.

Imagine if a Clayton cop stopped lunch time strollers on Central Avenue and stuck his gloved hands in other people’s pants in full view of other citizens?  His probable cause – they were on the street.

The Tea Party would start the demonstrations before happy hour.  As they should.

So let’s go over the Transportation Security Administration conundrum.  To protect Americans and the constitution we cherish, T.S.A. violates our personal privacy, ‘humiliates’ women in wheelchairs, put hands inside our underwear and threatens to prevent us from using our purchased airline tickets.   Kind of like destroying a village to pacify it, we let government violate our rights to protect them.

Yes, terrorism is real.  But is the response intelligent and effective?  Tests of T.S.A. effectiveness inevitably find mock guns and explosives getting through screenings.  The ‘intelligent’ part I think has been already answered.

And people wonder why I hate to fly.

The post TSA misses guns and knives, but nails me for my cardiac device appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In a novel approach to censorship, the US Department of Defense [DOD] recently bought up the entire 10,000-copy first run of Operation Dark Heart, a memoir that it doesn’t want us to read. DOD says that the book, written by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, reveals classified information about US operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan that threatens national security. This action may mark the first time in history that a government has used purchasing power to take a controversial book out of circulation.

The buyout actually works to the financial benefit of the author, who might not otherwise have sold out his first printing. The second edition—replete with blacked-out text—may also sell more briskly than otherwise expected.  The tactic also has inspired a bit of humor. On a recent edition of NPR’s “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me” news quiz, panelists joked about similar ways to enhance sales of other books, such as: Where the Wild Things (and our Troops) Are, and Eat, Pray, Love, Reveal Nuclear Codes.

In a nod to more traditional book-banning tactics, DOD is reported to have destroyed the books after buying them [for a reported $47,000]. [No word, yet, as to whether they were destroyed the old-fashioned way—by burning—or whether book-broiling has morphed into a more 21^st century format—shredding and recycling.]

Either way, this episode is not the first time a work of non-fiction has been outlawed or censored for national-security reasons—with or without justification. And there’s no reason to think it will be the last. Here are a few other examples:

United States Vietnam Relations, 1945-67

You probably know this publication as “The Pentagon Papers.” Smuggled out of the US State Department in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg and others, and leaked to the New York Times, it was more report than book. But its 3,000 pages contained information that embarrassed the US military, the State Department and many others who formulated and executed American policy in Southeast Asia after World War II. Outed for the web of lies its top officials had promulgated about US military policy and activities, the Pentagon attempted to prevent publication and charged Ellsberg with near-treasonous acts. The effort became futile when Ellsberg outflanked the military censors, by getting several other national newspapers to publish excerpts, and when the US Supreme Court struck down the government’s attempt to block publication. Supreme Court, 1: US government censorship, 0.

The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence

The CIA really, really didn’t like this 1974 book by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. The spy agency claimed that Marchetti—a former employee—had violated his contract, which said that he couldn’t write about the CIA without its approval. According to Wikipedia:

The authors claim to expose how the CIA actually works and how its original purpose (i.e. collecting and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons in order to advise public policymakers) had been subverted by its obsession with clandestine operations.

It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. Civil-liberties groups opposed the government’s attempt at censorship, questioning whether a citizen can sign away his First Amendment rights.

The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they stood firm and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored.The book was a critically-acclaimed bestseller whose publication contributed to the establishment of the Church Committee, a United States Senate select committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities, in 1975.

Spycatcher

All you have to know to understand why British muckety-mucks hated this book its subtitle: “The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer.”  Written in 1985 by Peter Wright, who worked as a British intelligence agent for 21 years, the book reveals the activities of MI5, Great Britain’s domestic counter-intelligence agency. Wright’s tell-all infuriated British cloak-and-dagger higher-ups, not just because it violated the code of secrecy, but also because it exposed many embarrassing instances of ineptitude in the agency in the 1960s.  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government took its objections to court—both in Great Britain and in Australia. Although the British government won some legal battles, it eventually lost the war. Spycatcher was published in the US in 1987, and several British newspapers brazenly flouted an injunction, publishing excerpts and a serialization of the book. The world did not end.

Special Forces Hunter at War

In 2009, Denmark was all a-buzz over Thomas Rathsack’s upcoming expose of his life as a Danish Special Forces commando in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Danish Ministry of Defense not only wanted to ban it, it demanded that the publisher supply a list of people to whom it had sent advance copies, and it warned  newspapers against publishing it. The government said that Rathsack had revealed too many details on the commandos’ methods of operation and [the information] could prove useful to Denmark’s enemies.” [Denmark has enemies? Who knew?]

Unfortunately for the Danish government, on the day before the book’s scheduled publication, an influential Danish newspaper published extracts from the book—and its morning edition sold out. In an editorial accompanying the excerpts, the editors said, “Members of the public have a right to follow the news—even when we are at war, and even when the authorities think they should be kept in the dark.”

A database of censored books—courtesy of our friends in Norway!

Want to know more about censored books? Check out Beacon for Freedom, an extensive, searchable database of censored books. Located in Norway, Beacon for Freedom has its roots in a group called NFFE, which “was established in Spring of 1995 as an independent centre of documentation and information committed to defend freedom of expression world-wide.” Now operating under new management, the website lists 657 censored books from a wide variety of countries.

“The struggle for freedom of expression is as ancient as the history of censorship,” says the site. “…The database, containing bibliographical information on the writings of free thinking men and women that were banned through history, will serve as a tribute to the memory of the countless victims of censorship – past and present. In recognition that knowledge of the past is essential to understanding the present, today’s conditions for freedom of expression should be viewed in a broader context and time perspective; that of the world history of censorship.”

Image credit: Larry West, deviantart.com

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Many Americans have looked to fixed-rail modes of transportation such as intercity trains, subways, and light rail systems as key to addressing America’s transportation problems.  As has been reported in the Occasional Planet and in many other publications, exciting innovation is occurring in the world of rail travel and fixed rail provides opportunities for easing metropolitan and inter-city transportation.

One of the major advantages of trains over airplanes is the ease of boarding.  You can still do with trains what you could pre-September 11, 2001 with airplanes: go to the terminal, purchase a ticket, and board.  But how long will this last?  If more and more Americans use rail transportation, will trains become targets for would-be terrorists?  Apparently there are some who think so.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported this past July 4:

Don’t be too alarmed to see stepped-up security on MetroLink or Amtrak trains in St. Louis.

During the past week or so, Metro and Amtrak officials have alerted their passengers that they may encounter canine teams and uniformed law enforcement officers.

“This is not in response to any sort of threat or risk,” Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said last weekend. “This is something we are doing around the country more and more. I think our customers are going to see this more and more often as they travel around our system.”

The surge team was in St. Louis for an undisclosed number of days, Magliari said last Sunday. The dogs are brought in to detect explosives on arriving and departing Amtrak trains.

This stepped-up security corresponds with the holiday weekend — a time when more people are out and about. Metro is expecting big crowds this weekend and will have extra trains for people attending Fair St. Louis.

This weekend, Metro — along with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and local police agencies — will patrol the transit system. The operation goes by a clunky name: Visible Intermodal Protection and Response. And this weekend isn’t the first time it has been in effect. The teams are on the system a few times a year.

We should not be surprised that officials are taking steps to try to ensure more safety on rail travel.  What we should be concerned about is whether or not these officials learn from the way in which security has been instituted at airports.

At airports such as Lambert International in St. Louis, travel is down more than 50% since pre-September 11 days.  While part of this is attributable to a lagging economy, much is due to passengers’ unwillingness to endure the delays, aggravation, probing, and at times invasion of privacy that occurs in going through security to terminal gates.

As railroad officials increasingly address security issues, it is important that procedures be reassessed.  Two things are clear: (1) regrettably, we may need more security with trains, (2) airport-type procedures would drastically undermine an attempt to generate a renaissance of rail travel.

What is unclear is what different procedures would work.  Fortunately, we now have an opportunity for a “do-over.”  The post-September 11 procedures were put in effect under emergency conditions; there was very little time for thought and none for debate.

There has to be a better way to address security issues for fixed rail while not taking the fun out of riding the train.  If we don’t mandate serious studies of how to address these questions now, we will be caught in the jaws of the same instant procedural changes that occurred after September 11.  We now have an opportunity for forethought; let’s use it wisely while we can.

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