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Other institutions have adopted airport-style security measures, particularly behavior profiling. Your hometown police are certainly trained in these techniques, and your courthouse security checkpoint. But your public library staff may have been trained, your large employer's HR department, building security at your office building, etc. Private companies market these training programs, under different names, but modeled on airport security. Lower level staff get trained to identify minor behaviors that supposedly predict the potential for worse behavior. The most extreme aspect of this approach is staged provocation. The whole lot is of unproven utility and a great cover for prejudice and retaliation. Airport security is just the most in-your-face example that most people encounter.
A difference in degree, but not kind, separates the treatment you receive at airports from the treatment accorded to internees at Abu Gharib or Gitmo. Not to minimize true torture, but the same philosophy of coercion underlies all these attempts to gain information and ensure conformity, and the techniques should be seen on a continuum of forced compliance.
Prisons can strip prisoners, but the TSA cannot strip passengers. But TSA will soon use computer imaging to render you naked on screen. The given reason is weapon search in prisons and airports alike, but the real reason is prisoner/passenger humiliation. The same people you dislike handling your private possessions will soon be gawking at your private parts. Of course, they won't take pictures of you naked. They didn't take pictures at Abu Gharib either. Or publish pictures of Saddam in his underwear in prison. Oh, that's right, they did! Imagine the indignity of arguing about keeping your 5 oz. shampoo with the security official who is looking at your boobs onscreen, and saving the pic to your file.
Your small child is singled out for special attention, and your reaction is watched. Very similar to techniques used in interrogation, both in the use or threatened use of children and indirection. Often the subject of search is not the true subject. You get separated from old Grandpa and he gets sealed away in a glass booth, confused. What do you do? They're watching.
You enter the line and you get yelled at, given conflicting orders. Often you have to juggle more items than you have hands, including a boarding pass that must be "available at all times," even though someone else in a uniform told you to put it away. Separate liquids, no, leave liquids in your carryon. You are taking off your prison slippers at the same time and partially disrobing in a crowded place, in front of others, with no chairs or the usual amenities to help you with these tasks. There is the threat of worse treatment if you speak up. Your privacy is casually invaded, your personal items treated with disrespect. The situation never improves, though it often changes in petty ways, even at the same airport on a different day. This system seems inefficient and inexplicable, bureaucracy at its worst and you blame lower level TSA members. But these are the same techniques of confusion, petty humiliations, awkward physical demands, lack of sympathy from authority, threats, etc. common to controlling and softening up internees. The lack of improvement after seven(!) years is a clear indicator of design, not accident.
Nor is the rudeness you encounter exactly an accident. Security can't have an overt policy of rudeness, but that doesn't mean higher-ups can't watch your reaction when a front line employee is rude to you. If a passenger makes a complaint that sticks, well they can always get rid of that low-level employee. But most complaints or questions just result in a heightened security response toward you. An inmate can't be right at Gitmo. You can't be right at a security checkpoint--it's not that the security officer thinks you're wrong, btw, they want to see how you behave if they thwart you.
All security stuff is ultimately tied to information gathering and the collapse of the Fourth Amendment. The government increasingly knows more about you than you could ever remember yourself. Since when is your computer's hard drive a weapon? We have no idea how they are using all the information they collect, and, thanks to Obama, McCain, and others, we may never know.
But don't be surprised if they pocket your shampoo and stick a nude pic of you on the web if you oppose the next war. It looks like you're going to miss your flight at least. Step into this small windowless room, sir, we have some questions for you. How'd you like a free trip to Syria?
