Airport security, Kurt Cobain, and the Fourth Amendment

Yesterday Kathy and I flew back into the United States from what turned out to be a wonderful, much-needed and delightfully relaxing vacation - London, Berlin, visiting friends in a national park in northern Germany, then to Barcelona for 9 days of sun, surf, and sightseeing. Our return flight(s) took us from Spain through London, then Toronto before finally making it home to Texas.

For our big travel day home I found myself wearing an old t-shirt with an excerpt from the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution emblazoned on the front: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...." I didn't wear it to make any particular statement, it just happened to be the last clean shirt in my backpack, which was otherwise jammed with sand-covered laundry, assorted toiletries and tourist acquisitions, plus a small stack of books including several novels that I read while we were gone. (It was a welcome joy, I should add, to pull my head, for the most part, out of all the criminal justice topics covered on Grits and spend time reading good fiction.)

Anyway, as I trudged through the airport in Toronto, weary, jet-lagged and quite ready to get home, the Fourth Amendment shirt turned out to be quite the conversation starter. Fellow travelers standing in the security line first commented on it, noting the irony that we were all about to take off our hats, coats, belts, shoes, run all our belongings through an x-ray and submit to metal detectors and possible pat-down searches in order to enter the country.

One older man with apparent Tea Party leanings (judging by further, unrelated conversation) declared that if police tried to enter his home without a warrant they'd get their brains blown out with a .44 magnum. I reminded him that may turn out to be a bad idea, citing poor Kathryn Johnston's case out of Atlanta. Police broke down the 92-year old woman's door one evening in 2006 based on a "no-knock" warrant obtained with information from an unreliable (or perhaps non-existent) informant. Terrified, Johnston cut loose with a shotgun at the intruders and was gunned down by police, who tried to plant drugs in her house after they realized their error.

That tale reduced his macho bluster a bit, though he couldn't resist suggesting that such incidents might be expected more frequently under Barack Obama's presidency. I retorted somewhat disdainfully that Mrs. Johnston's death occurred on George Bush's watch, and that such incidents occurred long before Mr. Obama hit the scene and would likely continue long after. (I'd love to have heard the fellow's views if he had a chance to read Radley Balko's work on SWAT teams and police raids.) By this time others in line were listening in and also commenting on my t-shirt, with more folks further back in the zig-zagging queue straining from afar to read its text.

I wasn't really in the mood for a political conversation and was rather relieved to reach the front of the line where we handed over our passports and customs declaration to a grossly overweight US customs agent. We answered his annoying, routine questions and watched as he perfunctorily stamped our passports, then I noticed the fellow peering over his glasses at my chest, muttering the strange words to himself in a barely audible whisper as he read them.

"That's a great t-shirt," he announced with a grin, "I'm a big fan of the US Constitution, especially the Second Amendment. You know, I took an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution when I took this job," he added, "and if you ask me, these days the biggest threats are coming from within this country instead of outside it, if you know what I mean." I had in fact not asked him, but I nodded my head in agreement, even though one imagines he and I likely disagree over exactly what internal threats the Constitution presently faces.

I told the fellow I considered it rather like wearing a Kurt Cobain t-shirt, commemorating something that's dead and anachronistic, however laudable or memorable for those of a certain age who could still recall when it was relevant. This elicited a loud belly laugh. "It's not that bad," he replied with a big grin. "There are still plenty of people like me sworn to protect your rights." "Oh, then y'all aren't about to make me go through a metal detector, take off my belt and shoes and x-ray my bag about 30 feet from here?," I asked as I watched passengers piling their belongings into trays to run through an x-ray before being herded like cattle in a feedlot through a metal detector. In the background, I could hear a woman plaintively, pointlessly arguing over the seizure of a bottle of hand sanitizer. The agent shook his head and sighed. "After 9/11, everything's changed," he lamented. "Anyway, welcome home."

At this point I should mention that as a practical matter airport security is largely a joke - pure security theater. A large number of people were staffing the US security point where we all had to pass through, though about half of them appeared to be standing around doing nothing of value, chatting to one another or chiding passengers for not arranging their belongings in their rectangular trays in just the right fashion. Three different people scanned my boarding pass, including before and after entering the metal detectors, as though it hadn't just been done by somebody else several feet away. A business traveler in line with us commented that he'd traveled all over the world for his job and that airport security took longer to enter the United States than in any other country, though he added that it might go quicker if all the people standing around aimlessly or triple-checking our boarding passes were actually helping process people through the system. I readily agreed.

The screen through which another overweight man was viewing people's carry-on baggage via x-ray was visible to me for much of the time I was in line. He looked bored, understandably, and while I was there he never once intervened to determine the contents of people's carry on luggage, even though it was impossible to tell what was in them given the jumble of items travelers were carrying. For example, my wife had accidentally forgotten to remove a pair of pointy scissors from her satchel that she'd been using to cut up brochures, postcards and pictures for a travel scrapbook she keeps whenever we go abroad. She discovered them once we were on the plane, but airport security had let them through without a hitch. At least that lady had been prevented from bringing on her hand sanitizer.

In reality, the best security comes from passengers themselves and alert airline staff, not from the army of underpaid bureaucrats pretending to keep us safe at the airport entrance. The reason the 9/11 hijackers succeeded was that before that tragic day, all plane hijackings had aimed to hold passengers hostage, but literally by the end of that day it was no longer possible for hijackers to take over planes with sharp objects. When passengers on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania learned other planes had flown into buildings, they stopped the hijackers themselves and would have prevented the plane's takeover in the first place if there'd been a history of such things when it happened. Similarly, the "shoe bomber" whose failed efforts now force all of us to remove our shoes in the airport was stopped by passengers who saw what he was doing and intervened. Ditto for the "Christmas Day bomber." The Government Accountability Office has found that airport screeners routinely miss guns, bomb parts, and other dangerous objects despite all the rigmarole.

It took about an hour to make it through the airport's security procedures and get to our gate. We arrived just before boarding began; more standing in line. At the end of the long hall headed to the plane, an Air Canada stewardess cheerfully welcomed me with a notable Quebecois accent before stopping for a moment to read my (apparently provocative) t-shirt and laughing out loud. "That's an appropriate shirt to wear to the airport," she said, smiling. A steward behind her looked too and grinned: "Ironic," he said, before looking at my boarding pass and pointing us to our seats.

"You're telling me," I replied, then shuffled obediently back to my seat, anxious to put the army of airport bureaucrats behind me and shift my thoughts away from these absurdist security procedures and bury my nose in an excellent set of short stories by Roald Dahl.