Irritating as they are, the privacy violations we see every day are the least worrying

by Eileen McGuire-Mahony | 12:54 pm, February 10, 2012 | Comments Off

Last week saw newsy few days for my favorite freedom fondling cadre.  An iPad stealing spree that somehow lasted a year before the bugger got caught, his coworker who robbed a foreign national blind right in front of a camera, and – of course – sentencing for the last round of pilfering.

Ah, yes, the TSA is hard at work.

C’est tragique, this stuff is too nearly common to track.  And, when the monkey brigade doesn’t find loot, they act like angry chimps.  I once opened a suitcase to find a TSA search notification…and my brand-new Tahari sweater crusted with either urine or tobacco expectorant…or both.  Say what you will about those pesky terrorists; they have better hygiene standards.  Clearly, America suffers under a security apparatus out of control.

The TSA is an easy target, very low hanging fruit.  Anyone who flies has interacted with them, and I have yet to personally encounter someone who had good words for the prolonged, ritual humiliation that is air travel.  Simply, it’s the public face of the beast.  The pettiness of it all, the abuse of power in any and all imaginable manners, the sheer aggravation of witnessing all that inefficiency, the misery of being deprived of a comfort so simple as a 4 oz. pudding cup…well, it’s easy to dismiss these people as laughable goons.  I’ve written about that before.  A core problem of the TSA is that it’s a job demanding judgment and discretion, yet one with pay and prestige set so low as to guarantee the only applicants will be beneath the bottom of the barrel in those skills.

Ah, but what of the people who wear suits, rather than those charming Smurf-blue pseudo-professional uniforms?  They’ve got degrees, triple digit IQs, and security clearances.  If we’re facing such dreadful and unending terrorist threats, why does the smart set keep staffing airports with baboons?

What’s telling about this is how seriously the higher-ups do, or don’t, take ‘Security Theater.’  I’m not the first to point out that, since 9/11, the fearsome Al Qaeda hasn’t managed to be more than a third-rate pest.  On that, as time passes, it seems bin Laden et al blew their entire load on one attack.  Who on earth actually believes we are facing a threat anywhere near sufficient to justify the surveillance network that has tangled up around us in the last decade?

This stark reality undercuts most conspiratorial theories about some massive cabal plotting the details of an Orwellian hell.  To judge by the security personnel we interact with most frequently, these people probably couldn’t load a squirt gun without wetting themselves, let alone plan and implement the Panopticon.

So, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.  Never resort to conspiracy theories when sheer mendacity and greed will explain the observable phenomena.  Isn’t it just the nature of all governments to grab power anyway they can?  The modern free-for-all in data is the realization of a longed-for but heretofore technologically impossible dream.  Parading as a loving mother, still carting about the corpse of an attack more than a decade old, national security is become death, destroyer of world, comprehensive domestic surveillance.

If anything, this should prove that we’ve no need of vile conspiracies in order to get opaque, corrupt government.

Truly frightening is that America’s surveillance system is, arguably, not answering to anyone.  If pilfering from luggage and feeling up co-eds on spring break is the front line of our War on Terror, then the backstage boys are spooks gone rogue, so hopped up on getting information that any difference between enemy to be sought and target to be guarded is gone.

Salon pointed this out recently, noting that security agencies, such as the NSA and DHS, groups who have long been snubbing Congressional subpoenas and FOIA requests, have now graduated to ignoring Executive Orders.  To be fair, this is a case of government laziness and overpromise colliding.  A December 2013 deadline – still 20 months off – to declassify a cache of documents is already looking to be a sure miss.  But the National Declassification Center, an Obama baby, has known of the deadline for three years.  To date, they’ve worked through just over 26 million pages of the 400 million due for declassification, a work pace that puts them on track to miss that 2013 deadline by a decade.

Compared to the outcry over strip searching Grandma, this may seem distinctly boring.  It’s certainly less news-friendly.  But when politics gets so boring that few people pay attention out of sheer monotony, open government gets cloudy, all the same.

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