Lynne Kiesling
In previous posts on the TSA and security here, here, here, and here, I’ve argued emphatically for taking a relative risk assessment approach to our security and surveillance policies and spending. Courtesy of Meg McLain, here’s a vivid graphic representing why that’s a good idea, and why we should not be spending so much money so ineffectively on security theater:
Lynne Kiesling
This week we have many introspective analyses of the consequences of an evil act perpetrated 10 years ago. Those consequences are a mix of good and bad, ranging from no successful coordinated attacks in the U.S. to foreign wars with gruesome human and financial costs. The consequences in which I am most interested, and about which I am most concerned, are those attached to the growth of the surveillance state toward a police state.
For most of the past decade the federal government has implemented, and the American people have accepted, invasive search, extensive surveillance, and increased militarization of law enforcement, and have done so with little or no analysis of whether or not the benefits of reduced attacks are large enough to justify the enormous financial, social, and cultural costs of, in my opinion, the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. I wrote about this in May in the context of the TSA’s increasing use of untested x-ray radiation scanners that are ineffective at identifying weapons and explosives and invasive criminal-style frisks of airline passengers, referring to John Mueller’s and Mark Stewart’s performance of the benefit-cost analysis that the GAO repeatedly recommended that the Department of Homeland Security should do and has refused to do.
I think we should all be more concerned about, and pay more attention to, the consequences of our increasingly authoritarian/submissive society (can’t have one without the other!). Glenn Greenwald has been a stalwart voice, doing investigative analysis of the growth of the surveillance state, with this recent omnibus and link-filled post as a thorough compendium of the information- and data-related surveillance and secrecy authority and control that the federal government is exerting. I also wrote in May about how the Patriot Act has reduced our civil liberties, including economic liberties as an important component of our civil liberties. The government’s enforcement of the Constitutional protections of our rights to be free from unreasonable government search have evaporated into near-nonexistence (both at the airport and elsewhere), which increases our general uncertainty and reduces our productive and valuable social-economic engagement and interaction with others. In the process it also dehumanizes those who are in positions where they can exert this coercive authority and control, as anyone familiar with the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority and the Zimbardo Stanford prison experiment knows too well. Actually, one of my favorite quotes about authority is from Stanley Milgram:
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
I fear that we have witnessed some disappearance of a sense of responsibility and individual moral agency in American culture, and that is one of the greatest costs of the evil act of a decade ago.
And to what end — how justified is this fear? High financial, human, cultural costs, to avert events that are one-quarter as likely as being struck by lightning. Some may criticize the performance of relative risk assessments between accidents and deliberate attacks, but it’s precisely these crucial relative risk assessments that enable us to recognize the unavoidable reality that neither accidents nor deliberate attacks can be prevented, and that to maintain both mental and financial balance we cannot delude ourselves about that, or give in to the panic that is the objective of the deliberate attacks in the first place. Thus the title of this post, which comes from two separate quotes from Bruce Schneier — the first from his excellent remarks at EPIC’s January The Stripping of Freedom event about the TSA’s use of x-ray body scanners, the second from his classic 2006 Wired essay of the same title:
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.
The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.
Other than the above links, I have found two recent essays on the subject exceptionally good. The first, from a symposium in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is from Alex Gourevitch on fear, in which he notes
The great lie of the war on terror is not that we can sacrifice a little liberty for greater security. It is that fear can be eliminated, and that all we need to do to improve our society is defeat terrorism, rather than look at the other causes of our social, economic, and political anxiety. That is the great seduction of fear: It allows us to do nothing. It is easier to find new threats than new possibilities.
A decade after 9/11, we look backward and find ourselves in all-too-familiar surroundings. We have, in fact, accomplished very little. We have yet to do any of the serious thinking that might carry us beyond the banal, stifling quest for security. That kind of thinking would require us to have a different relationship to fear: a willingness to accept it, even cause it.
The second is by American writer Paul Theroux, but is not to be found in an American publication, interestingly enough, but in the Telegraph. It is outstanding and thoughtful in its entirety, but this part really resonated with me:
Of all the agencies created by the panicky response to 9/11, the Transportation Security Agency [sic.; it's Administration--ed.] (TSA) is the most visible and to me one of the most obnoxious for its obstinacy, its clumsiness, its inefficiency and its ubiquity. There was a time when bag searches and interrogation of travellers was purely a feature of travel in eastern Europe. Now such searches and screenings are a common feature of life in America; and that we have become habituated to it, submitting without complaint, is one of the saddest consequences of 9/11. I think of it as the Gestapo-with-a-grin, Stasi-with-a-smile method of intimidation, a species of security theatre that has redefined what a weapon is (a small bottle of liquid, a nail file, a hat pin, a shoe) – it has redefined the notion of privacy, of travel, of freedom.
Heck, even Business Week is arguing that it’s time to rethink counterterrorism spending.
So let’s get on with it. Be neither authoritarian nor submissive. Be indomitable. Refuse to be terrorized.
Lynne Kiesling
I wasn’t around KP a lot last week because I was spending a lot of time following the Patriot Act extension debacle and contacting my Congressional representatives to urge them to vote against it (of my so-called representatives, only Senator Durbin did so; I think this is the first time he and I have aligned on an issue).
The past couple of weeks have been brutal for our civil liberties in the US. Consider this incomplete list:
In the past two weeks the legal enforcement of our inalienable right to be free from unreasonable search seems to have almost disappeared.
You may ask why I’m paying so much attention to Patriot Act-related issues (including my frequently-articulated objections to the TSA, an outcome of the Patriot Act), and what is its relevance to our economic decisions and choices. The first and most obvious reason is the morality of the issue. Free people, in a country whose legal institutions are premised on protecting that freedom, have inalienable rights, and we have stipulated legal institutions for the protection of those rights (NOT for the granting and definition of those already-existing rights). In this case the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution is the legal institution being destroyed (and the First and Fifth (due process) are taking a beating too), with the evisceration of our civil liberties as the consequence.
The second reason is the more consequentialist, utilitarian one relating to economics. How can we thrive, be happy, be productive, invest, take on risks, when we are not secure in our life, liberty, and property? Our civil liberties are an essential foundation of those secure property rights on which our economic activity and economic growth are built. Without being secure in our life, liberty, and property, our economic selves wither.
Matt Zwolinski’s recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians articulates well why the erosion of civil liberties matters, both at a daily personal level and at an intellectual level, and implicitly at both a moral and economic level, and why we should emphasize both economic liberty and civil liberty in our policy arguments.
Economic freedom is not the only freedom over which governments currently run roughshod. And, as I have suggested here before, it is probably not even the most important one. …
But libertarians, and especially bleeding heart libertarians, ought to give these issues much more attention than they currently do. First, these issues matter for people’s lives, especially the lives of the poor and vulnerable who are much more likely to find themselves victimized by the growing police state, either directly or indirectly. Second, precisely because they aren’t under dispute we can make compelling arguments on these issues without first trying to resolve all of the difficult and intractable problems that divide various schools of political and philosophical thought.
Economic liberties and civil liberties are complements, and the erosion of one erodes the other. These are some of the reasons why I am paying such close attention to the Patriot Act and the TSA, why I am acting to encourage change.
Lynne Kiesling
Over the past six months the TSA has started using whole-body imaging scanners as primary screening devices without explicit Congressional authorization. Congress has only authorized the TSA’s privacy officer to solicit public comment and publish a privacy impact statement (according to EPIC’s lawsuit), and their authorization of TSA practices is implicit in their budget authorization. But TSA’s response is to use scanners as primary, and to bully passengers into accepting it by making the opt-out frisk onerously invasive. For example, two women have recently made public the invasive frisks that they’ve endured and the pain it caused them: journalist Amy Alkon and former Miss USA Susie Castillo (note, in particular, Castillo’s video accompanying her post, and the response from TSA spokesperson Luis Casanova, claiming that the screener in her case followed proper procedure, which in a rational world would means that the procedure is morally bankrupt). To quote Amy Alkon from a comment on her post:
It is not just “unfortunate” that I (and many others) have had this experience. It is a dangerous threat to our rights and part of the near constant attempts to degrade them in the name of safety these days. This is not “the price you pay for wanting to fly.” This is the price you pay for complacency about government rights grabs. If I or any person smart enough to hold their own in this comments section wanted to get a weapon or a bomb on a plane, they could.
But, sleep tight, sheeple.
The DHS and TSA are following these policies without Congressional authorization and without performing either economic analysis or risk assessment, relying solely as executive agencies on the continuing support of the executive branch. (The TSA also fails to comply with the public comment and disclosure requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, which is one aspect of EPIC’s lawsuit against them.)
Yet this technology is so fallible that in addition to failing to identify a gun on an agent 5 times as she passed through a scanner to test it, it will flag you for an anomaly even for a piece of lint in your trouser pocket. That anomaly marks you for a frisk, after having been scanned, so the “either-or” proposition turns into an intrusive “both-and” for many people (although we don’t know for sure how many, because the TSA refuses to compile and share such data).
In a recent post, Salon’s “Ask the Pilot” author Patrick Smith essentially summarizes my thinking on how ineffective, ludicrous, and offensive TSA policies are, and I encourage you to read his observations (and the comments on the post). In suggesting alternatives, he highlights the important political economy motives that are involved in the large expenditures on such ineffective technologies:
And I’m still waiting for somebody to explain the logic of the body scanners. Let’s ignore for a minute the audacity of these machines and our capitulation to their existence. (If, a decade ago, we were told that people would soon have to appear naked in order to board an airplane, such a claim would have been met by laughter and outrage. But here it has come to pass.) We’re asked to believe the scanners are a critical tool. Yet they are being deployed domestically rather than at airports overseas, and only sporadically at that. Should a bomber notice a scanner at one checkpoint, he merely needs to choose the next one down.
And here’s where it’s easy to be cynical. Instead of body scanners, why not rely on bomb-sniffing dogs? They’re highly effective, unobtrusive, and cheaper — not to mention cuter. I suspect it’s because there isn’t a big corporation somewhere that stands to earn billions of dollars from the deployment of dogs. It’s doubtful the scanners are making us safer. But rest assured they’re making somebody wealthy.
The one-two scan-frisk punch is both ineffective and a violation of our inalienable right to be free from unreasonable search, a right that in the US is supposed to be enforced by government employees who take an oath to uphold the Constitution. And yet the DHS and TSA have not performed any benefit-cost analysis to show whether their large tax-funded expenditures are worth it; even though the GAO has pushed them to do so, the feckless and irresponsible Congress has failed to hold the agencies accountable for this analysis. Such a benefit-cost analysis must include a risk assessment – not just a relative risk assessment among a set of security measures, but an absolute risk assessment of the probability of a terrorist attack and the value of its harm relative to other risks that we incur in our normal daily routines. Bruce Schneier makes this point eloquently in all of his writing about the security theater that we endure and pay for, and recently did so in a TED talk that I recommend.
Since Congress has failed in its fiduciary duty to American taxpayers, academic researchers have stepped into the breach and provided a benefit-cost analysis using the limited public data available. As this month’s Midwest Political Science Association annual meetings, Ohio State political scientist John Mueller and Australian civil engineering professor Mark Stewart presented a benefit-cost analysis of overall DHS (including TSA) expenditures over the past decade, as well as an analysis of the methodologies that DHS and TSA use to identify and prioritize their activities. Gulliver in the Economist also picked up on the paper over the weekend. The paper’s abstract:
The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents and of seeking to expend funds wisely. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically.
I strongly, heartily, fervently encourage you to read their analysis; while not ideal and obviously constrained by having to rely on some assumptions grounded in limited publicly-available data, their analysis makes conservative assumptions biased toward the case for increased expenditure. And yet they find that in order for this one trillion dollars increase in security spending to be worth it, we have to deter four attacks per day. This is a shocking result.
Their analysis starts with a question that too few people ask: is this expenditure worth it? They then critique DHS procedures that fail to perform benefit-cost analyses or accurate risk assessments:
Indeed, at times DHS has ignored specific calls by other government agencies to conduct risk assessments. In 2010, the Department began deploying full-body scanners at airports, a technology that will cost $1.2 billion per year. The Government Accountability Office specifically declared that conducting a cost-benefit analysis of this new technology to be “important.” As far as we can see, no such study was conducted. Or there was GAO’s request that DHS conduct a full cost/benefit analysis of the extremely costly process of scanning 100 percent of U.S.-bound containers. To do so would require the dedicated work of a few skilled analysts for a few months or possibly a year. Yet, DHS replied that, although it agreed that such a study would help to “frame the discussion and better inform Congress,” to actually carry it out “would place significant burdens on agency resources.”
Clearly, the DHS focuses all or almost all of its analyses on the contemplation of the consequences of a terrorist attack while substantially ignoring the equally important likelihood component of risk assessment as well as the key issue of risk reduction. In general, risk assessment seems to be simply a process of identifying a potential source of harm and then trying to do something about it without evaluating whether the new measures reduce risk sufficiently to justify their costs. (p. 4)
Of all of the disturbing points raised in the paper, Mueller’s and Stewart’s discussion of “probability neglect” and probability analysis is high on the list. Probability neglect is the tendency of people to focus on worst-case scenarios but not their likelihood, which is a substantial distortion when we are talking about very low probability, high cost events. DHS methods use this cognitive bias to their advantage. I can’t tell whether DHS uses probability analysis incorrectly due to their innumeracy or because it enhances their ability to extend their agenda and budget, but in either case this is unacceptable. Not only do they exploit probability neglect; they also do not apply probability analysis correctly:
What is necessary is due consideration to the spectrum of threats, not simply the worst one imaginable, in order to properly understand, and to coherently deal with, the risks to people, institutions, and the economy. The relevant decision-makers are professionals, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that they should do so seriously. Notwithstanding political pressures, the fact that the public has difficulties with probabilities when emotions are involved does not relieve those in charge of the requirement, even the duty, to make decisions about the expenditures of vast quantities of public monies in a responsible manner. …
A second stratagem for neglecting probability that is sometimes applied at DHS is to devise a rating scale where probabilities of attack are added to the losses. Thus, as a Congressional Research Service analysis points out, to determine whether a potential target should be protected, DHS has frequently assessed the target’s vulnerability and the consequences of an attack on it on an 80-point scale and the likelihood it will be attacked on a 20-point ranked scale. It then adds these together. Thus, a vulnerable target whose destruction would be highly consequential would be protected even if the likelihood it will be attacked is zero, and a less consequential target could go unprotected even if the likelihood it will be attacked is 100 percent.
This procedure violates the principles espoused in all risk assessment techniques such as those codified in international risk management standards supported by 26 countries including the United States. In these risk is invariably taken to be a product in which the attack probability is multiplied by the losses, not added to them. Essentially, what often seems to be happening is that DHS has a pot of money to dole out, and it has worked out a method for determining which projects are most worthy while avoiding determining whether any of them are actually worth any money at all. (pp. 6-7)
After describing their benefit-cost analysis and the results summarized in the abstract, they close with a much-needed discussion of “political realities”. Simply put, one common argument for Congress’ fecklessness on this topic is that individual members have no incentive to rein in DHS/TSA and hold them accountable for results and performance metrics because they fear that being seen as “soft on terrorism” will reduce their probability of election success. Mueller and Stewart provide evidence going back to the 1980s showing that such fears are overstated (but overstating fears seems to be the modus operandi here, doesn’t it?).
Moreover, individually and in aggregate Congress has a fiduciary duty to taxpayers to perform oversight and hold federal agencies accountable for how they spend taxpayer money. Why hasn’t Congress held these agencies accountable for the one trillion dollars spent over the past decade, which is clearly excessive? I endorse their statement that:
Political realities supply an understandable excuse for expending money, but not a valid one. In particular, they do not relieve officials of the responsibility of seeking to expend public funds wisely. If they feel they cannot do so, they should either resign or forthrightly admit they are being irresponsible, or they should have refused to take the job in the first place. To be irrational with your own money may be to be foolhardy, to give in to guilty pleasure, or to wallow in caprice. But to be irrational with other people’s money is to be irresponsible, to betray an essential trust. In the end, it becomes a dereliction of duty that cannot be justified by political pressure, bureaucratic constraints, or emotional drives. (p. 22)
Given this analysis, what are you going to do to fight such a fiscally irresponsible erosion of our rights? Among other things, I am going to call the offices of my three Congressional representatives, talk specifically to the staff member responsible for security issues, and send him/her this paper (which is a preview of their forthcoming book). I’m not sanguine about the impact of such an effort, so I solicit your suggestions for how we can, individually and collaboratively, rectify such irresponsibility. Otherwise I fear that T.S. Eliot and Thomas Jefferson were right:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
UPDATE: I’ve fixed the link to the “Ask the Pilot” post, and corrected the attribution to Salon.
Lynne Kiesling
Live! Here! Now! The annual Kauffman Foundation Econ Bloggers Forum is being webcast today, until 11:30 CDT and then again 1:00-4:00 CDT. A lineup of great speakers; I was unable to attend last year, but greatly enjoyed the event two years ago. I think Bryan Caplan is about to speak …
I will be participating remotely via video web conference link, talking about the economic and moral aspects of why I am not flying and why I’m not there in person, riffing off of my earlier post about the TSA and its immoral, illegal, wasteful and inefficient policies.
Lynne Kiesling
A concise public choice analysis of the distortionary economic rents created by the ever-increasing “layers” of TSA security theater, as reported today on the Wired gadget blog:
Airport “security” theater may be sickeningly pointless, but this stealthy introduction to a police state brings certain commercial advantages to those willing to cash in. First, it was the baggie makers that got rich. Then, it was the turn of laptop bag and sleeve manufacturers. Now its the turn of sneaker makers.
Adidas’ SLVR S-M-L Concept shoes are neither a concept nor “slvr” (silver?). What they are is TSA-friendy, with a stretchy upper and expandable sole which makes it easy to slip them off when being forced to undress and submit to the “security” “officers” of our totalitarian state. Sure, they may look like lace-up shoes, but that’s just a trick so you don’t look like you bought them on the over-60s shopping channel.
This pathetic genuflection to our governmental overlords has one neat side-effect: The shoes only need be made in three sizes, and they will stretch to fit. This also means that your girlfriend can now steal your shoes, along with your sweaters, socks and anything else that will fit her.
The SLVR S-M-L Concept shoes are $140 per pair. I told you somebody was getting rich. And what next? Crotchless pants to make invasive TSA groping a little bit easier?
In addition to Charlie Sorrel’s recognition of the rents that the TSA policies have created for Adidas, I applaud and echo his rhetoric. However, in his list of those who have profited from the expansion of the police state, he forgot to list the whole-body imaging scanner manufacturers, who have paid through the nose to get those rents, through the politically-connected lobbyists they have employed to persuade Congress of their fear-driven, security-industrial complex “business” model. Any rents that Adidas gets to enjoy from shoe sales will pale in comparison.
Lynne Kiesling
As I’ve mentioned before, I am passionately and actively opposed to the TSA’s fear-based violations of the rights and dignity of individuals. But my opposition extends beyond the moral and philosophical into the economic … and some recent commentaries indicate that I am not the only one!
First let’s think about the cost of the scanners being installed at airports, most of which are x-ray scanners that bombard you with ionizing radiation that penetrates your skin and may increase your risk of skin cancer, particularly if you are already in a high-risk category, in addition to displaying a naked image of your body. Economically speaking, the U.S. government has already spent $80 million on these machines, with another $90 million request in for this year. Politically speaking, most of the x-ray scanner purchases, and therefore a big chunk of that $170 million, are from Rapiscan, a company that benefits from the lucrative relationships of its security advisor, former Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff. Indeed, scanner companies employ many lobbyists, and 80% of the lobbyists for this industry are former Congress members or staffers.
But according to the GAO, the equipment purchase costs, while high, pale in comparison with the ongoing staffing costs that will have to ensue to use the whole-body imaging scanners, as reported in this Business Week article:
Staffing costs could add $2.4 billion to the overall expense of full-body scanners being deployed in airports in response to the attempted Christmas Day bombing, a congressional auditor said at a hearing today.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration should figure out if the expense is worth it, said Stephen Lord, a director at the Government Accountability Office.
Lord also said it’s unclear if the machines would have detected an explosive device allegedly hidden in the underpants of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the Dec. 25 bombing attempt on a commercial jet landing in Detroit.
“While GAO recognizes that TSA is attempting to address a vulnerability exposed by the December 2009 attempted attack, a cost-benefit analysis is important,” Lord said.
The added staffing cost is a consequence of the TSA more than doubling its planned acquisition of scanners to 1,800 from 878 after Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight, Lord told a panel of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Note that the TSA proposes, and Congress has so far rolled over and accepted, this expenditure and use of this technology for primary screening, despite the TSA’s known unwillingness and/or inability to perform any sort of meaningful benefit-cost analysis on these whole-body imaging x-ray machines. The TSA willfully refuses to provide a benefit estimate to evaluate against the $170 million of equipment costs plus the $2.4 billion in operating costs, plus the unseen and unestimated cost of the stripping of individuals of their rights and dignity.
Quantifying these benefits will be difficult, particularly when you take into account that most airline terrorism threats originate outside of the U.S. and that even this invasive technology can be fooled easily with some putty, or by concealing PETN (plastic explosive) in one’s mouth. Not only does the technology fail to accomplish what its supporters claim; to paraphrase Bruce Schneier, TSA’s strategic approach to passenger searches is too fear-based and too focused on things and not focused enough on behavior. I’d be very surprised if these expenditures, or even the whole TSA budget more generally, could pass even a window-dressing cost-benefit analysis.
According to an article from Dominic Tierney in the Atlantic, more individuals and policymakers are becoming more aware of this fact with respect to DHS in general, not just the TSA:
DHS is ripe for savings and efficiencies. The fruit isn’t just low hanging–it’s boxed and ready to ship. But Republicans have excluded Homeland Security from any cuts (along with defense, veterans affairs, Social Security, and Medicare).
Politics and ideology combine to curtail a rational debate about the Department of Homeland Security. Cutting DHS funding offers few votes. Quite the opposite: any politician who calls for reduced funding will face the wrath of special interests. And if a future terrorist attack could be linked–even tangentially–to earlier cuts, it might be career ending (this is an even bigger problem for Democrats who live in dread of being labeled “weak on terror”).
Tierney is challenging Republicans to be intellectually consistent in their quest to reduce government expenditure to tackle the $14 trillion government debt and the $1.3 trillion annual budget deficit, but regardless of partisan accusations, the evidence is mounting that the TSA (and DHS more generally) does not provide good value for money, does not give us a good return on the taxpayer and “airport security fee” payments to support their apparently dubious and ineffective activities.
Even the commenters on this post on the WSJ travel blog are quick to point out that the TSA is an ineffective and unresponsive bureaucracy, so when the post’s author muses on the lack of recent TSA complaint volume, there’s an avalanche of comments along the line of “why bother to file a comment with the TSA? They don’t respond. So I’m just going to stop flying until this Orwellian nightmare is finished.”
That point raises another unseen economic cost to the TSA’s intrusive procedures and unresponsive bureaucracy. What’s the economic cost of the foregone productive activity that doesn’t take place when people stop flying? Conference calls, web videos, and Skype are not perfect substitutes for face-to-face, interpersonal interaction, whether for work or leisure. Some estimate of that lost economic activity (just what you want when coming out of a recession!) would have to be added to the cost side of the cost-benefit analysis.
So when Matt Kibbe and Dick Armey ask what expenditures Congress should cut, as they did in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, here’s my top recommendation: Defund the $90 million request for additional x-ray scanner purchases. Pass a bill that picks up where H.R. 2200 did in the last Congress, by limiting the use of the x-ray scanners already purchased to secondary screening. Refocus the existing TSA budget on actually being able to deliver on actual cargo screening rather than passenger search policies that operate on the presumption that every person wanting to fly is a potential terrorist. Or, as Art Carden argued so eloquently in November, abolish the TSA, return the responsibility for airline security to the, you know, airlines, and direct those resources to some higher-value use, like paying down the $14 trillion national debt. With that kind of tradeoff, how can we afford not to do that?
But the invasive TSA policies and the widespread anger and aggravation they have generated have led to one piece of positive economic activity, although I think it technically still counts as a Bastiat-style broken window:
Elguji Software, LLC. released their second app for the iOS platform: TSAzr – Share Your TSA Experience.
TSAzr (pronounced “TAY-zer”), allows the flying public to share their TSA screening experience with the world.
Passengers can provide information such as if they went through a body scanner, received a pat down (and what the pat down experience was like), even if their “junk” was touched.
Now with the Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and the new TSAzr app, everyone can rate their experience with the TSA, airport by airport. Even post their TSA experience on their Facebook wall.
See which airports are performing the most body scans, which airports are doing the most pat downs, and which airports people are rating the highest and lowest. View real time data and graphics for each airport.
With a $14 trillion federal government debt, a $1.3 trillion annual federal government budget deficit, and government policies that are leading people to reduce their economically productive activity, we cannot afford the expensive and failed bureaucracy that the TSA provides. Nor can we afford to spend money on the TSA budget to cater to special interests peddling ineffectual and morally reprehensible technologies.
We cannot afford to maintain the TSA charade any longer, either economically or morally.
Lynne Kiesling
I have been a too-silent opponent of the Patriot Act’s authorization of invasive surveillance in the name of national security. One of the consequences of that authorization has been the growth of the Department of Homeland Security and, under it, the formation and growth of the TSA. Those of us who travel frequently have known the TSA as “Thousands Standing Around” for years, and have derided the TSA policies on shoes (the “shoe carnival”) and liquids that are the security equivalent of locking the barn after the horse is stolen.
The TSA’s push to increase the intrusiveness of their physical search of passengers for specific items has pushed beyond laughable inconvenience and inefficiency into literally physically invasive search that does not qualify as a reasonable search under the administrative search carve-out of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment, as written, protects individuals from unreasonable government search and seizure of their person and property, and the TSA operates under the administrative search carve-out from it — basically, if you put your bags on the conveyor you are presumed to have consented to the search of your person and possessions. The TSA are trying to claim that the new backscatter x-ray full-body scanners, millimeter wave full body scanners, and aggressive, frisking-style pat-downs are a sufficiently reasonable search that they should be considered legal under administrative search.
The TSA’s position is wrong, and instead is an aggressive, authoritarian push that violates not just the dignity of individuals, but also our innate (i.e. NOT government-granted) civil and human rights. Their policies and procedures operate on the presumption that every single person that presents himself or herself at the airport to engage in a commercial transportation transaction is a potential terrorist. That presumption flies in the face of every concept of freedom and individual rights that is at the foundation of a free, dynamic, vibrant society.
They do so in the name of making us safer in the face of terrorist threats, but this is a false equivalence, and one where economic logic is important. Their invasive practices require lots of resources. Did you know that each of these scanners costs $175,000? How many FBI intelligence agents and explosive-sniffing K-9 teams could we train and employ with the millions of dollars that Congress has already authorized for the purchase of these scanners? The opportunity cost of these scanners is enormous. Enormous. And it puts us at more risk than we would face if we instead focused those resources on more effective tools, such as behaviorally-targeted intelligence gathering and explosive-detecting dogs.
But here’s where the political economy comes in. The companies who manufacture these technologies are active lobbyists, and have spread their lobbying dollars liberally among the heads of security-related committees and sub-committees in the 111th Congress, and those members of Congress have delivered millions of dollars in scanner contracts to these companies. If that’s the decision-making dynamic in Congress, what hope do the relatively cheap intelligence and dog options have in the face of well-funded x-ray and MMW scanner lobbyists?
These trampling of individual civil liberties have economic implications. Remember that airlines operate on razor-thin margins, and Herb Kelleher of Southwest famously observed that the last 5 or 6 passengers on a plane make a difference between profit and loss on that flight. It doesn’t take a large reduction in demand for air transportation (an inward shift in the demand curve) for the airlines to see that profit margin evaporate. For example, I used to be both Platinum on American and Premier on United, which meant I flew at least 75,000 miles annually. For 2011, because of the TSA, I am taking 1 flight at the end of January because I made a commitment before these policies were implemented, but after that, I will not fly. I have zero flights planned, and only two tentative trips to which I’ve committed for vacation in July and December. With razor-thin margins, it doesn’t take many frequent flyers who want to maintain their dignity and respect staying off of planes to turn profits to losses, at the hands (literally!) of the TSA.
If you have made some of these arguments yourself, you have probably heard the response that flying is not a right. That is wrong. The Supreme Court has ruled in several cases that flight falls under the individual rights we have to free movement under the Constitution, and this right was reinforced formally in language in the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. We do have the right to fly, and to fly without unreasonable search that strips us of our dignity.
Other economists have written about other more directly economic aspects of this important issue, thinking in terms of benefit-cost analysis. In November Art Carden wrote in Forbes that full frontal nudity doesn’t make us safer, and I strongly encourage you to read his analysis. In December Steve Horwitz made the substitution effect argument: if people substitute out of flying and into driving to avoid invasive TSA searches, those people are at much higher risk of accident and death:
To the degree that the new TSA procedures raise the psychic cost of flying, either by increasing the wait time at security and/or by making people very uncomfortable with see-through scanning or being fondled by a TSA agent, it will induce them to look for alternative methods of travel. For most people, that will be driving rather than flying. And the reality is that you are far more likely mile for mile to be killed in an automobile accident than in an airplane. The most dangerous part of air travel is driving to the airport. And if you consider not all of the risks of flying but only the risk of what the TSA procedures are supposed to prevent, namely the extraordinarily small chance of being killed in a terrorist attack on an airplane, it is even more likely that you will die in your car than on the plane.
Today the Electronic Privacy Information Center is hosting an event, The Stripping of Freedom: A Careful Scan of TSA Security Procedures, with several excellent panels. If you care about such rights, and I obviously think you should, I encourage you to check out EPIC’s activity in this area (including their lawsuit against the TSA to gain an injunction against the use of scanners for primary screening), contact your airlines and hotels, and contact your members of Congress. Otherwise our Fourth Amendment rights, which are essential to a dynamic, thriving society, will continue to erode, and will erode at an increasing rate.
