The registered traveler program, in which people surrender a bit of themselves into the maw of the Overmind in exchange for some bogus promise of “security” is so obviously bad that I’m not going to belabor it here. Here’s an artilcle that pricks the surface of why this program is stupid and dangerous — and asks the question, how long will it remain “voluntary”?
One of the things that’s always puzzled me about the Transportaion Security Agency is why people — good guys and bad guys alike, evidently– consider mass transportation the default target for attack. If bad guys started blowing up shopping malls would we then have to create a Shopping Security Agency and have our retninas scanned before being allowed to shop?
Like John Gilmore, I think that the TSA has a lot more to do with conditioning people to surrender privacy and freedom of movement to The Authorities than it does with increasing our safety. I distrust, emphatically distrust, the TSA and all its ilk, but I’m willing to admit that there may be some benefit derived from it to counterbalance the incipient totalitarianism it presages and prepares the way for, like John the Baptist making smooth the way for the One Who Was to Come. But as for the Registered Traveler program in particular, I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
By any rational analysis, the nonsense at the airport has neither effective nor efficient effect on security. The effort is clearly not coordinated or balanced with other potential targets outside of transportation, or even with other modes of transportation. And even within the narrow domain of “commercial aircraft”, we screen virtually all passengers and their luggage for fear of folks blowing themselves up, but virtually none of the cargo that is anonymously placed on nearly every flight. Absurd.
A partial explanation for this is simply that the Bush administration are incompetent fuck-ups. From college, to private business, to Iraq and Katrina, the man and the people he associates with obviously don’t know what they’re doing. And yet the man and his associates are more than competent at one thing: dissembling. The TSA actions are merely a high-profile show to convince the unregarded masses that the administration is “doing something.” Cargo doesn’t notice that it’s been screened, it can’t be bullied into being fearful, and it doesn’t vote. Therefore, we harass our people and keep them in a state of fear.