The Security Ratchet
Americans have always talked—and preached—a great deal about freedom. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed our rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death. But whenever fear takes hold, Americans have repeatedly traded liberty for the promise of greater safety. Once surrendered, that liberty is rarely returned.
Air travel after September 11, 2001, provides a good example. The hijackers exploited a particular weakness—cockpit doors—to turn airplanes into guided missiles. Combined with the assumption that hijackers wanted hostages, met demands, and safe passage, that weakness left airplanes vulnerable to a terrible new kind of attack.
The answer to the particular attack carried out on 9/11 was straightforward: abandon the old assumptions, reinforce and lock cockpit doors, change crew procedures, and increase the presence of air marshals. None of those measures requires ordinary travelers to surrender their privacy or freedom of movement. Together they made the 9/11 method—seizing an airplane and deliberately steering it into a target—extraordinarily difficult to repeat.
But our government did not stop there. Congress created the Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”), federalized passenger screening, and built an enormous security system through which millions of Americans must now pass. Shoes came off. Liquids were seized if not properly size-limited. Laptops, phones, and other electronics were separately scanned. Bodies and carry-on bags were searched. Families seeing passengers off or awaiting their return were forced to remain outside security because only people with boarding passes and proper identification could pass through the new process. Curbside waiting became a police matter, with armed officers shooing away—and sometimes threatening to arrest—people who lingered too long saying goodbye to loved ones.
Meanwhile, passengers continued to board buses and trains without anything remotely resembling the TSA system. A passenger can board most buses or trains with a large suitcase without passing through an airport-style checkpoint. Those systems face real risks, but we do not treat that possibility as a reason to search every passenger. We tolerate those risks as part of ordinary life. Life has risks, and that is one of them.
That is how the security ratchet works. A frightening event occurs. Government promises to “fix it.” Citizens surrender a little convenience, privacy, movement, and liberty. The new restrictions become normal. Questioning them sounds reckless. Surrendering more freedom in exchange for measures whose additional security value is often unproven, undisclosed, or too small to justify the burden becomes expected.
Keeping bombs and weapons off airplanes may justify some passenger screening. But “some screening” does not justify every search, every identification demand, every database, every delay, or every indignity TSA invents. Once the cockpit was secured, government should have been required to prove that each additional restriction produced enough additional safety to justify what it took from us. Instead, the burden was reversed: travelers were expected to surrender their freedom unless they could prove that the surrender was unnecessary.
People who remember flying before 9/11 remember a freer and far less burdensome experience. We can reasonably accept direct safeguards against cockpit takeover and other demonstrated threats. But every additional restriction should have to answer a plain question: Does this actually make us safer—and safer enough to justify what it takes from us?
Security matters. But so does liberty. Citizens in a genuinely free country should demand concrete evidence before permanently trading one for the other. Instead, we shuffle forward in line, remove whatever we are told to remove, display whatever papers we are told to display, and gradually stop asking whether any of it works. The security bureaucracy remains. Our freedom does not return. It simply oozes away.
Further reading: GAO on reinforced cockpit doors and aviation security; GAO on evaluating the cost and effectiveness of security countermeasures; FBI, “Richard Reid’s Shoes”; and Justice Department, attempted bombing of Flight 253.