Our airport security system is a giant hassle. It’s very costly. And now we have the incredible privilege of having government bureaucrats grope our private parts.
So are we getting big benefits to offset these high costs? Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner has a column about the TSA that includes a single sentence (actually, a fragment of a sentence) that pretty much tells us what we need to know.
…despite years of imposing increasingly invasive new security procedures, the TSA has yet to catch one terrorist.
To be fair, one interpretation of this sentence is that the TSA and its overseas counterparts have done such a great job that terrorists have given up. Yet the “shoe bomber” made it on a plane, as did the “underwear bomber.”
Moreover, the Government Accountability Office warns that it’s unclear whether the new body-imaging approach would have caught the underwear bomber. And since this approach apparently is unable to detect certain types of bombs hidden in body cavities (use your imagination), we’re still left with the fundamental issue of whether the bureaucracy is imposing high costs on innocent people without providing a fail-safe way of stopping bad guys.
That being said, I confess that I’m amazed that terrorists haven’t succeeded in knocking down more planes since 9-11. Somebody, somewhere, deserves some credit. After all, protecting us from aggression is one of the few legitimate responsibilities of government.
