Quiz: What do Pocket Knives and PRISM Have in Common?
It doesn’t matter if it’s the tiny knife hanging from your keychain, or a top secret data collection program. Once something starts under the banner of “security” today, it doesn’t seem to matter if the threat is reduced, the leadership changes or people realize the end of the banner simply reads “theater.” From pocket knives to server farms, modern security appears to be a one-way street towards ever-more invasive and restrictive policies.
The headlines for several days now have spurred big debate over the continued surveillance programs by the federal government. But the same one-way security sign that appears to have guided the latest NSA spying efforts - once you start, you can never stop - is the same kind of sign that guides security at a much smaller scale, like with wiffle ball bats and pocket knives at the airport.
Back in early March, TSA administrator John Pistole surprised many after announcing that after a long review, the agency was making changes to its prohibited items list for passengers on airliners. The thousands of small knives confiscated at airport security checkpoints around the country each week, were no longer going to be confiscated. If you wanted to carry one with a folding, non-locking blade, less than 2.36 inches (6 centimeters) long, you were in luck. For those who apparently want to carry on their lacrosse and hockey sticks, ski poles, or small/lightweight baseball bats, that inconvenience was also gone, they were off the list too.
The new banned list was to take effect in April. The TSA said the change was part of an effort to allow “Transportation Security Officers to better focus their efforts on finding higher threat items such as explosives.” The agency said the decision to allow the small knives, golf clubs and other sporting goods also aligned the TSA “more closely with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards.”
Now it’s mid-June and you still can’t put your little knife, or that wine bottle corkscrew with the fancy foil cutting blade in your carry on. Last week, on the same day news of the NSA spying broke, the TSA announced that after initially delaying the change, it was now canceling it. Turns out there were some loud voices who didn’t want to be aligned with any international standard. And they definitely didn’t want anybody driving down security lane with a reverse gear.
Items on the prohibited items list were something Pistole had been looking at since he took the job as the head of the TSA in 2010. What he discovered was the real threat was to anybody who declared a change of threat status. The announcement that the TSA might actually loosen the list of proscribed objects was met with swift response from politicians, the unions representing pilots and flight attendants and others who said the security of passengers, crew and the flight were being put at risk by making the change.
There was a similar outcry in 2005 when small scissors, screwdrivers and other tools were allowed on airliners. But that change to the list stuck. Today you can carry a large sturdy screwdriver in your carry on, but not a pocket knife.
There were many who supported the change to the list, including again politicians, and even some pilots. But they were mostly people who admired the courage of an administrator who dared reassess the security threat to airliners. In the end the groups representing small knife owners and wiffle ball bat players could not compete with the one-way security groups.
Of course, this is just one small scene in our modern security world. The inconvenience posed by the carry-on banned list might pale in comparison to what is happening at the other end of the cable that transmitted this story. And that raises an even harder question for our country: If there’s no way back from the security escalation against pocket knives on aircraft, is there any hope for even bigger threats against common sense and principle?
