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Jewish World Review June 11, 2013/ 3 Tamuz, 5773 Our Insecurity About Security By Lenore Skenazy
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | "Security Theater" is the fantastic phrase invented by security guru Bruce Schneier to describe the kinds of charades we go through to make ourselves feel safe. It's what happens when you're at the airport and you go through the explosives detector and the TSA folks take you aside for a private patting. Personally, I don't mind them touching me — that's just their job. I mind the fact that WORRYING ABOUT ME is their job. I'm straggling through the line, meek and stocking-footed, a skinny, 50-something lady with glasses and a suitcase they can SEE is full of salami. (Whenever I go visit my mom in Chicago, I bring fabulous Vienna-brand salami back to New York. Yes, I KNOW New York is where great salami is supposed to come from, but I bring salami TO it. Come to think of it, maybe that's why the TSA folks search me.) And yet, the only things they ever find on me — besides cholesterol oozing from every pore — are stray barettes or a dime I forgot to fish out of my pocket. So the machine is picking up every little last metallic bit as if it is a threat to safety in the skies. If doctors were this sensitive, we'd have exploratory surgery for every pimple. It's overkill masquerading as "caution." It's the problem that defines our era. Which brings me to a letter I just got from a mom. You'll see the connection. "At my daughter's middle school (7th and 8th graders), I have to sign in and get a badge to walk — 10 feet — to the glassed-in administrative office to sign my child in and out of school. Apparently parents can't walk 10 feet in a public space without having had a background check and signing in. I have to show my driver's license to two sets of people, as well. My son, a high school student, asked me to bring him a notebook one day. I had to sign in at the front desk and get a badge, walk to the counselor's office for his grade, sign in AGAIN, sign another form to leave the notebook, then sign back out again at the counselor's office and again at the front desk. It took me over 15 minutes to drop off a forgotten notebook. I told my son NEVER AGAIN could I bring him anything. It was ridiculous. Talk about 'security theater!'"
Well, yes, let's. Schneier's hypothesis is that there's security we can't see that actually DOES make us safer (everything from diplomacy to plain clothes detectives), and then there's some security that we DO see that doesn't make us any safer at all. If we were just a bit more mature about the fact that life can never be competely secure, maybe we could cut back on the latter. At schools, we're wasting time and goodwill by treating all parents like potential perverts or snipers. A friend of mine who went to accompany her son's field trip last week was almost turned away because a computer glitch failed to find her background check. Without it, the school couldn't trust her to chaperone the class. Even though you'd think — rationally — that not having enough chaperones is probably more dangerous than having a mom along without a background check, too bad. In our fear, we are willing to waste human capital. And then there's wasting capital captial — money. To date, funding the TSA has cost us $60 trillion. As the website Online Criminal Justice Degree calculates it, that works out to $6 million per gun found — none of them belonging to a terrorist. When the time comes that we decide that over-caution is costing us more in decency and dollars than it is creating in real security, I hope we will scale back. And, by the way, that time is now.
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Mitch Albom | |||||||||||||
