Security theatre and the cult of doing
Dropped my spouse off at the water taxi this morning at 8am. She’ll get to the airport by 10 which hopefully will give her enough time to get through security for a 2:30 flight. But we’ll see.
I’ve been reflecting a little on the airborne events of the last few days and reading lots of blogs that say that the Transportation Security Administration in the United States (and CATSA here in Canada) has it all wrong when it comes to their latest response to an attempt to blow up an airplane. The problem is that they are trapped in the fear loop that the United States government has created for itself since 9/11.
US (and by association, the rest of us) security policy has been driven, at a base level, by fear. The thinking goes that the more we are doing, the safer we are, and if there is a breach of security we need to do more. The problem with this line of thinking is that the world will never be perfectly safe. This means that every perceived (and reported) security breach drives the need for SOMEBODY TO DO SOMETHING!. If the TSA does not act, they are accused of being soft and endangering the lives of flyers. I have heard friends say to others this week “do you want to be unsafe or bear a delay in getting on board?” This question creates a ridiculous positive feedback loop, equating more DOING with safety. And one wonders if it will ever happen that these measures will be rolled back. How do you argue that doing more makes us safer and then stop doing pat downs for example without being accused of doing less to protect us?
Reactionary doing satisfies the appearance of safety and security, but it does not necessarily do anything to make people safer. In fact, in times of panic or inconvenience, you could argue that people become more and more frustrated, their anger levels rise, and the skies are actually unsafer as a result, not from terrorism, but from air rage.
Security theatre comes from the school of management that respects measurables. But it arises out of a short term thinking mindset that disconnects the activity from the systemic context. You can certainly show that three or four new procedures have been put in place, and you can measure things like delays to flights, how many acts of terrorism have been committed in the next few months and so on. But all that does is take away from the systemic context of security. The problem is that the major measureable for security is zero – zero terrorist attempts. Zero is unattainable, and unmeasureable in the long run. As soon as zero changes to one, a whole new set of reactions is triggered.
The net effect this has on the world is to make people more fearful of events that are highly improbable (I read yesterday somewhere that the probability of being on a plane that is the target of a terrorist attack over the last 10 years world wide is 20 times the probability of being struck by lightning). And there is certainly no guarantee of safety, there never can be. Mr. Abdultallab snuck explosives onto a plane after being cleared through an airport that had TSA certification. He had a visa to the United States, and he got through Amsterdam’s security as well. There are many ways to do this, and there will always be ways to do this. Short of a strip search for every passenger and an xray to ensure that there is nothing INSIDE your body that could be dangerous, air travel is as secure as it has ever been. Probably the best move of the last ten year shas been to lock the flight deck doors. That alone has meant that there have only been 7 hijackings since 9/11. most of them in Africa, and all of them ending with no loss of life. Crude attempts to fashion explosives in the cabin from innocuous materials have been tried twice and have failed. One Bolivian claimed he had a bomb, but it was simply tins full of dirt and adorned with lightbulbs.
Air travel is safe – as safe as it has ever been. This is totally at odds with what we are being told this week and shown in the actions of the security organizations that have lost themselves in a feedback loop of panic and reaction. The more patting down, personal searches and confinement to your seat you experience, the less safe you feel, without being any more safe than you actually are.
“But we’re DOING something!”
PS…just as I finished this post, Caitlin called from the airport. CATSA is not allowing any carry on baggage at all today on her flight to Los Angeles. All she can bring on is her laptop. Everything else has to go in the checked luggage. One assumes this will speed up the boarding process, limiting the personal searches that have to happen, but that makes for a pretty boring 3 hours in teh air and another 4 hours on the ground. Not even a book is allowed.
Matthew May argues in a similar vein in his book The Pursuit of Elegance where he talks about our ‘natural, instinctive bias for action’ and two major obstacles we face in trying to solve problems elegantly: acting and adding. The current security situation is a classic example of doing more to be *seen* to be effective. He goes on to say: “We mistakenly pose the question ‘What should we do?’ before asking ‘What is possible?’ We favour ‘implementation over incubation’. Your post is a good example of this bias for action and how it manifests in our lives.
Interesting to parse this a little further. in martial arts, you train to act, but it’s an action that comes from practice, from a ground of clarity and fearlessness. The TSA has acted in a way that, if it was in a fight, would get itself killed quickly. No ground, committing to a strike out of fear and anxiety, no way to work with the energy of the situation.
Action is not a bad thing, but action that arises from unclarity and no practice can result in much unintended damage happening.
I am so glad there are people like you in the world who are speaking truth about this stuff.
I have been highly critical of responses to terror attempts for a long time.
It is also interesting to note that more generally fear of crime has risen dramatically during a period when actual crime rates have dropped.
I wonder what the rates of hijacking were in the 1970s for example?
Here’s a good list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_aircraft_hijackings
This is true about crime. In most cities in Canada, crime has decreased over the last decade, but politicians still get themselves elected on a law and order ticket.
Security theatre is not security. Those are two different things.
Chris–
The opposite of love is fear; conversely, the opposite of fear is love. Chris, you have named it well.
We are in a cycle of fear””an attack is made, we become fearful, hunker down, do something however ineffectual. We could somehow accept that there is a certain level of danger past which we can do nothing except be vigilant. But making people sit for an hour with nothing in their laps but their freezing hands will do nothing but make us all more fearful. And fear does not watch very well.
How do we help us to break out of this circle of fear?
Love is somehow the answer, but I do not have the way to apply it. Should we love the terror? I don’t think so: the very attempt was successful in increasing the level of terror in the United States””just touch the fear already there in any way, and the victim will crank up the terror willingly and quickly. Do we love the perpetrator? Somewhere it is written to do so. But we can also and more quickly love the victims””us””by realizing that we cannot stop all attempts.
We must calm ourselves first. We must love ourselves first.
Right now, we do not love ourselves, we fear ourselves””we fear all of us, the other of us. How do we move from there to loving us?
:- Doug.
One thing about your comment Doug: this notion of the victim. I recall this starting in earnest on 9/11 when everyone declared “we are all New Yorkers” or something to that effect. We conflated concern and empathy for the families of those that died that day with an affront against US personally. We claimed the ground of “victim” and all the attendant outrage that goes along with that.
Victims are not always the best people to decide on response to their wrongs. THis is why we have a justice system, and especially why we have a restorative justice system in some places.
The fact is that, I think it’s not a stretch to say that this latest attempt was actually a victimless crime. Sure it inconvenienced a lot of people, and no doubt there were some minor injuries but no one was victimized by this failed attempt.
And yet, the response is unbridled outrage and everyone and their dog claiming the moral high ground of victimhood. This is why victimhood is so powerful. We build up victims in this culture to the status of martyrs for whatever cause we project on them. We give them a few wishes and nod solemnly in doing their bidding. And it’s one thing to do that with genuine victims like someone who has been disabled by a physical assault, but another to do it with people who claim “an assault on you is an assault on me.” That logic has led the globe in a worldwide war against it’s own paranoia in which millions of people are becoming real victims of confused egos run amuck. That is probably the legacy of this insane decade: that Americans got to claim the story of 9/11 as “an attack on our freedom, which must be defended at all costs.” From that, a borderline psychopathic President was allowed to divide the world into two camps, manufacture it into a rationale for two open wars and a bunch of nasty nasty covert operations and the result is that Americans are less free today than they are at the beginning of 2000.
That was not due to those that committed the crimes on 9/11: it was entirely due to the response. but people who were not victims failing to love themselves enough that they lost their ground. Let’s let this next decade be one where we train together in clarity and love. The fierce love of courage and maturity that it takes to bring peace in the world, in our collective and individual realms.
Thanks for this Chris. The experience I had flying this week from the fortunately small airport of Cranbrook, BC was what you described. I showed up, fortunately, to a small plane with 25 passengers. Myself and my three kids. Each of us packed very well with checked bags and our carryon backpacks. We were given the same treatment as Caitlin. Zoe (14) felt particularly frustrated not being able to bring her book on. The kids saw it all as “stupid.” They felt the personal frustration. In the patting down, taking a used tissue out of pocket for Zoe and showing the runny nose remnants to the officer. I mostly played the role of adaptive Dad, inviting the kids to not give it much energy. A poignant moment came as Zoe in her frustration claimed how “stupid it was to have such treatment all because of one person.” It was a moment to illuminate what you have named. And how easy it is to screw up big protective systems. You can never fully protect in this kind of doing. I’m not against the doings. However, there is a ridiculousness to think that absolutes are even possible. Thanks for your naming. I forwarded to Zoe for her reading.
Yup – and of course this is all assuming that the reactions are simply to look like they’re doing something. I’m not sure it’s all so benign. There are a lot of new tools everyday to dig deeper into personal lives, and as the popularity of Google, Youtube and Facebook have shown, many of us have an innate fascination with this. Governments and spy agencies love it even more. ‘Security’ forces worldwide are more of a threat to us than hijackers.
Meanwhile, there may be an upside. Right now if you need a deep body scan to find out if you have any tumors or whatnot, you may find yourself on a long waiting list. When they – inevitably – decide that they need to scan inside our bodies as well for concealed ‘threats’, then all we’ll need to do is a take a plane flight for better medical screening. I can’t wait.
John–
Love your idea!
Chris–
I love as well your turn of phrase: “a worldwide war against it”™s own paranoia”–that is really incisive.
As to victims, I do think that the resulting paranoia was either planned by the bin Ladens of this world before 9-11, or used by them successfully after, such as the way “security” has changed after 2009/12/25.
:- Doug.