Unsatisfied with patting down barefoot grandmothers, the TSA is now ready to deploy an even more fun toy — body scanners that allow for a full inspection of the airline security victim’s body through his clothing.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the shape of security has been evolving in ways that some advocates of liberty have found troubling. More importantly, this evolution has not always, or even over the majority of the long haul, resulted in real improvements to the safety of, well, anyone.

Given the corrupt nature of many agents of the State, one might somewhat understand the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to extend the power of a not-so-precious few. Such is to be expected from people who are motivated by a quest for power and little else. Despite Lao Tsu’s admonition that "Only fools seek power; and the greatest fools seek it through force," we know that the elixir of coercive state power is a powerful and addictive intoxicant for many. It would be a mistake to call all of today’s rights infringers fools. Many of them are skilled. (Some of them might even have good intentions.) Either way, they are very adroit at getting their way and can present all manner of valid-sounding justifications for whatever steps they wish to take.

It is no real surprise then, when lower-echelon bureaucrats begin to drink deeply of the same Kool-Aid. One such mini-Napoleon, James Schear, TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport exclaims, "It's the wave of the future." He’s talking about the new body scanners, but I’m still a little confused. To whose future does he refer? If electronic body inspection is the wave of the near future, I can only guess what the further-away future holds.

Even if one ignores bureauthugs like Schear, the grip of the save-us-from-the-terrorists hype is more widespread than just people like him. As we see in a recent piece from the Christian Science Monitor, even if a priest asks you to watch his luggage, you’d better not, lest safety be compromised. Please. At the risk of succumbing to using the argument from effect, few can argue with one assertion: the probability of being the victim of a terrorist attack is almost infinitesimal.

Consider: more people died choking on olives last year than will die in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil this year. (That might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not.  Around 4093 people died from choking in 2004, for example. A little less than 900 of those people inhaled an article of food.) Even if almost none of those people were eating olives, it’s still way more than the number killed by an exploding suitcase left by a priest, as far as I can tell. (On the other hand, maybe I should be careful with these types of comparisons, lest the Transportation Security Agency be joined by the Food Choking Security Agency.)

When the push for more and more aggressive search techniques first came into vogue at U.S. airports, my friends and I used to joke that eventually the powers-that-be would have everyone naked at the checkpoints. After a very thorough search, all passengers would be issued a toga and, or course, complete safety would ensue! It seems now that our jokes are starting to come true. I have heard other writers suggest that making planes into pseudo-Romper Rooms won’t increase safety, and I think they are correct.

Why?  I’m glad you asked.

Paraphrasing Bruce Schneier from a long-ago column written very soon after the 9/11 attacks, it is a simple matter of cause-and-effect. Unless specific security measures being insufficient actually caused the attacks, ostensibly increasing security has no real chance of lessening the probability of subsequent attacks. For example, the attackers did not break any security protocols. They didn’t even lie to gain admittance to the planes. As such, having each passenger visit an on-concourse proctologist is unlikely to help. 

Says Schneier in another classic offering:

Since 9/11, two -- or maybe three -- things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and -- possibly -- sky marshals. Everything else -- all the security measures that affect privacy -- is just security theater and a waste of effort.

Schneier goes on: "The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control."

Schneier and many others have put this debate into context, as I attempted to do in a piece for The New American entitled, “Living Under Surveillance” some time ago. Says Schneier, “The problem is not obtaining data, it's deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it.”

It seems to me rather obvious that looking through the clothing of every passenger provides a system of further control without instituting one iota more security. That is, unless it is simply a step along the path toward TSA-approved togas.