[Mb-civic] Profiling soles - William F.S. Miles - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Profiling soles

By William F.S. Miles  |  September 23, 2005

MAYBE IT was just plain laziness, or a sudden rush of perversity, but 
when an airport screener directed me to remove my sneakers before 
passing through the metal detector, I politely declined. On account of 
the careful wording she used, I knew I was within my rights. ''You 
should remove them," she'd said just a tad menacingly, ''to avoid 
secondary screening." She did not say, ''You have to take them off."

The unstated message was this: Federal regulations do not require 
removal of footgear at the initial airport security check. A passenger 
has a right to pass through the X-ray machine fully shod. But a suspect 
shoe eventually entails more work for the screeners. Though the 
screeners' mission may be our protection, when it comes to the trade-off 
between their convenience and ours, guess who comes first.

So airport screeners exert subtle (and not so subtle) pressure on 
anxious airline passengers to voluntarily renounce yet another civil 
right: the right to remain fully clothed until found footwear suspect.

As the screener had warned me, I was immediately subject to what in 
airport security argot is known as ''secondary": the wands, the pat 
down, and, yes, the inevitable denuding of my feet. The secondary 
screener -- once he arrived -- was polite to a fault. It was the 
security gate minder who, before calling for ''secondary," gave me my 
Richard Reid eureka moment. When I asked the agent if my Avias had 
indeed set off the machine, he replied, matter-of-factly: ''It's not 
that. Your shoes have a profile."

So that's the compromise between security and liberty to which we have 
been reduced. Ethnic profiling and racial profiling are out. Honed 
intuition and common sense are unconstitutional. At the security gate, 
agents of the Transportation Security Administration discriminate not a 
wit between American white-haired grandmothers in wheelchairs and Saudi 
young males on transit visas. Instead of experienced security analysts, 
we rely on random computer lotteries to decide who gets yanked from line 
for random body searches. We cannot profile people. Instead, we profile 
shoes.

Now, don't get me wrong. As a frequent flier, I am all in favor of tight 
airport security. As a Kerry-Gore-Dukakis voter, I also admit to a civil 
liberty bias. But I want a rational, human, reflective system when we 
choose to fly America's skies. Not lotto software and shoe profilers.

I want screening machines that can look into your soles as well as they 
do the rest of your body. Until then, I'll settle for a transparent shoe 
removal rule: no more of this ''You'll be better off (and we'll have 
less to do) if you take them off right now" business. I want the shame 
and indignity of random body searches of the elderly to cease.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/23/profiling_soles/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050923/029495eb/attachment.htm