I HAD SOME TIME TO THINK RECENTLY ABOUT OUR GOVernment’s fixation with security. That was during a 45-minute wait to
clear security on a Monday morning at the St. Louis airport. Part of
the issue was what I (and I suspect hundreds of other travelers) saw as
the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) misalignment of
resources—one agent for TSA PreCheck travelers, one for Southwest
Airlines’ elite status travelers, and one for the hordes (which included me).
But part of the issue goes back to the basic fear that seems to underlie
some of the government’s more extreme security initiatives. Don’t get me
wrong—I’m as interested as anyone else in seeing that my flight is safe
from terrorist attack. But consider: We take off our shoes because of a
single effort to smuggle a bomb in shoes—an attempt
that failed. We go through a full-body scan because of a
single effort to hide explosives in underwear, which also
failed. We are limited to three-ounce bottles of liquids
because of a potential bomb threat that never, literally
and figuratively, got off the ground. Now we know that
our government spies on every last one of us through
the invasive National Security Agency (NSA). In the
security arena, it seems, we’ve turned the American justice system on its head. Each of us is presumed guilty.
The airline security checks perhaps can be accepted
as a major inconvenience. The NSA intrusiveness is
to my mind a much greater threat to our democratic
ideals. Yet another major requirement in the growing security web threatens the overall health of our
import-dependent economy. In 2006, Congress mandated scanning of
all maritime containers bound for the U.S. That requirement has not
been implemented as of yet. Fortunately, this time, the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) appears to have made a sensible judgment.
Jeh Johnson, the DHS secretary, sent a letter to Sen. Tom Carper,
chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee, saying he would extend the deadline for implementing the
rule for another two years. In the letter, he said the department’s abil-
ity to comply with the requirement was “highly improbable,” “hugely
expensive,” and “not the best use of taxpayer resources.”
That extension was good news for the nation’s importers and their
customers—that is, just about every one of us. Some 70 business orga-
nizations, including the National Retail Federation, American Trucking
Associations, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, sent Johnson a letter
supporting that decision. More critically, that letter urged continuation
of the risk-based approach to cargo screening currently used by the DHS
and called for Congress to repeal the 100-percent scanning requirement.
Congress should do so.
bigpicture
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