Ten Years After 9/11, TSA Doubts Remain
A decade after this century’s “Day of Infamy,” FlyersRights still questions our government’s efforts to provide real air travel security. Like all other Americans, we at FlyersRights.org want our travel to be safe. However, we demand that security measures imposed upon us be effective, safe, constitutional, and consistently-applied.
Are we getting what we need? Chicago Tribune reporter Jon Hilkevitch recently took a hard look at security issues and the government’s attempts to address them since 9/11. In his September 6th article, Hilkevitch notes that travel hassles remain, with doubtful assurances of real security. Many Americans (FlyersRights members among them) are dissatisfied and skeptical of what he calls “silly and ineffective security measures designed to obscure glaring weaknesses in a well-funded system that has had 10 years to get it right.”
We pad, barefoot, through security lines, shove our personal belongings into the maw of an X-ray machine, face the choice of standing in a machine that irradiates us while conducting a strip search or submitting to a groping body search, and then spend more time getting reorganized enough to make it to the gate. Yet we aren’t actually contributing to more secure air travel—we’re just participating in an endless game of Security Theater.
There are signs of progress, as the TSA explores better ways to secure our travel, but pilot programs and research are not enough. FlyersRights will continue to speak for America’s air travelling public until sanity returns to air security.
