Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Well Code Me Pink

This program seems to have been floated some time ago but I’m just getting around to being outraged by it.  The idea seems to be that we should rate and rank our citizens by how much of a risk they seem to be to blow up an airplane.  If our review of their credit history, employment history, and arrest record are sufficiently alarming, they will be grounded, prohibited entry onto a common carrier regardless of the fact that they’re carrying no weapons and pose no actual risk.  We’re using sloppy shortcuts instead of actual El Al style vigilance, and the victim is our civil rights. 

It reminds me of the fatuous blowhard who was expounding to a few tourists behind me in line for the screenings at the airport last year; he was opining that the TSA should use him to select people for secondary screenings, and not subject little children and old ladies to this indignity (and waste everyone elses’ time while they’re at it).  “I’ve never seen a Norwegian terrorist,” he chortled at his sheep-faced audience.  I turned to him and asked, “If you saw three middleeastern shopkeepers and Tim McVeigh, who would you pick to search?  I consider domestic terrorists as dangerous as foreign ones, myself.” He had nothing more to say on the subject for the remainder of our wait in line. 

Then we have stories like this.  That little bastard’s a code orange - good thing he’s got great credit or he’d have missed his flight…