Charles Pierce: Let Americans Read Fifty Shades of Grey in Peace

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55894/tsa-books-aclu/


Let Americans Read Fifty Shades of Grey in Peace

The TSA wants a look at your books, please.

By Charles P. Pierce
Jun 26, 2017


The ACLU would like you to know that your air travel experience is about to become even less fun, even more intrusive, and more than a touch more East Germanish, courtesy of the Transportation Safety Administration, the most singularly useless law-enforcement operation on the planet.


The TSA is testing new requirements that passengers remove books and other paper goods from their carry-on baggage when going through airline security. Given the sensitivity of our reading choices, this raises privacy concerns. Tests of the policy are underway in some small airports around the country, and DHS Secretary John Kelly recently said that "we might, and likely will" apply the policy nationwide. "What we're doing now is working out the tactics, techniques, and procedures, if you will, in a few airports, to find out exactly how to do that with the least amount of inconvenience to the traveler," he told Fox News. The policy may also apply to food items.


Please explain to me how paper goods are now a threat.

The rationale for the policy change given by Kelly and the TSA is that the imposition of growing fees for checked baggage by the airlines has prompted passengers to more densely pack their carry-ons, and that this has made it harder for screeners to identify particular items amid the jumble of images appearing on their screens. Laptops must already be pulled out separately because they are regarded as a heightened threat and can be better examined if they are not scanned in a bag with many other objects. It is not clear to me whether books are also regarded as a special threat or whether they are hard for the TSA to distinguish from explosives. I do know from a tour I was given of the TSA's testing facility a few years ago that the scanners highlight items that are especially dense, and items that are organic (since explosives are made of organic, i.e. carbon-based, matter). That's probably why the agency thinks it would speed things along to pull out food and books.


But this business about the books is alarming as hell, as the ACLU demonstrates.

And we know that in the airline screening environment in particular, there have been multiple cases where passengers have been singled out because of their First Amendment-protected expressions. For example, in 2010 the ACLU sued on behalf of a man who was abusively interrogated, handcuffed, and detained for nearly five hours because he was carrying a set of Arabic-language flash cards and a book critical of U.S. foreign policy. We also know that the DHS database known as the "Automated Targeting System," which tracks information on international travelers, has included notations in travelers' permanent files about controversial books in their possession.

Even someone reading a bestseller like "50 Shades of Grey" or a mild self-help book with a title such as "What Should I Do With My Life?" might be shy about exposing his or her reading habits.


I should hope so. I have seen these stylish matrons, and Dads in ill-fitting shorts, surreptitiously buying the Fifty Shades series and stashing them under their copies of Harpers after paying for them, the way Woody Allen bought magazines in Bananas. These folks have enough problems stashing their suburbo-porn in their carry-ons without some guy in a blue shirt with a badge passing judgment while they're trying to put their belt and their shoes back on simultaneously.

Really, now. Is that too much to ask?