Former DHS Official Blames Privacy Advocates For TSA's Aggressive Procedures

colinneagle writes with an interesting excerpt from Senate testimony offered yesterday, on the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, from Stewart Baker. Baker formerly served as DHS Assistant Secretary and NSA General Counsel, and gave his opinion on the source of the real problems within the TSA, opining: "Unlike border officials, though, TSA ended up taking more time to inspect everyone, treating all travelers as potential terrorists, and subjecting many to whole-body imaging and enhanced pat-downs. We can't blame TSA for this wrong turn, though. Privacy lobbies persuaded Congress that TSA couldn't be trusted with data about the travelers it was screening. With no information about travelers, TSA had no choice but to treat them all alike, sending us down a long blind alley that has inconvenienced billions."

a no win situation.

[Anonymous Coward]

dhs was created and given the impossible job of keeping everyone safe all the time.

if someone gets killed then dhs will be the scapegoat in endless congressional hearings.

what did we expect DHS and the TSA would do? i personally expect them to freak-the-fuck-out and go crazy with the aggressive techniques.

the public bitches no matter what.

Re:Sounds like evil to me

[mellon]

Depends on their goal. The underwear bomber made a shitload of money for the pornoscanner companies. The shoe bomber slowed down security checkpoints. The liquid explosive fraud created a huge hassle and is now making a lot of money for concessions at airports. The amount of economic damage these attacks have caused is absolutely massive! A suitcase bomb at the TSA screening area doesn't have an easy and economically damaging countermeasure, so there's not much point. That attack was tried once [wikipedia.org]. Aside from a temporary dip in the stock market in Russia, it was ineffective—no massively expensive security measures have been instituted in response.

Re:Sounds like evil to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Al-Qaeda want to anyways?
It would take a ridiculous amount of effort to even equal the amount of killing and terrorizing of americans our own law-enforcement and 'security' measures commit.
Better to send a threatening letter and let their staunchest allies; The American Government, do the job themselves.

Re:bizaro universe

[XcepticZP]

Call me weird, but your story reminds me a whole lot of this talk of gun registration and the subsequent disarming of the public that so many call for. Bullies play by their rules, and you're stuck with gimped rules to defend yourself with against them. Leaving you only one recourse, to cry for help. But what happens when no one comes which is so often the case?

Re:Sounds like evil to me

[Actually, I do RTFA]

no massively expensive security measures have been instituted in response

That's because the massively expensive security measures that the government ordered implemented were overturned by the Russian courts as depriving people of rights.

In America, you violate the rights of citizens in the name of security; In (former) Soviet Russia, the independent judiciary acts as a check and balance on the totalitarian executive branch.

For some reason, it's less funny then most of Yakov's jokes.