On flying from Tokyo Narita to Washington, DC recently I was treated to a
piece of security theatre of the worst kind. After all the usual security
checks on entering the airside, after the boarding pass check at the gate,
there were security staff on the jetway pulling passengerrs (it appeared to
be random but as a caucasian travelling on a plane with mostly Chinese and
Japanese on it, I have no idea if I was racially or nationality profiled for
the check). The check consisted of them asking to open my bag. I had a
roll-on suitcase and a laptop bag. They only wanted to see the laptop bag and
the "check" consisted of opening the two main zip closures (there's five zip
enclosures on the bag) and briefly looking inside. I was then "frisked".
Since I was wearing a leather jacket with large pockets containing things
such as digital camera, paperback book, sunglasses, the frisking under the
jacket seemed particularly intrusive and utterly pointless. The only possible
way I can consider these checks to have any validity is if they are intended
to reveal nervousness about further checking [which wold then prompt a more
thorough check]. However, given the manner in which these checks were done -
there was no CCTV that I could detect, for example, this seems highly
unlikely. Anyway, I dislike being pawed at by strangers even when it's
expected so being able to distinguish between my dislike of the process (and
frankly my annoyance at the apparent worthlessness of these checks) would be
very difficult to distinguish from worry that they were going to find
something illicit that I was trying to conceal. As always with security
theatre, I also worry that this kind of activity takes resources away from
security operations which might actually work.
--
Profesor Andrew A Adams
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan
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