Editorial: Airport Screening Is Overly Intrusive
Your editorial, Jan. 25, "Pauls' run-in with the TSA,'' is only half right. Rand Paul and GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul certainly are right to be staunch critics of TSA screening procedures; I am, too.
It's government mediocrity at its bureaucratic best. There have been many regrettable situations that were clearly wrong and overly intrusive by TSA employees.
Are the screenings necessary, in general? Yes, as you say, it's unfortunately the reality of the post-9/11 world.
Rand Paul may or may not be setting a good example by refusing a patdown and, therefore, was put in the situation of being detained. But he's within his rights, and those rights should be better respected and alternate procedures put in place by the TSA. And they should be carried out in a very timely way so as not to cause passengers to miss their flights.
That's where the current system becomes even more abusive; if you won't tolerate the TSA's intrusiveness and possibly a patdown, then they'll escort you off to some room with no windows to sit for a long enough time to ensure you'll miss your flight.
And what about the other systematic failures of the TSA screening process? For all the effort put in by everyone involved, who says it really works? I've sat at a gate many times and had to listen to a loud, ear-piercing alarm for 10-15 minutes because some unauthorized person entered or exited a supposedly secure door. Was the terminal cleared and everyone rescreened? No. And why is 2½ ounces the rule for liquids in one container, but you can travel with an unlimited number of such containers?
The thing that most highlights the poor planning and general incompetence of the TSA system is multiple or duplicate screenings. If you travel in from Europe where you will be screened before boarding just like in the USA, clear customs and want to reboard a connecting flight, you're required to be screened again. Why? You've been in a secure area the entire time. It doesn't work that way traveling to Europe, where you just proceed to your connecting flight.
Of course, if the TSA doesn't trust the screening done in Europe of passengers coming into the USA, then the whole process is a complete joke. There is nothing stopping someone from directly exiting the terminal on arrival in the USA.
And if you take a flight from Philadelphia to JFK and on to Europe, you're screened once in Philly and then again in New York because they haven't built a secure corridor to move passengers from the domestic terminal to the international terminal. What would it cost to build a secure corridor between terminals compared with employing 50 or more TSA personnel 24/7/365 to screen everyone passing through on connecting flights? And, of course, it would eliminate the aggravation of duplicate screenings and a recurrence of all the problems already mentioned.
I'm not sure I'll vote for Ron Paul just yet, but father and son's "trusted traveler" program may be worth another look.
David S. Butterworth
West Lampeter Township
Copyright 2012 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.
