The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is a federal agency discussed at length in a 2015 episode of The Bob Zadek Show featuring investigative journalist Jim Bovard. Bob Zadek introduces the subject by describing the TSA as a government agency formed in the aftermath of 11, not as a genuinely new agency but as a rearrangement of existing boxes with large sums of money directed into the newly formed TSA. Its stated mission, Zadek says, is to make travel safe, and its primary presence is at airports, though he notes SWAT teams conducting surprise checks on Greyhound buses and trains as well. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Size, budget and mission
Bovard states that the agency has about 45,000 TSA screeners who work at airports and hassle travelers. Zadek asks about the agency’s budget, and Bovard replies that it amounts to quite a few billion dollars, which the agency is proud of and defends. Bovard characterizes the agency as arrogant and arbitrary, saying that if someone is abused by it, the chance of getting answers or justice is almost nil. He notes that the agency has been criticized by the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, by the Government Accountability Office, and by private investigations, and that despite its screeners and whole-body scanners it is almost completely incompetent at discovering weapons and mock explosives when Inspector General agents attempt to smuggle them through as a test of the system. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Security theater and the problem of measuring value
Zadek frames the agency’s central rhetorical protection as the impossibility of measuring its value: on any day when nothing bad happens in the air, the TSA can claim credit, so the average American cannot determine whether the enormous sums spent, and the liberty and privacy surrendered, purchase anything at all. Bovard responds that the first thing to understand is not to trust the government’s own claims, because the government has been caught lying about the TSA and other programs and has covered up major failures. He cites over 400 TSA agents who have been fired for stealing from luggage and from people going through screening, and describes the agency’s history as an unending series of scandals even as its officials speak as if entitled to perpetual deference. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
The SPOT program
Bovard describes a TSA program called SPOT, the screening of passengers by observation techniques, in which thousands of TSA agents go through airports doing chat-downs and watching for micro-expressions that might signal a terrorist or someone planning to bomb an airplane. He says the actual list of warning signs includes yawning, wringing of hands, widely open staring eyes, and gazing down, and that his favorite warning sign is someone who has excessive complaints about the screening process. Zadek interrupts to marvel at the government’s skill at designing acronyms, noting that the Patriot Act was itself an acronym, and Bovard replies that it is too bad the government spends more time crafting acronyms than designing good programs. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Scandals and arbitrary power
Bovard recounts writing a story for the New York Times eleven years earlier on how many TSA agents were thieves robbing passengers, which he says made a mockery of the agency’s pretense of having chosen the best and brightest to exercise arbitrary power over the rest of us. He says the TSA denied any problem at the time, and that about four to six weeks later the agency paid a nationwide class action settlement for people who claimed they had been robbed by TSA agents. Zadek raises what he calls one of the most significant issues in the whole structure of the TSA: that a single, relatively untrained agent, acting almost alone and without anything resembling due process, can deny a person the right to travel and can kick someone off a plane. Bovard agrees that there is a great deal of arbitrary power held by low-level, not very well-trained and sometimes arrogant people, and says that once a federal agency has arbitrary power the agents are off the leash. Zadek adds that agents are incented to stop a lot of people, comparing them to police officers whose performance is measured by how many tickets they write. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Invasive technology and its evolution
Zadek observes that some people remember pre-TSA travel, recalling old films in which a passenger steps from a cab and walks directly to the airplane, and warns that those who grow up with the TSA accept it as the norm. Bovard says the agency has become far more aggressive, far more groping, and far more punitive over roughly thirteen or fourteen years, and that a sea change occurred in 2010 with the widespread adoption of whole-body X-ray machines capable of producing what he calls a birthday suit photo, detailed enough to reveal whether a male has been circumcised or whether a female has an IUD. He says the TSA claims the photos are not kept, but that similar machines elsewhere were programmed to capture images and that an agent could photograph the screen with a cell phone. On the scanners’ radiation, Bovard says pregnant women and people with other health issues would not want to be radiated by the feds every time they travel, and that one TSA defense was that the machines are checked once a year for radiation emission levels. He also describes TSA agents barking at travelers to raise their hands higher, and says that people who opt out of the scanner for a pat-down are sometimes targeted for punitive treatment, as he found out in Portland, Oregon. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Self-censorship and the rule of law
Zadek describes monitoring his own speech while waiting in a TSA line, afraid that a wisecrack could get him pulled out of line and cause him to miss a plane, and asks what it is about American society that makes millions of people afraid of their own government for merely speaking. Bovard says that most of the time people in screening lines seem to bristle at the nonsense, but that others would be happy to submit to a body cavity search if federal agents told them it would make them safe, and that many Americans are willing to give up freedom, dignity and privacy for a bogus promise of safety. Zadek later invokes a core principle of constitutional law—paraphrased—that when government encroaches on basic constitutional rights it must do so in the least intrusive way possible and must assure Americans that no less intrusive way exists, and argues the TSA is the opposite: the most expensive and least effective measure, intruding on the liberty of all Americans with the broadest brush. Bovard says most Americans submit to it but he is not sure how many accept it, and that he would like to cast the TSA into the junk bin of history. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
The 95% failure rate
Zadek asks Bovard to explain the well-reported 95% failure rate. Bovard says it came from a confidential Inspector General report that was leaked in late May or early June, finding that agents testing the screening process were able to smuggle weapons and bombs past TSA screeners and whole-body scanners 95% of the time. He adds that the TSA has not caught any terrorist, despite spending billions, hassling millions of Americans, and domineering. Zadek notes that the TSA would say terrorists do not even try because they know they will be caught, which he says is belied by the 95% failure rate. Bovard attributes the absence of further attacks partly to structural changes such as tighter cockpits and to passengers no longer being passive in a hijacking attempt, and says the TSA is a good inkblot test for how Americans feel about their freedom and rights. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
9/11 as an intelligence failure
Zadek asks listeners to imagine that 9/11 never happened but that the government nonetheless announced it feared hijacking and built the TSA exactly as it now exists, suggesting Americans would not have stood for it, and concludes that 9/11 gave birth to the TSA. He argues that 9/11 represented an intelligence failure that could have been avoided through better communication among intelligence agencies, and that the fix was yet another failure costing profound inconvenience with no benefit, since the TSA does not prevent 9/11-style events. Bovard calls it an intelligence and law enforcement failure, citing warning signs the feds disregarded and a foreign policy that was making more enemies than people recognized, and mentions drone attacks sowing seeds of hatred. He refers to a book he wrote a dozen years earlier, Terrorism and Tyranny, in which he argued that killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans. Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015)
Across episodes
The excerpts come from a single episode, the 2015 conversation with Jim Bovard, and show no development across multiple episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the TSA was formally established, what statute created it, or which committee or department oversees it beyond the references to the Inspector General for Homeland Security and the Government Accountability Office. They do not give the agency’s exact budget figure, the outcome of any litigation beyond the class action settlement Bovard mentions, or the identity of any TSA official. The episode ends mid-sentence in Bovard’s remarks about Americans being docile, and the excerpts contain no discussion of later TSA policies, leadership changes, or reforms.