Get Your Hands off Our Collective Junk and Start Profiling!

"Get your hands off my junk, or I will have you arrested!".

This is one version of the refrain that it being spoken, or shouted, across the nation. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been authorized by a Homeland Security directive to place full body scanners in many of America’s airports. Yes that's rights, now, when you shuffle by JFKs security check, it will not only be the holes in your socks that are "exposed", but also the most private of your private property.

Of course you can opt-out and be subjected to a thorough hands-on grouping.

When confronted with this impossible choice, many just shrug their heads or murmur that is the better of two evils, the other being a terrorist attack. Yet I wonder does this approach really increase our security?

I mean Israel faces a much more consistent threat and has an airline security apparatus that is the envy of the modern world, so why don't they grope and expose? Yes Israel is a tiny country and, with only one major international airport, it faces much less of a logistical problem. But given that HS measures are so intrusive, should we not do everything possible to avoid them, especially considering their obvious logical flaws?

I mean in Israel, (and I apologize for continuing to return to them as the paradigm, but they understand terror) there are checkpoints at the entrance to the airport. This is because terrorists will target any location with high density human populations -malls, trains, restaurants etc. In other words "exposing" Americans does not in the least prevent terror; on the contrary it surrenders to it.

Yes terrorists have a special incentive to specifically bomb plains so as to undermine our economic viability, but Israel has dealt with that without fondling every visitor and citizen.
Put otherwise, the TSA's actions are both unnecessary and don't work.

So why is our increasingly inept government reaching into our pants, this time through the zipper?
Undoubtedly some, you know who you are, will respond that the corporations, and politicians desperate for local job creation, are pushing for the acceptance of these secularized porn flick apparatuses. Ok, but we can just as easily employ private security firms, similar to Blackwater, to help ensure our security.

I know what you’re thinking:

That this suggestion just brings us back to square one, and standard TSA practices are failing.
Yes but that’s not what I mean. You see I think the TSA can do its job and do it as effectively as Israel. All we need to do is profile.

When I brought this up with a Muslim friend he was aghast, and I don't blame him. But the profiling system that Israel uses is a lot more sophisticated and accurate, then just identifying and separating Middle-Eastern/Muslim faces from the crowd. Think the show "Don't Lie to Me", coupled with a comprehensive computer system that integrates million of disparate pieces of information into a near perfect assessment of individual fliers.

For instance, prior to the x-ray baggage check on international flights to Israel, EVERY customer is subjected to a brief but friendly interrogation. The answers are evaluated not only by their content but also by delivery. Obviously this is only one small part in a multi-layered process that is very expensive. But so are those machines and the privacy they violate.

It all boils down to whether our society is so frightened by the term profiling that we are willing to give up exactly that which we are afraid of loosing with government profiling: our autonomy, privacy, and self-respect.

If you ask me get your hands off our collective junk and start profiling!