Analog SFF, June 2011

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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS by Stanley Schmidt

Serial: ENERGIZED: PART I OF IV by Edward M. Lerner

Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME

Science Fact: NANOPARTICLES FOR DRUG DELIVERY by Carol Wuenschell

Novelette: CITIZEN-ASTRONAUT by David D. Levine

Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE GREAT MISSILE MYSTERY OF 2010 by Jeffery D. Kooistra

Department: BIOLOG: DAVID LEVINE by Richard A. Lovett

Short Story: TAKE ONE FOR THE ROAD by Jamie Todd Rubin

Short Story: STONE AGE by Alastair Mayer

Novelette: KAWATARO by Alec Nevala-Lee

Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS

Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis

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As Thanksgiving 2010 approached, travelers bound for Grandmother's house (or wherever) anticipated their journey with more than the traditional holiday trepidation, for two reasons. The agonies of autumnal holiday travel may seem irrelevant in midsummer, but they're anything but. The same problems seem more than likely to recur, quite possibly in more severe form, the next time around; and now is the time to do something about them—if anybody really wants to. In any case, the actions and reactions of both sides—government and protesters—provide an instructive illustration of a larger and more general danger.

And it just may be relevant to another holiday that does occur in summer.

The first concern facing travelers on the day before Thanksgiving was the array of unprecedentedly intrusive security procedures that had been recently instituted at airports, which many travelers would be experiencing for the first time. The second was the threat—much heralded and advocated on the internet, though not much happened in reality—of massive protests against those security measures.

The new antiterrorist procedures, in case you've been hanging out with Rip Van Winkle and missed hearing about them, involve (a) full-body scanners, which use one of two types of low-level radiation to show inspectors a detailed image of a passenger's body unobscured by clothing, and (b) full-body patdowns, at a level previously regarded as appropriate only for medical exams or couples who know each other
very
well, as an alternative for passengers who object strongly to (a).

No third alternative was offered, except, “If you don't like it, don't fly."

Not surprisingly, many people did object strongly to both (a) and (b), saying that the Transportation Security Administration had gone too far—especially after watching widely circulated online video clips of things like TSA agents tormenting three-year-olds lest their teddy bears turn out to be bombs. At least one columnist, Al Lewis (of Dow Jones Newswires), suggested that the TSA itself had in effect turned into a terrorist organization. And a movement grew on the internet urging travelers to insist
en masse
on having detailed patdowns rather than detailed body imaging—which, since they take longer, would have resulted in a massive clogging and disruption of air travel on the busiest day of the year.

That didn't happen, but John S. Pistole, head of the TSA, was concerned enough about the prospect to call Joe Sharkey, who writes a travel column for
The New York Times
, to try to justify his agency's position and head off the threat. His concerns sounded admirable: he did not want some people's holidays ruined by other people's protests. He acknowledged that the new procedures were invasive, but also reminded everyone that “the threats are real."

Indeed they are. Anyone who remembers 9/11—and that means pretty much everyone—knows that. But is it possible to protect against
every
threat? Or does there come a point at which the protective measures are worse than what they purport to protect against? In other words, is there a point at which “enough is enough"? If so, does that point still lie ahead of us, or have we already passed it?

We've all heard, so often that it has become a cliché, the argument that, “If
x
saves even one life, it's worthwhile and we should do it.” But is that always true? Let's think this through to its logical conclusion.

The more a security inspection can detect, the more chances it has of finding a weapon that might be missed by some less thorough technique. Therefore, clearly, either a full-body scan or a full-body patdown is better than the quaint approaches of bygone days, because they can reveal more kinds of objects than those more timid methods. But why stop there? When the currently new methods were announced we heard cries of, “What's next? Cavity searches? Requiring everybody to fly naked, with no luggage?"

Well, why not? Those would certainly reduce the uncertainty even more. And if it saves even one life . . .

Of course, if we really want to eliminate every possible risk and save every possible life, we'll have to insist that these things be done for
everybody
. Never mind bleeding hearts who fear that that three-year-old will be too traumatized ever to fly again. Somebody
could
plant a bomb in a teddy bear, so we'll have to check every one of those. And we can't draw a line at three-year-olds—not even the youngest babies can be trusted. True, they're not likely to concoct diabolical plots on their own, but diabolical adults could plant something on them. So they, too, must be searched thoroughly. (I'll leave it to wiser heads than mine to figure out the exact logistics if there are no exemptions for diapers.)

And why stop with physical searches? Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) can already tell us something about what specific parts of a brain are active at a given moment, and better neurological scanning technologies are being developed all the time. When they improve to the point where we can tell specifically what a person is thinking or feeling, don't we owe it to ourselves to take full advantage of that, to detect malevolent intent before it can be translated into action? If it means that people have to get to the airport days instead of mere hours before their flights, and if fares have to rise astronomically to pay for all this, surely those are just minor inconveniences, if even one life is saved.

All this may sound too farfetched even for discussion, and I'll grant you that hardly anyone would accept these extreme measures if somebody proposed implementing them all at once, right now. But as I've pointed out on numerous previous occasions, people will accept astonishingly huge changes if they're imposed not all at once, but as a series of little steps, each of which seems innocuous or even desirable in and of itself—and people's idea of “innocuous” and “desirable” can change radically when they're operating in a state of induced panic. To many people now, suggestions of cavity searches and nude travel without luggage seem unthinkable—but they thought the same thing five or six years ago about the measures now in use. Twenty-five years ago they thought the same thing about much milder measures that we now take for granted, like the “liquid limits” and the requirement to put shoes and coats on the conveyor instead of wearing them. (Don't believe me? Go digging in your archives and reread my editorials “Acid Raindrops” [February 1985] and “Softening Us Up” [September 2005].)

So when a TSA spokesman tells us that they don't plan to do anything more intrusive than they're doing now, I consider that meaningless. They may be telling the truth, in that they have no such plans now; but that doesn't mean that they won't in another four years, after somebody finds a new way to scare them.

If and when that happens, I consider it highly likely that people will protest, just as a few did last Thanksgiving—but then they'll go along with the latest round of “unthinkable” measures, just as they have in the past. Pistole told the
Times
, “When somebody gets on a plane, they want to know that everybody else—O.K., maybe not themselves but everyone else—has been thoroughly screened.” I haven't seen any hard numbers to convince me that he's right about most people thinking that way, but I do know that some do. I've seen enough human behavior to believe that the same individuals are quite capable of demanding maximal screening for everybody else, even as they grumble about it when they're on the receiving end—while blissfully unaware of the inconsistency of their position.

So on my more cynical days, I suspect that not only are full-body scans and patdowns here to stay, but cavity searches, “check your clothes at the door,” and brain scans are only a matter of time. But on less cynical days, I sometimes dream that eventually a more balanced view will prevail—that significant numbers of people will realize that if they want absolute safety for themselves, they must be prepared to accept the same indignities they wish on others.

And that even those will never be enough, because no matter how many dangers you anticipate and guard against, nature or your fellow creatures will always manage to come up with another one. Flying, even with the present level of terrorism, is one of the safest things we do; but any sane person who boards a plane must accept the reality that freak weather or mechanical failure
could
bring the plane down. The probability is small, but it's always there; so you do what you reasonably can to minimize it, expect airlines and governments to do the same, and simply live with the slight residual risk.