Jaunted

The problem is that there's actually no such thing as "random screening." Someone, somewhere is always making a (usually) realtime decision about which passengers get pulled aside. Profiling kicks the decision up the ladder and makes the selection criteria more explicit, with either computers or security experts making the choice. Random screening bumps the decision downward and gives almost absolute discretion to the agents at checkpoints.

The problem—as we're seeing in this story, and as we know from other incidents—is that sometimes those agents are enormous jackasses. That's partly why, since literally the first months after 9/11, we've been hearing stories about Midwest blonds getting pulled aside and felt up. And perhaps not coincidentally, here we have a Midwest blond making exactly that complaint.

Which isn't to say that we should dump random screening and adopt profiling. There's been something of a democratic discussion for almost a decade now, and Americans have functionally decided the practical and ethical costs of profiling are just too high. But it is to say that when we're adding up costs and benefits we have to take into account these kinds of incidents, where the discretion given to bad apple TSA agents lets them get their rocks off by humiliating passengers.

[Photo: TSA]

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