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Japan Launching Random Airport Pat-Downs, Because You Might Be a Terrorist

April 25, 2012 at 2:55 PM | by | Comment (1)

If you've been day dreaming to yourself "I'm really looking forward to 2012 being a year of aviation for Japan travel, because even though tickets to the world's largest tower are $37 a pop at least there's no chance I'll get groped leaving the country"—we've got some bad news for you.

It was just last fall when a Japanese comedy show mocked TSA for the agency's gropey random searches. The segment poked fun at how "random" searches can become excuses for getting a little too hands-on with passengers, a point we've unpacked explicitly here and here and here. In Japan things were conducted with much more circumspection, apparently.

Fast forward to earlier this week. The Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism announced a new policy under which—yes—passengers traveling through Japanese airports with international flights may now be subjected to random searches.

Right now passengers get pat-downs only if they light up metal detectors at checkpoints. Starting in June about ten percent of all passengers will be pulled aside for a search, which the Japanese insist will "act as a deterrent to terrorism, including acts involving explosives and weapons which metal detectors do not pick up." Yeah OK.

There are arguments about random searches vs. profiling going back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11. By the mid-2000's those were full-blown debates, complete with computer simulations measuring the percent of bad guys nailed randomly vs. how long it takes terrorists to reverse engineer profiles. Those debates were never really resolved.

What did happen is that the U.S. spent a decade with people uselessly screaming back and forth at each other, mostly to no avail. Some airports eventually had to resort to putting up movie posters to ease the dehumanization of airport security (?!?). So in a way we're glad the Japanese are opening this can of worms. Why should Americans have all the fun?

[Photo: katorisi / Wiki Commons]

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Nothing new

This has been done in Sweden and many other countries for many years. Here a certain % are randomly selected by the metal detectors as to avoid accusations of false profiling and also because criminals does not always look like criminals and the other way round. The reason for searching people not setting of the detectors are of course that not all dangerous objects are made of metal.
stefaneh on April 26, 2012 at 11:11 AM #Permalink

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