If You Would Just Pledge to PBS, This Wouldn't Happen
Years ago I was a Graduate Teaching Assistant for an introduction to archæology course. The professor devised several practical activities for the "discussion sections" that we TAs taught, to be followed by analytical write-up homeworks.
For one such assignment, students were asked to imagine how an archæologist of the future might interpret an everyday object from today. My students discussed telephones, radios, CDs (by far the most popular object), even loofahs.
Without exception, every student suggested their object might be interpreted as a weapon.
I had nearly 100 students that term, and every last one of them could conceive of their ordinary object as a weapon. Think about that. Then read this.
The airports and TSA won't give you an exhaustive list of banned carry-on objects, because what's banned is potential weapons, which is up to the discretion of the examiners. So even if you take care not to pack anything bannable in your carry-on bags, you never know what you're going to end up having to leave behind, through no fault of your own. Given what my students could imagine, it's a wonder that we get to carry anything onto aircraft.
Two points.
First, if there's no provision for returning confiscated items, it seems ethically tantamount to theft (or "government taking" if you prefer), especially since they then turn around and sell them. (I would be much less annoyed if they donated them to, say, Goodwill, or the Salvation Army, or otherwise avoid profitting from the activity.). They're using a vague but stricter standard than what a reasonable person would consider as a potential weapon, so you have to make an educated guess: and if you guess wrong, you've just lost your stuff.
The solution? Require airports to have a confiscated-objects office. When an object is confiscated, you are issued a receipt, the object is stored in the office, and when you present the receipt upon return, you get the object back. Objects unclaimed after one month may then be disposed of in accordance with the policy currently in effect.
Or, for small objects, you could have a confiscated-objects bag on the aircraft: the objects are essentially checked-in at the security checkpoint, and then each flight's bag is delivered into the custody of the flight crew just before departure, and stored in a secure space in the cabin. After arrival, the bag is delivered to the next small-item-check station and departing passengers may collect their objects after exiting the security checkpoint.
Simply to confiscate things that fall within the realm of uncertain banned-ness is to treat the passengers as potential criminals: it's not that you made a mistake, which is forgiven at the cost of some inconvenience. Rather, it implies that you should have known better, and you're to be punished by loss of the objects.
This leads into my second point: how civil liberties are eroded. Since you don't know what you can't have, the safest strategy is to be as conservative as possible: the travel-packing version of the lawyers' "Cover Your Ass" strategies. In practice, this means leaving all sorts of ordinary, useful, potentially even necessary stuff home (nail clippers? asthma inhalers?), or accommodating the delays of checked baggage. You don't know what's permissible, so you restrict your behavior. And even then, you can't be sure that you haven't broken an unwritten rule. [Consider the possibility of Soup-Nazi–like expectations of passenger behavior on the part of security personnel, with similar consequences for violations (e.g., insufficient politeness – not rude, just not fawning – leading to full-body scans [I have seen this happen]. So the possibility exists that whether or not something gets confiscated might come down to whether or not the examiners like you. And air travel is so conducive to maintaining a cheerful attitude throughout one's trip!).] The cost of civil-liberty infringement isn't what's banned outright. It's the other stuff that you decide not to do because you're not sure it won't get you into trouble.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I have never had anything confiscated on a flight.)
For one such assignment, students were asked to imagine how an archæologist of the future might interpret an everyday object from today. My students discussed telephones, radios, CDs (by far the most popular object), even loofahs.
Without exception, every student suggested their object might be interpreted as a weapon.
I had nearly 100 students that term, and every last one of them could conceive of their ordinary object as a weapon. Think about that. Then read this.
The airports and TSA won't give you an exhaustive list of banned carry-on objects, because what's banned is potential weapons, which is up to the discretion of the examiners. So even if you take care not to pack anything bannable in your carry-on bags, you never know what you're going to end up having to leave behind, through no fault of your own. Given what my students could imagine, it's a wonder that we get to carry anything onto aircraft.
Two points.
First, if there's no provision for returning confiscated items, it seems ethically tantamount to theft (or "government taking" if you prefer), especially since they then turn around and sell them. (I would be much less annoyed if they donated them to, say, Goodwill, or the Salvation Army, or otherwise avoid profitting from the activity.). They're using a vague but stricter standard than what a reasonable person would consider as a potential weapon, so you have to make an educated guess: and if you guess wrong, you've just lost your stuff.
The solution? Require airports to have a confiscated-objects office. When an object is confiscated, you are issued a receipt, the object is stored in the office, and when you present the receipt upon return, you get the object back. Objects unclaimed after one month may then be disposed of in accordance with the policy currently in effect.
Or, for small objects, you could have a confiscated-objects bag on the aircraft: the objects are essentially checked-in at the security checkpoint, and then each flight's bag is delivered into the custody of the flight crew just before departure, and stored in a secure space in the cabin. After arrival, the bag is delivered to the next small-item-check station and departing passengers may collect their objects after exiting the security checkpoint.
Simply to confiscate things that fall within the realm of uncertain banned-ness is to treat the passengers as potential criminals: it's not that you made a mistake, which is forgiven at the cost of some inconvenience. Rather, it implies that you should have known better, and you're to be punished by loss of the objects.
This leads into my second point: how civil liberties are eroded. Since you don't know what you can't have, the safest strategy is to be as conservative as possible: the travel-packing version of the lawyers' "Cover Your Ass" strategies. In practice, this means leaving all sorts of ordinary, useful, potentially even necessary stuff home (nail clippers? asthma inhalers?), or accommodating the delays of checked baggage. You don't know what's permissible, so you restrict your behavior. And even then, you can't be sure that you haven't broken an unwritten rule. [Consider the possibility of Soup-Nazi–like expectations of passenger behavior on the part of security personnel, with similar consequences for violations (e.g., insufficient politeness – not rude, just not fawning – leading to full-body scans [I have seen this happen]. So the possibility exists that whether or not something gets confiscated might come down to whether or not the examiners like you. And air travel is so conducive to maintaining a cheerful attitude throughout one's trip!).] The cost of civil-liberty infringement isn't what's banned outright. It's the other stuff that you decide not to do because you're not sure it won't get you into trouble.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I have never had anything confiscated on a flight.)
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 10:26
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