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Mix-Ansicht- USA:Sicherheitsbeamte brechen Gepäck auf nach Zufallsprinzip - kingsolomon, 07.01.2003, 20:41
USA:Sicherheitsbeamte brechen Gepäck auf nach Zufallsprinzip
-->ganz zu schweigen von Leibesvisitationen nach dem"Zufallsprinzip"
Viel Spass bei der nächsten Zufallsreise in die Staaten!
Gary North's REALITY CHECK
Issue 204 January 7, 2003
[I will be publishing on Tuesdays and Fridays
from now on.]
THE WORLD WE ARE LOSING
North's law of bureaucracy is as follows:
"There is no government regulation, no matter how
plausible it initially appears, that will not
eventually be applied by some bureaucrat in a way
that defies common sense."
For a regulation that makes considerable sense, it may
take months or even years for the right bureaucrat to come
along. But not always.
Last Friday evening, my wife returned from a trip to
California. On Saturday, she began to unpack her bag. Not
bags -- just one relatively small one. It actually fits in
an overhead bin. For the sake of this report, I'm glad
that she didn't do that with this bag.
She noticed that the edge of the bag was torn. I
thought this might have been the work of the famous gorilla
in the old American Tourister luggage TV ad. But then she
said,"the lock is broken." I told her:"It's probably the
new flight security rules that went into effect on January
1. The inspectors broke the lock and got into the bag."
She opened it. Sure enough, she found a slip of
paper. I reprint it here.
Transportation Security Administration
Notification of Baggage Inspection
To protect you and your fellow passengers, the
Transpiration Security Administration (TSA) is
required by law to inspect all checked baggage.
As part of this process, some bags are opened and
physically inspected. Your bag was among those
selected for physical inspection.
During the inspection, your bag and its contents
may have been searched for prohibited items. At
the completion of the inspection, the contents
were returned to your bag, which was resealed
with a temper-evident seal.
If the TSA screener was unable to open your bag
for inspection because it was locked, the
screener may have been forced to break the locks
on your bag. TSA sincerely regrets having to do
this, and has taken care to reseal your bag upon
completion of inspection. However, TSA is not
liable for damage to your locks resulting from
this necessary security precaution.
As for the slash in the bag, who knows? The gorilla
left no note of explanation.
You had better calculate this travel expense into the
budgets of your flights from now on.
Upstairs in the terminal gates, the security people
make searches of passengers. Searches are required to be
random, for to go after some of Ann Coulter's famous
"swarthy men" would be to violate people's rights on a
racial basis, which is not allowed, rather than violating
people's rights on a non-racial basis, which is required by
law. So, to maintain the illusion of randomness in a world
of surveillance cameras, government data bases, and other
profiling technologies, they have to conduct random
searches.
During World War II, the British cracked the Germans'
military code. The Brits knew the times and routes of the
oil tankers that were to supply Rommel's forces in Africa.
To keep the Germans from figuring out that their code had
been broken, the British would send a reconnaissance plane,
which would make itself visible to the men on the tankers,
and then run for cover. The plane would send a message
announcing the whereabouts of the tanker. The Germans on
the tanker would conclude that they had been spotted from
the air. What bad luck! If they radioed home, they would
tell the command that they had been spotted. Then a
British submarine would sink the tanker. The Germans never
did alter the code.
The reconnaissance plane was part of the deception.
So are the random searches of passengers and bags. They
are to provide camouflage: (1) from voters who demand
action; (2) from lawyers who might otherwise get their
swarthy clients released on the basis of racial profiling.
Anyone who really expects searches like these to protect
airliners is so abysmally dense that he might as be a
Congressman.
The other purposes of the new surveillance system
relate more to controlling average people than catching
terrorists.
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---------------------
BROKEN LOCKS
It is obvious that it's time to sell your high-priced
Samsonite luggage at a garage sale and use the money to buy
a replacement bag at the local Salvation Army. If you
don't, then don't lock the bag. If you have a really
secure bag, it's going to be a target. The airline baggage
handling systems have been under fire from Congress. So,
in order to prove that they're on the job, the security
people are going to have their lock picks and lock clippers
in full-time use.
The public will probably roll over and play dead. To
complain would be to call into question the Homeland
Security program and the steady jettisoning of the right of
privacy. The agents of the government are becoming
invasive on the official basis of protecting us from
terrorism. Yet the enormous security state that had been
created after World War II proved incompetent with respect
to 9-11. So, it is being rewarded with larger budgets and
more power.
In the name of protecting us from invaders, our
privacy is being invaded by the protectors. There is not
much doubt that the voters accept this rationale. Men have
been assured by governments down through history,"An
honest person has nothing to hide." Are we also to believe
that an honest person has no need for locks on his baggage?
It's not just baggage locks. It is also locks on our
communications, such as our e-mail. A vast surveillance
system already exists. Cameras located on freeways monitor
automobile licenses. We know that the technology exists to
monitor faces in stadium-size crowds. In London, they have
cameras installed at airports that survey faces and match
them with a data base of suspected terrorists. Don't call
it profiling. Call it mug-shotting. The world portrayed
in the recent movie,"Minority Report," where private and
public eyeball-recognition software is universal, is
already here in terms of the absence of legal restraints.
All that is missing is the technology.
As the price of anything falls, more of it is
demanded. In this category place surveillance. As the
price of anything rises, less of it is demanded. In this
category place privacy. At some price, it's available, but
the price is too high for most people. The very rich use
these techniques. Criminals use them. Tax-evaders use
them. But innocent people don't.
So, what do we learn from these two laws of economics?
This: the new technology will lower the surveillance-per-
victim cost. This technology will be used on innocent
people. When organizations buy this equipment, they will
use it. They must justify the expense. But to put this
equipment to use, the managers must re-define what
constitutes suspicious behavior. That which used to be
regarded as unsuspicious -- at the older, higher price of
surveillance -- will now be defined as suspicious.
This is not mere theory. It is happening now. Every
time we go into an airport, we can see the future.
We are told by officials that we need a national
identification card. We already have one: a driver's
license with a photo image. Try to get onto an airplane if
you don't have one. Did this system prevent 9-11? Of
course not. But it gets Americans to line up. This is the
desire of every bureaucrat: to get people to line up. If
scarce resources are not allocated by price, they must be
allocated by standing in line. Bureaucrats don't allocate
by price -- at least not in public.
MONEY TRANSFERS
Americans think they can hide money in foreign
accounts. With the steady erosion of banking privacy in
international markets, it is becoming expensive and
difficult to hide the movement of digital money. I think
it is close to impossible, especially since 9-11. This is
why Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups don't use
wire transfers. Islam has an ancient system of credit-
transfer that is not digital. The system is called hawala.
There is a complex body of law governing the exchanges.
http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/hawdrft.htm
The acknowledged masters of foreign exchange are Jews
who are involved in the international diamond trade. All
transactions are in cash. All are sealed by verbal
contracts. There is an industry-wide court system. No
member of the guild ever takes a compatriot into the civil
courts. Violations mean exclusion from the guild. This
system has been operating for a thousand years. Magna
Carta? Late-comers!
http://edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap8.htm
If you use cash, you forfeit interest payments. But
at 1% per annum, this return may not be worth forfeiting
the use of currency. The price of remaining in currency is
falling. The benefits in terms of privacy and buying
things at a discount are rising. We do not see this, but
we can surmise on the basis of economics that it exists on
the black market. This is a market without taxes. The
average guy isn't in this market. The main participants
are poor people, working-class immigrants, and rich people
who are involved in illegal or unreported trades.
That's why the average Joe is the real target of all
this recent clamp-down in security. The system is aimed at
him because it's cheaper to aim it at him. Like the drunk
who searches for his dropped key in the area close to the
street lamp, so is the government's new system of
surveillance. The drunk won't find his lost key, but at
least he won't risk tripping in the dark.
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