The civil liberties fight over airport body-scanning and patdowns is tainted by corporate interests. It's time to follow the money

Amanda Marcotte - guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 November 2010 15.41 GMT

Left-leaning civil libertarians initially welcomed the sudden surge of news reports about anger and revolt over the Transportation Security Administration's new procedures that involve rather intimate patdowns for people who won't or can't use the body-scanning machines at airport security lines. We'd been raising the alarm for years about the long lines and privacy invasions, all done in the name of security, with little to no evidence that any of it made us safer.

But it didn't take long to realise that much, if not most, of the ire aimed at the TSA was coming from conservative corners, which made progressives hesitate. On the one hand, building political alliances is a time-honoured strategy to get things done. On the other, aligning yourself with the American right means bringing on quite a bit of baggage: bad faith arguments, outright lying, racism – and hidden agendas, usually serving predatory corporate interests.

Were rightwingers suddenly interested in civil liberties issues that usually hold little interest for them because the TSA had gone too far? Or was something else going on?

Many of liberals' worst suspicions were immediately fulfilled. Rightwing media instantly harnessed the outrage to demand racial profiling, which is both illegal and ineffective. Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of the Nation discovered that some accounts of being molested by the TSA were concocted by conservative activists. Unfortunately, the Ames/Levine article has been justifiably criticised for using shoddy evidence and arguing through smears and implication, and name-dropping the Koch brothers; this may all cause some people to overlook the most damning argument in their piece.

And that argument is one that blogger Davey D more clearly laid out: all this conservative outrage at the TSA lays the groundwork for arguments in favour of privatising airport security, a cause championed by folks like Congressman John Mica, who is a ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Mica has received more than $81,000 in campaign donations from the very firms that would take over airport security if the TSA relinquished authority. Mica's arguments that privatisation would fix the groping problem are farcical, on par with arguing that hiring Blackwater reduces war crimes.

This is about more than the crude influence of industry lobbying, though. Ginning up outrage about government workers and demonising them as perverts serves a larger conservative corporate agenda. The more you can turn the public against the idea of people working for the government, the more you can strongarm the government into privatising those services. In the end, the result of rightwing arguments about the TSA will be continued privacy violations – but just ones that are more inefficient and expensive to the taxpayers.

read the rest here.... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/26/air-transport-theairlineindustry