smile you're on security theater

It's such an apt phrase for what happens in our airports. Take off your belt and shoes. Kindly remove the metal plate from your head. Hold your arms out while I run this beeping rod up and down your body. Perhaps the theater is a burlesque but most assuredly it's absurd.

Now the UK has a law that allows police the discretion to decide whether a photographer should be allowed to take public photographs of police. Will such a law be abused, or will police carefully regulate their natural desire for privacy and their understandable level of paranoia? It's another example of a government making laws that are at least a decade out of step with the way the world works. Cameras are everywhere. It's a simple enough fact to understand. After all almost every cell phone has a camera.

And the law is ostensibly to stop terrorist activity. This is where the theatricality emerges. True terrorists, such as those that devasted New York, or those that so recently attacked Mumbai may be legitimately considered evil, but they're not idiots. If you are exceedingly lucky you may catch a terrorist that is also an idiot with such a law. But succcessful terrorists, those that plan and wait, will not be caught taking photographs. They will simply think for 30 seconds and then implement elementary precautions, like integrating their camera into their shoulder bag or jacket and using a remote.

Security theater doesn't demonstrably make us safer (although I expect a Homeland spokesman would say it does make us safer, but we can't tell you how or why as it needs to stay blanketed by "National Security"). It reduces our freedom of movement and action, our liberty. Our ability to do all of the little but essential things that make us feel human and unconstricted. Our abilities are torn away in a societal suicide of a thousand cuts, small enough that you forget them after a while, until we worn down and permanently bound by our fears. It's very easy to take something away, and very difficult to get it back again. And then who has won?