Partisanship and the TSA Controversy

Let me start by largely agreeing with Roger Cohen, who notes that the implementation of full body scanners at airports is irrational, and may be driven largely by the efforts of former government officials turned lobbyist (such as Michael Chertoff). Cohen doesn't fall into the trap of calling for profiling or for "Israeli-style" security, something that is completely unworkable in the U.S. system of air travel - and to many, far more objectionable - in favor of using actual intelligence to determine which passengers should be screened.

Let's be honest for a moment. Airport security screening as we know it was designed to stop hijackings in the classic sense - the opportunistic diversion of an aircraft to a different destination, or an attempt to hold hostage the passengers on an airplane. It was largely focused on obvious weapons, principally guns. That meant made it possible to screen passengers relatively quickly and painlessly. Most notably after the Lockerbie bombing, security was tightened in order to try to prevent bombs from being brought on to aircraft. Post-9/11, the effort to keep bombs off of airplanes has become increasingly zealous, to the point of the full body scanners backed up with frisks. Old style security isn't adequate for the types of bombs and weapons that the TSA is now seeking, because those bombs and weapons are non-metallic and may be prepared, sealed or carried in a manner that makes them very difficult to detect. There's a particular concern about PETN.

At the same time, the odds of a passenger actually carrying such a device are vanishingly small. In the ten years since 9/11, there have been a couple of attempts to get explosive devices disguised as clothing items onto airplanes - hence no shoes and scans of our underparts - and additional attempts to sneak explosives into air cargo - but not one such device has been intercepted by the TSA. And for 95+% of passengers, we have sufficient intelligence to know that they're not going to voluntarily hide such an explosive device in their clothing. That leaves the well-considered possibility that an explosive device may be slipped into their baggage, justifying better quality scanning of both checked and carry-on bags. And yes, there's the "action movie" scenario to consider - due to some sort of threat against your family, a terrorist coerces you into trying to smuggle a bomb onto a plane.

While Eugene Robinson suggests, quite correctly, that the principal reason for popular objection to the new security measures is that "I (or my grandmother) might get scanned", he suggests that's acceptable because terrorists are smart enough to identify people who won't fit a profile, and also that profiling is a greater threat to civil liberties than is the potential virtual strip search of anybody who wants to ride on an airplane. But when Robinson alludes to the 9/11 hijackers "not fitting" a profile because they were Saudi nationals, he's missing the point that we had ample intelligence to be concerned about those people. And it's been conceded that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the "underwear bomber") should never have been allowed to board the aircraft he attempted to bomb - he got on due to an intelligence failure, got through security (albeit outside of the United States), and was foiled by his fellow passengers. So far there is no reason to believe that body scanners or enhanced pat downs would have detected his explosive device. So tell me again, how does scanning grandma make us safer? In what parallel universe is Bob Herbert's grandmother going to try to smuggle a bomb into an airplane? (And in that universe, why wouldn't she pick an airport or security line that doesn't have a body scanner?)

But the action movie scenario is exceptionally far-fetched, and creates multiple points of potential failure that don't exist when you find a Richard Reid, Jose Padilla or Abdulmutallab who is willing to actually carry the device onto the plane. First you have to get the device and a sufficient cohort of terrorists into the United States, then you have to find a mark who is traveling on the correct plane at the correct time, then you have to find a way to coerce your mark into trying to smuggle the bomb onto the plane, then you have to maintain that level of coercion for a long enough period that he attempts to board the plane, then you have to hope he doesn't call the police, tip off security, or act so nervous at the airport that security figures out something is wrong, then (assuming your plan is sufficient to get past security) you have to hope the device isn't detected by happenstance, then you have to hope he doesn't choose not to activate the device or deactivate it during the flight... Terrorists may sometimes appear to be stupid or inept, and luck has been involved in our avoiding catastrophe with the post-9/11 bombing plots, but there's a reason that none of these attempts have involved trying to coerce innocent, outside parties into carrying bombs onto planes - it would make the scheme more complicated, necessitate involving more people and in its implementation would all but doom the plan to failure.

A few days ago Ross Douthat wrote an editorial suggesting that the controversy over the new screening methods reflects partisanship and hypocrisy. At the surface level that seems reasonable, as our nation (like every other nation) suffers no shortage of either commodity. But Dan Larison provides an apt rebuttal:

On the whole, people on the left who are not troubled by the obnoxious TSA scans and pat-downs have not been terribly troubled about most of the other infringements on constitutional protections carried out over the past nine years, and most of the people on the right who have discovered “libertarian impulses” in this case have shown no signs of such impulses until the last year and a half. These impulses were not suppressed during the Bush years. They did not exist. Instead, they have materialized out of nowhere.

Larison also notes,

Even when some conservative hard-liners have objected to the TSA procedures, it is usually not because they have rediscovered their inherent distrust of the national security state’s power (which they never had!), but because these procedures have simply underscored for them how silly it is to screen all passengers at airports. The uproar over obnoxious TSA methods has presented them with a new opportunity to revisit their calls for profiling. At best, most of these protests are complaints against inconvenience rather than objections against intrusive government, and many of them do not reject authoritarian practices, but simply want to change the form of authoritarian practices. To that end, rhetoric about preserving American liberty is useful, but these are often the same people who have tended to justify every government encroachment on liberty and every expansion of the warfare and national security state in the name of “defending freedom.” This is all fitted into the larger Republican attack that Obama refuses to “name” the enemy, and that he has erred by no longer referring to the “war on terror.”

Larison notes that the alleged "partisan mindset" was absent from the recent vote to renew the PATRIOT Act.

But there's something else to consider, much to the consternation of the Glenn Greenwalds of the nation: Issue fatigue. Something becomes a hot issue for a while, is played out in the press, nothing changes, and time passes. While people may not forget the issue, it loses its urgency. And, as Larison notes, most people are happy to acquiesce to the subversion of the civil rights of others, so there's little price to be paid for an elected official who happily shreds the Constitution in the name of "the war on terror". When you couple that with the fear, which seems particularly high on the part of Democrats, of being held accountable if anything bad happens - of having to confront a "why didn't you order all air passengers to be strip searched and fluoroscoped before boarding"-type argument following a successful terrorist attack - that they would rather waste billions of taxpayer dollars chasing shadows (hey - it's not their money) than have an adult conversation about risks and costs.

Anger at Junk Touching

There are three reasons for objecting to the new TSA security measures, one of which I consider to have substantial merit, one of which I don't believe has been adequately addressed, and the last of which, at least to me, isn't particularly compelling.

First, there's the question of whether the screening enhancements actually do anything to improve airline security and, if so, whether they can be justified on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis. As of yet the TSA has proved wholly unprepared to substantiate any material benefit from the new screening methods, let alone a benefit that would justify the cost. (For that matter, the TSA hasn't presented much evidence on the cost-benefit front for existing technology, and its placement of air passengers into long lines as they wait for security creates a glaring vulnerability.) When you challenge scanners and frisks on a cost-benefit basis,

It's not about doing something "instead" of the current system—it's about not doing things that are wasting money and time and not making us safer. It's quite possible that we're already as safe as we're going to get—and every subsequent airport security "improvement" is just reducing our freedom without improving security.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with expecting that the government will provide a rational justification for either an expenditure of billions of dollars or an intrusion on the privacy of its citizens. Put both together, and people have every right to object when the government is unprepared to demonstrate a meaningful security benefit.

The second issue is whether the new body scanners are safe. With due respect to their exposing passengers to no more radiation than the additional exposure they might experience on a typical air flight, I believe people have a right to be concerned about additional exposure, particularly if they are prone to skin cancer or if they're concerned about their (or their children's) lifetime exposure. "The FDA says it's okay" isn't very comforting - the FDA was asked in general terms about radiation levels, not body scanners. Let's see the science, and some scientific reassurance of how we can have certainty now, given that we don't have a lot of experience with exposure to this type of radiation.

Even if we assume that the machines are safe when they come out of the box, how well will the machines be maintained, tested and operated to ensure that radiation levels remain at factory levels? After all, problems of radiation overexposure can happen in a clinical setting. Finally, in the unlikely event that the TSA actually requests that it evaluate the scanners, why should I believe the FDA wouldn't succumb to political pressure, particularly in light of its recent decision-making?

The third argument is, in essence, "This makes me uncomfortable." I'll grant, some people have more cause than others to feel uncomfortable. Some people cannot go through the scanner, or have prosthetics or medical devices such as insulin pumps that will result in a frisk even if they go through the scanner. But if the cost-benefit case is made, the scanners are safe, the TSA continues with its belated plan to minimize what is displayed to the technician in the scanning booth, and concerns over the alleged selection of "cuties" for more intensive screening are adequately addressed, it's difficult to see how this level of intrusion isn't reasonable. Not at all in the immature "shut up and take it" sense espoused by the L.A. Times, but in the sense that the case will truly have been made that this makes air travel materially safer. It's to TSA's continuing discredit that it is unprepared to make its case, apparently on the assumption that the L.A. Times sentiment would carry the day.

There's a variant of the discomfort argument, "No one should have to suffer this type of indignity." Except as many have pointed out, people do suffer this type of indignity quite regularly, most notably minority males in "high crime" areas who may be stopped, frisked and released with some regularity - and with a very low rate of detection of weapons or other contraband.

The authoritarians who argue "shut up and take it" bother me because, as usual, they are happy to surrender the rights of others in the name of security without even asking that the state provide evidence that security will be improved. The latest example I've found is from Richard Adams who is willing to include himself among those whose junk gets touched, but on the basis of terrible reasoning:

Personally, I'd like to take a flight knowing that the plane is less likely to be blown up or hijacked and rammed into a building full of people. Alternatively, I'd like to be able to work in a tall building in New York City, Washington DC or even London without having a 747 flown into it.

Don't want to be scanned in an airport security line? Really? Easy: don't fly. Nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to take that flight to Aruba. Although if security is relaxed because of the idiotic uproar of recent days, then you might get a gun held to your head on-board the flight instead.

Everybody would like to know that "the plane is less likely to be blown up or hijacked", but that doesn't mean that every security measure taken will in fact make that possibility less likely. And with due respect to arguing from fear, if a gun could get onto a plane despite existing security measures, these new measures aren't at all likely to improve the situation.

It's bizarre that a nation that has largely rolled over and acquiesced in allowing its government to tap its phones and internet traffic – the Patriot act, a far graver assault on civil liberties – should get so exercised about this instead.

First, many people have objected to the "security state" developments in the U.K. and U.S., but "shut up and take it" arguments from people like Adams have drowned them out. Second, the use of excessive security measures in one context does not justify the use of excessive security measures in a second context. Third, as I've previously indicated, a lot of the acquiescence toward security excesses in other contexts is that it's invisible - it's either happening to other people, or it's happening in such a manner that you don't even know your privacy has been encroached. It may well be hypocritical to acquiesce to intrusions in other contexts while objecting this time, but being a hypocrite doesn't make you wrong.

Further, if the contexts are analogous and Adams truly believes that the Patriot Act represents government overreach that's being replicated in this context, he should be arguing against the overreach. If he doesn't believe the situations are analogous, he's reaching for an example he knows is irrelevant merely so he can sneer that those who disagree with him are hypocrites.

While Adams makes a valid point about the inadequacies of racial profiling, he continues in relation to Charles Krauthammer's recent column,

The scariest part of Krauthammer's piece is this: "This has nothing to do with safety - 95% of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary." Which means that five per cent are necessary, according to Krauthammer. One in 20? In that case, security isn't anywhere near tight enough. More to the point, deterrence is a major purpose of airport security. How many people it catches is immaterial.

Adams' first mistake is his treatment of Krauthammer's only the fly statistics as being somehow scientifically determined. His second mistake is an interpretation of what Krauthammer is stating in relation to the 5% of passengers he sees as needing more intensive screening. Krauthammer's argument is that TSA could easily exclude 95% of passengers from the category of "even slightly probable to engage in an act of violence, terrorism or hijacking on an airplane," and that the TSA should thus focus its efforts at identifying and intensely screening the remaining 5%. He's not arguing that 5% of airline passengers are dangerous - not even close.

Let's say you're looking for a needle in a haystack. You propose using a metal detector to try to identify the haystacks that might contain a metal object, and searching those haystacks first. Somebody else howls, "No - we need to put all of the hay from all of the stacks into one giant stack before we even can even begin to look." You may not find the needle the first way, assuming there even is one, but the second way creates an enormous inefficiency. Krauthammer's point, in essence, is that we're better off trying to identify the 5% of the "haystack" that is at all likely to pose a threat rather than putting everybody into that "haystack" - an approach that creates a great deal of inefficiency, generates an astronomical number of "false positives" (bins and bins full of 3.2 oz tubes of gel, nail files, etc.) and may not do much to actually improve security. Yes, it's possible to dispute whether Krauthammer has the right approach to identifying the people who pose a threat - racial profiling won't do it - but is it not in fact the case that the vast majority of air travelers pose no risk to the air flight, and that we can reasonably screen 95% of passengers into a "very low risk" category for purposes of pre-flight security screenings?

Adams' argument that airport security is about deterrence, not about how many suspected terrorists are actually intercepted, begs the question. He's in essence arguing that we can justify the expenditure of billions of dollars and the intrusion of privacy of people who pose no threat simply to put on a good show. Let's not even consider whether the new measures have a greater deterrent effect than the status quo. Let's not bring up the question of whether focusing intensive screening on the small subset of passengers who might actually pose a threat to an air flight would have equal or greater deterrence. Think of the body scans and frisks as a glorious form of performance art.

Balancing Security Against the Threat

As the air traveling public recoils at the choice between being scanned by a TSA strip search machine or having an enhanced pat-down (a/k/a a frisk), the TSA has attempted to defend its latest measures:

TSA Administrator John Pistole defended the system today, saying that all passengers want to know that their fellow fliers have been properly screened for weapons like box cutters, liquid explosives or a shoe or underwear bomb.

"Everybody wants the best possible security," Pistole said on NBC's "Today" show. "The question is, What's that blend or balance, if you will, between security, safety and privacy? While we remain sensitive to people with those concerns, the system we have set up addresses those concerns and provides the best possible security."

Except, as we know, neither a frisk nor a strip search scan will stop a determined terrorist. Neither will detect contraband stored inside the body, and there's no reason to believe that terrorists haven't figured that out.

If public reaction so far is a measure, TSA should infer that it has gone past the tipping point - people are willing to take off their shoes, take medical equipment and computers out of their luggage for the x-ray machine, be patted down, wanded, and otherwise inconvenienced to eliminate most contraband from flights, but don't like the idea of being electronically strip searched or frisked. They would apparently accept the 1:10,000,000 or so chance of being hijacked without this "enhancement" over the 1:10,100,000 chance that they enjoy with this added security. And I may be overstating the statistical difference.

Thomas Friedman wrote a while ago that we have been lucky not to have been hit by another terrorist attack - and he's correct.

Meanwhile, we need to focus on the things we can control. For starters, we’re going to have to learn to live with more insecurity. Terrorism is awful, but it is not yet an existential threat. And we can’t let our response to it be to shut down our open society or tear ourselves apart with recriminations. Like the Israelis and Brits, we need to keep up our guard, learn from our mistakes, but also learn to bury our dead and move on.

President Obama recently made a statement that should have been treated as an opportunity to have an adult conversation about the risks of terrorism and how we might respond.

I said very early on, as a Senator and continue to believe, as a presidential candidate and now as president, that we can absorb a terrorist attack. We will do everything we can to prevent it. but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever, that ever took place on our soil, we absorbed it, and we are stronger. This is a strong, powerful country that we live in, and our people are incredibly resilient.

Instead, Republican hacks started to shriek about how the President wasn't committed to protecting us from terrorism. With no offense intended, I don't believe for a second that Pistole is trying to achieve balance. He's working in an environment in which it is presumed that no mistakes are acceptable, and thus that it's reasonable to invest $billions in technology that most people find objectionable in order to provide a very small overall improvement in security.

Pistole, who said Wednesday that the scanners and new pat-downs already had found "dozens and dozens of artfully concealed items" noted that Muslim women and members of other religions that dictate the kind of clothing they must wear can request to receive a pat-down in private or have a witness present, among other procedures.

I wish we had a better sense of what type of contraband we're talking about or how it posed a threat. Instead we hear about "dozens and dozens" of items - which could mean 48 - with no indication that any of them posed an actual threat to air security.

We are now in an era in which you can shut down an airport by accidentally going through the wrong door, or when a security guard accidentally leaves a door unattended. Jeffrey Goldberg's nightmare scenario - somebody setting off a bomb in a line for airport security - would, as he indicates, immediately shut down air travel across the nation. Meanwhile, with present policies for responding to an in-the-air incident, it's not clear why a hijacker would choose to try to get on an airplane over taking Goldberg's approach, at least if they're already in the U.S.

Something that might have helped in this debate, if you want to call it that, would be evidence that the TSA has rigorously tested and compared various methods of screening to demonstrate that a determined passenger is less likely to be able to smuggle contraband on board if scanned or frisked. As with every prior "enhancement", the TSA measure seems to be largely reactive - "somebody almost got away with X, so let's implement security measure Y to prevent it from happening again" - without any real thought to actual risk, cost, or efficacy. If TSA could say, "We challenged 1,000 FBI agents to get through security lines with dangerous contraband, and caught 99% of them using scanners versus 90% with frisks and 66% with existing technology", the case for the scanners would be far more compelling than claiming, after-the-fact, that the $billions spent have resulted in the interception of "dozens and dozens" of forbidden items with no claim that any of those items in fact posed a danger to a flight or other passengers.

Update: Adam Serwer reports the lack of testing and due diligence exercised by the TSA before making this multi-$billion investment:

The current scanners were being evaluated at a time when, according to a 2009 Government Accountability Office report, the TSA had neither implemented a cost-benefit analysis of its passenger-screening technologies nor established "performance measures that assess how deployed technologies have reduced or mitigated risk." As of today, the GAO says the TSA still hasn't done either, despite having deployed the scanners nationwide. A TSA spokesman defended the machines by saying it had done an analysis concluding that the machines offered an ability to detect nonmetallic threats that could "only otherwise be obtained by increasing manpower to conduct physical pat-down searches." However, a March GAO report found that it "remains unclear" whether the body scanners would have been able to detect the type of explosive that underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab attempted to employ. Once again, we've traded liberty for security without even having a good idea of how much security we're really getting.

And yet we're to believe that this is part of an effort to balance safety against privacy?

(Serwer and, more bluntly, Mike at C&F, have pointed out that much of the reaction to airport scanners and frisks falls into the category of "This type of thing is only supposed to happen to other people".)

Update 2: Apparently "dozens and dozens" means "130", again with no indication that any items found posed a threat to an airplane or other passengers. The biggest problem at this point appears to be a very high rate of false positives, meaning passengers who are carrying nothing inappropriate can agree to the virtual strip search and still have to go through a frisk.

The Continuing Problem of Airport Security Theater

Jeffrey Goldberg chose to be frisked over going through a backscatter "strip search" machine principally as fodder for his column, but he makes valid points about this latest step in the multi-billion dollar security theater industry:

At BWI, I told the officer who directed me to the back-scatter that I preferred a pat-down. I did this in order to see how effective the manual search would be. When I made this request, a number of TSA officers, to my surprise, began laughing. I asked why. One of them -- the one who would eventually conduct my pat-down -- said that the rules were changing shortly, and that I would soon understand why the back-scatter was preferable to the manual search. I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. "No way. You think Congress would allow that?"

I answered, "If you're a terrorist, you're going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina." He blushed when I said "vagina."

"Yes, but starting tomorrow, we're going to start searching your crotchal area" -- this is the word he used, "crotchal" -- and you're not going to like it."...

I asked him if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs. "Nobody's going to do it," he said, "once they find out that we're going to do."

In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? "That's what we're hoping for. We're trying to get everyone into the machine." He called over a colleague. "Tell him what you call the back-scatter," he said. "The Dick-Measuring Device," I said. "That's the truth," the other officer responded.

Goldberg argues (in part for the reasons suggested above) that embarrassing frisks and backscatter machines aren't going to work.

By the time terrorist plotters make it to the airport, it is, generally speaking, too late to stop them. Plots must be broken up long before the plotters reach the target. If they are smart enough to make it to the airport without arrest, it is almost axiomatically true that they will be smart enough to figure out a way to bring weapons aboard a plane.

His colleague, James Fallows, is similarly skeptical of airport security theater.

Meanwhile, the latest and greatest threat to air travel isn't coming from passengers - it's coming from unscreened and poorly screened air cargo. There has been some progress and, as of a cpuole of months ago,

Asked about the cargo shipped on passenger jets, Nicholas Kimball, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, drew our attention to the fact that 100 percent of the cargo loaded into the holds of passenger jets alongside luggage in the United States is now screened at some stage. In January that figure was said to be “at least 50 percent.”

But in a statement earlier this month announcing that accomplishment, the agency acknowledged that one part of the loophole had yet to be closed: cargo loaded onto jets flying passengers into the country from abroad does not have to be screened.

But let's not pretend there was no advance notice of this issue or that nobody saw this coming.

Why do we invest billions to inconvenience and embarrass travelers, the vast majority of whom could easily be ruled out as terrorist suspects by far less intrusive measures, while procrastinating on closing serious security holes? (Focus on passenger security left ‘door open’ for cargo attacks: pilots’ union.)

The Missing Element

Josh Marshal ponders why people are willing to

ethnically profile, do all sorts extra-judicial surveillance, maintain massive databases of hundreds of thousands of people who have some vague relationship to extremism, torture captives, condemn people to hours unable to go the bathroom on planes, even launch various foreign military adventures

while we hesitate to implement backscatter body scans

that might show a vague outline of boobs or penises (almost certainly no more than is exposed in most bathing suits)

and concludes,

It just tells me that at some level we're not really serious about this.

Really, though, the difference is obvious. With stuff that happens behind the scenes, we're comfortable assuming that it only happens to other people. Proponents of torture don't anticipate that they will ever be tortured. Proponents of racial profiling anticipate that it will only happen to other races - consider the recent spate of calls for the profiling of any person with an Islamic-sounding name, even though most made no similar demand for people with names like "José Padilla" and none that I know of made any such demand for people with names like "Richard Reid". The rule forbidding going to the bathroom on an airplane during the last hour of a flight - an idea that is unworkable (or potentially really messy) for people with certain medical conditions or for small children? It's already out the door. Now the decision is up to the discretion of the airlines.

It's simply another form of the anti-civil liberties retort, "If you're not breaking the law, you've got nothing to worry about" - which roughly translates to "If it's not happening to me, I don't care."

It should also be noted that the privacy technology for backscatter has improved, and will continue to improve, to the point that "nudity" is becoming a non-issue. Several years back, when I first heard about the use of this technology by the federal government, and the privacy issues it was raising, I asked, "Why not adjust the software to erase as much of the human body as possible - after all, you don't care about the body - just what's on it"? It took some time for others to hop on the clue bus, but that's the way the technology is heading. Note that the technology is anything but perfect - it won't see through fat folds, nor will it look inside body cavities - it's just another tool in passenger screening.

Planes, Automobiles... But No Trains

(Unless you count the airport shuttles.)

For those who have somehow managed to miss the wacky weather, yesterday morning was not a good time to be connecting through Atlanta.

If I may state the obvious:

• If you're working in an airport and somebody is connecting on a return international flight, it's not particularly helpful to ask them why they didn't make their travel plans around U.S. weather forecasts from the preceding few days.

• If you're running an airline and have hundreds of passengers - literally hundreds - lined up for help, even if no flights are going out, it's beyond obnoxious not to have more than one person working the reservations counter. (And no, it doesn't make up for much when you finally bring somebody in to help out an hour or so later.)

• If you're in a part of the country that rarely gets snow, yes, it's cool to stop your truck and take pictures of your small child making and throwing snowballs. But in a safe location - not on the side of the most treacherous, slippery, snow-covered exit ramp in your state.

• If you are providing roadside assistance for car rentals, and your customer calls about replacing a car due to a potentially dangerous problem, you're correct to answer "yes" when the customer asks if they'll be expecting you at the nearest rental location so you can exchange the car - but you have to follow that up by ensuring that the people at that location actually will be expecting the customer.

• If you're driving from Atlanta to Michigan, even if it's entirely necessary due to the weather, it's painful to have to drive around Tennessee.

• Real life road trips are nowhere near as interesting as those in movies - they don't even come with a laugh track.

But even considering the 40+ hours of travel time on the return trip, it was still a great vacation.

When was the last time you took a winter trip (at least in this hemisphere) and sighed, "Thank goodness we're back in the north, out of the snowstorms and flurries, where the roads are clear and dry."

How About a $100 "We'll Treat You Like a Human" Fee?

With the rising cost of fuel, the commoditization of ticket prices, and an apparent zeal to gouge every spare cent out of a passenger's pockets, the nation's (probably the world's) airlines have collectively made air travel an unpleasant experience. Frequent flyers may benefit from upgrades to a higher class of seat, assuming they're available, but pretty much everybody else must choose between the often absurd price of a "first class" or "business class" ticket or flying in the cattle car coach. Airlines don't appear inclined to lower fares for their first/business class sections, and to date the airlines offering all first class or all business class seating seem to be faltering and failing. So what's another option?

How about letting any passenger who wants pay a flat $100 (perhaps more for international flights), and treat them as if the clock has been rolled back to when air travel was more pleasant. For that money, give them a day pass to the airline's "club" lounge at the airport, the right to be screened through the expedited "first class" security line, the right to check at least one bag without an extra fee, a seat toward the front of the coach section of the plane, and a somewhat upgraded in-flight meal or snack (if they wish)? This could also be offered to frequent flyers who would otherwise qualify for a free upgrade when there's no room in first/business class, and to other flyers who want to cash in some saved miles for the privilege of being treated decently.