I will fly again soon. When I do, I will make the choice many air travelers have been making for months now and that all air travelers will make soon: whether to allow myself to be photographed naked or to be
frisked like a criminal and have my private parts touched. I will continue to choose the latter. This is not an easy choice to make, and if you choose other than I do, I will not call you unethical or a fool. But I will try to convince you that I am right.
Suppose that every time you entered or left your home, you were stopped by a government agent who disassembled your belongings, searched and inspected them all, and then undressed you, touching and examining your naked body. Surely, you would not stand for this. You would speak out. You would be in the street. You would lament loudly the loss of your liberty and of the moral center and political legacy of your country.
Now, suppose that all this happens out of sight. Your belongings and your body are searched as thoroughly and invasively as before. But the search is electronic and invisible to your eyes. You are not touched physically; the person violating you is in another room; you never see him. What would you do?
Where is the wrong: is it in being
touched, or is it in being
searched?
If the answer is the former, then there is nothing left to you that you may keep private. You can rightfully be recorded anywhere: at your business, among your friends, in public or private conversation. The things you say and do in your home with your children or your spouse can be filmed. So long as the person or persons recording you are unknown to you, and so long as the purposes to which they put those recordings are beyond your sight, you have no right or reason to complain.
I hold that the wrong is in being searched. My
right to be secure in my person, house, papers, and effects has not been altered by the progress of time or of technology. The scope of that security is the
knowledge of those things; the
means by which my security may be violated are immaterial.
Indeed, an invisible search is more insidious than a visible one precisely because of that difference. You may be unaware of what is being done to you; you may be confused. Your neighbors, not seeing you in visible distress, will not come immediately to your aid. And over time, you may forget that you are being searched at all. You will lose all
expectation of privacy, and any legal recourse you may once have had will have melted away.
When you opt for sexual touching instead of sexual recording (I do not say you are "opting out," because you are not getting out of anything), you are helping to make this invisible injustice a little more visible. You are participating in an act of nonviolent resistance.
"Nonviolent" is not a limitation to "resistance." It does not answer the question, "to what extent will you resist?". Nonviolent resistance does not restrain the brutality of those who are resisting; it exposes the brutality of those who are resisted. Gandhi and King did not win despite allowing themselves to be beaten; they won because they showed their neighbors that their opponents were willing to beat them.
Resist.
Don't we have to accept molestation as the price of our personal safety? Consider:
