Events | 2010.01.05
Airline security: was I the victim of terrorist profiling?
A writer reveals how, when flying from Britain to the US three days after the Detroit bombing attempt, all his post-9/11 paranoia of being judged on his appearance came flooding back
Anyone who has flown to the US since the failed bomb attack on Christmas Day will have felt it – the edge, the tangible atmosphere of tension.On 28 December I\'d been in the UK to spend Christmas with my family, and took a British Airways flight back to New York. I was happy because I\'d checked in online, and clicked on an exit-row seat. I wouldn\'t spend seven hours with my knees crushed, my body twisted to one side as I tried to sleep.
I knew the boarding process wouldn\'t be easy. There had been delays the previous day, and I arrived at the gate early. Every passenger was patted down and our hand luggage examined, but the process was handled efficiently and politely, and soon I was making my way down the aisle of the plane.
That was when I saw that the number on my boarding pass didn\'t match the seat I thought I held. I appeared to be seated halfway down the cabin. After a few minutes, a white man of about my age sat down in the exit row seat I\'d come to think of as "mine", and stretched out his legs.
I had a long time to wonder what had happened. Maybe the man had a bad back. But he seemed to be wandering around the cabin without effort. Maybe he was a VIP. At check-in they hadn\'t mentioned they were moving me, and since I hadn\'t printed out a boarding pass at home, I had nothing to show the cabin crew. But there I was, crunched and disgruntled. And there he was, with his legs straight out in front of him, reading and sipping a drink.
I came to the conclusion that the move was the result of security profiling. I\'m a UK citizen, holder of a hard-to-obtain O1 US Visa ("alien of extraordinary ability") and have a BA frequent-flyer card, so if I\'d been bumped it was unlikely to have been on the basis of my immigration status, citizenship or travel patterns.
It must (I thought) have been my appearance (dark-skinned, unshaven) or my "foreign" name. As my legs gradually cramped, I conducted an imaginary conversation with the airline, railing at them as racists, berating them for the sheer stupidity of a procedure which wasn\'t making anyone safer, and had just lost them my future business.
You may think I\'m being absurdly prickly. After all, we all want to be safe in the air. And what was the real inconvenience? I wasn\'t stuck in an interrogation room. I hadn\'t been delayed. I still had a gin and tonic and a movie to watch. But the whole experience – the paranoia, the feeling that one has been judged based on unknowable criteria – brought me back to the months after 9/11, when I travelled across the US on a book tour and experienced security screening that was poorly conducted, degrading and, as far as I could see, based on crude racism.
After being "randomly selected" six times in a row, I was sick of being treated as a threat. Because the screeners didn\'t know how to implement their own revised procedures, strange and frightening things kept happening – I was surrounded at a gate in Washington, and taken away for what turned out to be a standard body search. When I boarded the plane, my fellow passengers were so terrified that one woman asked to change her seat. On other occasions I was shouted at or manhandled. So I know there\'s a difference between robust security procedures and panic or prejudice.
After my Christmas flight I wrote to BA to ask for a comment, and they told me that they never profile passengers, and I\'d been mistaken about my exit row seat – at online check-in I\'d apparently chosen the seat I eventually occupied. I have no way of proving otherwise, and so must accept that my exit-row dream was just that – a hallucination of leg-room, brought about by an excess of Christmas cheer.
But it has coloured the way I see the new security measures announced this week. Air travel has become a fraught experience for many of us, and the prospect that holders of certain passports will always be double-checked when flying to the US, and that screeners will now see us all "naked" on the screens of their millimetre-wave scanners, only adds to the sense that once we\'re inside an airport, many of the rights we hold elsewhere are suspended.
The US has always taken the view that security trumps civil liberties, and the prospect of a bomb attack means that passengers are willing to accept measures they\'d once have questioned. However, it\'s particularly at times of heightened tension that the value of civil liberties is most clear. The new airline security procedures don\'t exist in a vacuum. They form part of a continuum that includes controls on public assembly, taking photographs in public places and personal data collection and retention.
I believe we\'re in a period where the very notion of privacy is being reconfigured by technologies, such as social networking. We would do well to understand what it means when we\'re asked to "make sacrifices" to win the so-called war on terror. Hari Kunzru writes regularly at harikunzru.com ; his latest novel is My Revolutions
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/[...]zru-airline-security-terrorism
