So very, very wrong - envious of the air industry, Amtrak officials will be screening passengers, too. Think about this: you can't drive a train into a building, and you don't need to be on the train to blow it up (because trains, you see, run on tracks, which are by definition many miles long and fixed in position and, you know, on the ground instead of being a mile up in the air.)
Even if we stipulate -- which I don't -- that the TSA's measures for air security make sense, then those same measures simply don't make sense for rail. They just don't. The article I linked to (at the Chicago Trib) says, "Concern has been mounting" since the 2004 bombing in Madrid. But see -- in Madrid, they bombed the tracks. Not the train. So these measures wouldn't have done anything at all in that situation.
The only possible reason for these measures is to make officials think they have power over suspected terrorists (or anybody else they choose, as we are already seeing in airports), and to make the train-riding public aware that they are being watched and scrutinized. That's all it can be -- it's authoritarianism, pure and simple.
This just has to stop.
But let's look at who the author of this article, Sarah Karush, talked to, shall we?
- Bill Rooney, VP of Security at Amtrak. Makes sense.
- Alex Kummant, CEO of Amtrak. Still makes sense.
Maybe she could talk to somebody not at Amtrak? Sure:
- Tim Connors, of the Center for Policing Terrorism at the Manhattan Institute
Go ahead, click through to the CPT-MI. I'll wait here -- or, if you're impatient like me, you can just accept my assessment of that page, encapsulated in the phrase "tragedy of 9/11".
Did we hear from anybody who didn't think it's a good idea that Amtrak is going to spend a whole lot of money on security consultants to school the public in being good Germans, in return for not being able to do anything about any hypothetical terrorist threats? No, we did not. We just got a bunch of feel-good mumbling about progress, and "reality has changed and now everything has to be transformed" and "this model stands up in court" and "bad guys won't be able to anticipate this." Sure -- nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
So we have a nice little article about creeping authoritarianism -- but without questioning whether that's where America should be going.
Good job, Chicago Tribune.
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