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Opt-out of gape-or-grope on November 24

By tfk on November 23, 2010.

Via Cogitamus: A surprising 70 percent of air travelers support National Opt-Out Day:

Asked whether they supported National Opt-Out Day, on which air travelers plan to call attention to what they say are overly invasive TSA screening techniques by intentionally refusing the full-body scans at the airport, a surprising 70 percent answered âyes.â The poll of more than 1,000 travelers suggests that air travel could be slowed significantly or even grind to a halt on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

The details of how this question was asked matter a lot, but that 70% offers a useful contrast to a recent CBS poll which found 80% of Americans are comfortable with the pornoscanners. My guess is that most Americans don't actually know what any of this discussion is about. If the pornoscanners are presented as a measure that will make flying safer, they support it, and if protests against them are presented as a reasonable reaction to TSA's invasions of privacy, people support that.

Public opinion is often flexible on issues that are changing rapidly, and this is just such a situation. Whether it's "9/11 amnesia" or simply an ability to think rationally now that airport security has reached a safe plateau, people are in a position to rethink the supposed trade-off between security and freedom. They may be ready to acknowledge that having a government agent force you to choose between being virtually strip searched or being groped is itself a loss of security, not an exchange of freedom for safety.

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Policy and Politics

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