Best piece of investigative journalism: Jeffrey Goldberg’s article on airport security in the forthcoming issue of The Atlantic. The reporter spends many hours in many airports across the country — acting strange on purpose, carrying all sorts of forbidden items (nail-clippers, weapons, alcohol, giant Hezbollah flag), using fake boarding passes (nope, he didn’t actually have tickets either!) and at one point even wearing an “Osama bin Laden, Hero of Islam” teacher through the screening.

A forged boarding pass, printed with a consumer laptop and consumer inkjet printer. This one got Mr. Goldberg in "elite" first class.

I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport. …

(B)ecause I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.

He never once missed his flight.

Anyway, it’s a definite must-read and a shocking look at how $7 billion taxpayer dollars have been used on what Goldberg calls “security theater.”

Best new web presence: The Daily Beast, a blend of news aggregator (i.e. it has lots of links to actual news and commentary sites), blog hub and high society. The design is great, the bloggers are varied and terrific (if a bit elite), and “The Big Story” feature is particularly nice, giving five or six widely different angles on a particular story of the day. You really should check it out.

Tags: airport security, al-Qaida, Daily Beast, Jeffrey Goldberg, Osama bin Laden, The Atlantic

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 7.49 pm and is filed under Out of the Blue Awards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.