Air travelers in America shall no more doff their chukkas, their wedges, their wingtips, their espadrilles, or their Mary Janes, according to a rule-change announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday. It’s been more than two decades since the Transportation Security Administration started putting people’s footwear through its scanners, after a man named Richard Reid tried and failed to detonate his high-top sneakers on a flight to Miami in December 2001. Indeed, the requirement has been in place so long that my adult children, who were born just before and after the September 11 attacks, didn’t even know its rationale. Feeling the cold airline-terminal floor through socks has been, for them, a lifelong ritual—as fundamental to the experience of flight as narrow seats and insufficient overhead bins.
The TSA’s mandate to go shoeless, like the volume limit on toiletry items (to thwart the assembly of explosives from liquids) and the need to remove laptops from carry-on bags (to better examine them for hidden threats), came to give the mere appearance of vigilance: not security but security theater. From the start, it provided newly federalized and uniformed TSA agents with stuff to do at every moment, and government officials with the chance to embrace “an abundance of caution,” a stock idea that can transform almost any inconvenience into leadership. Now, by closing the curtain on the shoe requirements, Noem has indulged in a rival form of spectacle: populism theater. Her new policy gives citizens something they actually want, and something that has until this point been reserved for upscale travelers who pay for premium airport-security-hopping services. But with this week’s change, the system hasn’t really been democratized so much as made indifferent. In this case, the fact of the TSA’s doing less—and caring less—just happens to be helpful.
In its earliest phase, the shoe-removal policy was applied haphazardly, showing up from time to time and terminal to terminal in response to ever-shifting, secret intelligence on terrorist threats tracked by the Department of Homeland Security. Where the new form of screening was in place, it served not only to avert future shoe bombs but also to speed up the queue. Metal detectors had been tuned to be more sensitive, and the metal shank inside the soles of many shoes, installed to provide support, often set them off. (In response, some major footwear brands, including Rockport and Timberland, rushed out lines of shoes with plastic shanks that were marketed as being “security friendly.”)
By the summer of 2003, the policy had become more formalized; the TSA started “strongly” recommending that all passengers everywhere remove their shoes, or else risk being subject to a secondary screening. Speaking to The New York Times, a TSA representative said this new approach would “ensure that the experience you have in one airport is similar to the experience you have in another airport coast to coast.” Three years later, the policy of universal urging was made into a hard rule: Now your shoes had to come off, no matter what.
Although footwear checks applied to all in principle, some individuals—especially those deemed suspicious on the basis of their looks, or who evinced anxiety—were getting more aggressive treatment from the screeners. The system seemed unfair for some, and also far too burdensome for everyone. Why couldn’t some new and better form of scanner be invented, one that could spot a shoe explosive even as the wearer stood there? Would Americans be padding across the gross airport floors forever, just because of Richard Reid?
Better technology should have been the answer. In the decade after 9/11, tech firms completely reinvented everyday life: Web search, broadband, mobile telephony, e-commerce, smartphones, social networking, and real-time document collaboration all became routine. Back in 2002, many travelers would not have had so much as a flip phone in their carry-ons; 10 years later, most were toting handheld supercomputers. Yet when it came to building new devices for screening shoes, very little was accomplished. DHS spent millions of dollars in an effort to buy or subcontract the development of next-generation scanners that could avert sole-borne risks in airports, to no avail. (During this time, airport screening’s most significant innovation was the gray plastic bin into which you might hurl your pumps, boots, or loafers.) Shoe removal would “be a part of air travel for the foreseeable future,” a TSA spokesperson somberly announced in 2012, after another four experimental scanners had failed in real-world testing.
But a different way to solve the problem also started to emerge that summer: It turned out just to be money. The privately operated Clear service was launched in airports, giving travelers willing to pay a couple of hundred dollars a year and hand over their biometrics the ability to shortcut the screening line. And when the government’s own pay-for-comfort airport-security service, TSA PreCheck, rolled out widely in 2013, enrollees could finally forgo the lingering inconvenience of taking off their shoes. PreCheck also let them keep their laptops packed and their toiletries inside their bags. For a time, airline flyers with elite status got special access to both PreCheck and Clear.
This would be right in line with other trends of the early 2010s, when the VIP experience was being sold in a thousand different ways. Pay-to-play became a way of life. It’s hard to remember anymore, but before ride-hailing apps were available for nearly everyone, private cars were associated with late-night talk-show guests and people being shuttled to airports directly after giving conference keynotes. The precursors to the modern smartphone, such as the BlackBerry, were originally made for important executives before everyone adopted the air of importance. Since then, the whole economy has shifted upmarket. Those with money can now buy online memberships that get them tables at restaurants or tickets to shows whenever they want. Even Disneyland lets you pay to skip ahead in line.
Trading cash for the right to get through airport security with your shoes on prefigured all this and made it visible for everyone to see. Being in the TSA PreCheck queue not only gave you quick, shod access to the terminal; it also offered a perch from which to look down on the rabble nearby, stripped down to their socks and belt loops, presenting their shampoos and ointments, and unsheathing their electronics. What a bunch of losers, frequent fliers might think, before ascending to the airline club in their Lobbs or Louboutins.
It’s surely long past time to broaden out this special privilege and to stop demanding that every other person among the 1 billion annual air passengers in the United States take off their shoes because one guy tried to hide a bomb in his sneakers a quarter century ago. But the termination of the policy does not feel justified by any new development in science, technology, intelligence, or geopolitics. In announcing the change, Noem gave no satisfying explanation. She said only that it was enabled by the presence of “multi-layers of screening,” new scanners, more personnel, and Real ID—a nationwide identification system that was ginned up by Congress 20 years ago and somehow still has not been fully implemented.
By all appearances, the rule on shoes was not rescinded just because rescinding it happens to make sense. Rather, the change was made because the terror-hardened discipline of the millennium’s beginning has finally, fully been replaced by nihilism. These days, you board a plane that might or might not be flight-worthy, regulated by a shrunken-down Federal Aviation Administration, routed by an air-traffic-control system undermined by neglect and disdain. The president blamed a fatal plane collision on diversity programs, while selling access to the White House in plain view. No one seems to care. But at least you’ll be able to keep your shoes on before lifting off into America’s sunset.
The post The End of Airport Shoe-Screening appeared first on The Atlantic.
