Are Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms a Form of Security Theater?
As a person with a lifelong panic disorder, security has long been an issue for me. Safety comes in a variety of flavors, and for an anxious person, what feels safe and unsafe can change from day to day.
An anxious person spends a fair amount of time monitoring their surroundings, searching for reassurance that they are safe. And during their constant hypervigilant sweep of the external world, they are simultaneously scanning their bodies for changes, disruptions, or physical sensations that might dictate whether they stay home or leave their house and go to that dinner party.
They prepare for what they fear will happen.. For example, someone might wear headphones in public because they're afraid someone will speak to them. The headphones provide a false sense of protection, although in truth, the headphones don't protect them at all.
These measures are known as safety behaviors or safety-seeking behaviors.
The problem with these sorts of safety behaviors is that an anxious person associates their misguided hypervigilance and over-attunement with being safe. They can overly rely on a faulty system, responding to minor or misapprehended breaches in breathing with avoidant behavior for nonthreatening situations.
Worrying when there is no threat is a maladaptive coping mechanism, a misguided safety behavior that does not keep an anxious person safe, even if we believe it does.
It’s one thing for a person to fool themselves into feeling safe, and quite another when this misguided coping mechanism is adopted by a governmental system.
Enter Security Theater…
After 9/11, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was created to shore up the nation’s transportation security. They became responsible for our airports, screening all passengers and cargo. They are the reason we wait an hour in a creeping-slow line to take off our shoes and belts and remove our laptops from our bags and put them through a conveyor belt to be scanned, while our bodies get wand-ed and X-rayed.
Recently, I was at the airport, watching people hurry past the snaking, sweaty, 45-minute crawl-parade, following a sign that read: “Trusted Travelers.” These are travelers who are considered “low risk.”
Why are they low risk?
They paid $85, filled out an application and had a cursory ten-minute in-person interview.
If money can buy you the privilege of being considered a “safe” person, how secure is airport security?
Turns out, it’s not safe at all.
You see, airport security, like an anxious person’s safety behaviors, is a distraction, it’s a semiosis. And by that I mean, the process (taking off your shoes, putting your electronics in bins, being limited to weights and types of liquids) communicates to travelers a meaning and that meaning is safety.
Security theater was coined by the security technologist and cryptographer Bruce Schneier, who explains security theater is a response to fear. On a blog post about this topic, he writes:
The security line at the airport was erected to showcase active terrorist-prevention measures; a way to placate the public. But the measures they put in place are ineffective. What the entire TSA operation does is telegraph the perception of security.
The security line at the airport is a performance. It doesn’t prevent terrorism, or crime. It doesn’t make us any safer, it’s simply a pretense for addressing safety. It’s like giving a patient a placebo to treat their illness, knowing it’s not medication, but hoping the act of prescribing will be enough to heal.
We base our terrorist-prevention strategy on the last thing that happened: A guy plants a bomb in his shoe to blow up the plane he’s boarding, and so now, we take off our shoes at the airport. (Wasn't there also an Underwear Bomber?)
There are people who believe that we should put our money into intelligence research on potential future attacks, and direct our resources there, instead of spending money having people take their shoes off because one time there was a shoe-bomber.
We have security theater purely for the psychological well-being of the public, but standing in that excruciating line and being felt up and down by strangers is not psychologically soothing.
Worse, knowing that security theater is a sham, means recognizing that the airport has a security problem: It’s not safer, it’s just the illusion of safety.
America doesn’t like getting to the root of our problems. (We also don't like accountability.)
We’re surface skimmers, nodding and treating the symptoms without ever wondering or trying to pinpoint the source.
Original art for How to Live by Edwina White
When you know what Security Theater is, you can’t help but see the illusion of safety everywhere you look. It’s what makes up our society. Marriage as an institution gives the illusion of security, but nothing can guarantee a future. Security Theater is an incongruence. It’s a person talking out of both sides of their mouth, saying one thing, and doing another.
“Focusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow globe bombs simply induces the bad guys to do something else. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you haven’t reduced the total threat.” –Bruce Schneier
Like so much of our lives, security theater is just another performance, a deflection from something we’re not properly addressing.
When you go out into the world today, be attuned to this concept, and see if you spot it. Pay attention to the way the world addresses the symptoms and not the roots. Pay attention to your own safety behaviors. Are they working for you, or are they simply helping you avoid looking at the roots of the real problem?
And you? Are you familiar with Security Theater? What are your thoughts, and can you see the connection I'm trying to make? I hope so.
Until next week, I remain...
Amanda
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