Reading the article, I would suspect that the title and its apparently poorly-written content may be deliberately misleading so as to encourage clicks from indignant and gullible readers.
I would suggest that it is probably quite untrue that the TSA are enabling people to bypass an absolutely essential and mandatory security check by paying an $85 fee. Given the government's security imperative, it's an absurd assertion.
On the other hand, if it
were true, then the potential implications would seem serious - they could include, for example:
- 1. That the mandatory airport screening and security checks on every trip you take out of the country are not and never have been necessary at all, despite the government agency's assertions that they are/were.
- 2. They would thus be a charade, a form of "security theatre", conducted at great expense and inconvenience to the taxpayer.
- 3. They could be a deliberate sociological experiment with crowd control, to see just how much nonsense and harm people will tolerate, accept or believe they have to put up with - e.g., the X-ray machines; being herded about with such indignity, like cattle (as they arguably are in these security checks).
- 4. Allowing people to bypass the checks if they pay a fee is tantamount to extortion by a government agency.
- 5. This "wrongness" is all happening under the deliberate design of government agencies.
Now, if one or more of these potential implications were true, then some people (not me, you understand) might say that it could indicate a planned approach to an experiment to establish just how easily manipulated or stupid people can be individually and/or
en masse, but I couldn't possibly comment. They might go on to suggest that switching the rules like this seems to have all the hallmarks of the Bell Telephone Labs "Hawthorne experiments".
Come to think of it, and having been raised and schooled in farming country, the photo of the people walking down the railed entry channels and massing in the background does seem redolent of herding cattle into a stockyard. Maybe that's it. The people
are regarded as cattle, and so have to be treated accordingly - so it might be a kindness that is being done to them. If a cow or a bull has $85, then it could get itself a less inconvenient/uncomfortable treatment. Seems reasonable...
