I’ve never mentioned this publicly, partly because it sounded paranoid even to me. But with some distance, it’s worth reflecting on.
Late in Joe Biden’s presidency — this would’ve been September, 2024 — my wife and I returned from a trip to Paris. On the way home, I was, for some reason, singled out and subjected to an extraordinary amount of additional security screening. When I went to scan my passport, it was rejected multiple times and I was locked in between the two sets of gates that one must pass through. When I was freed from that, I proceeded through security, where I was pulled out of line and subjected to a more thorough search than anyone else, including being required to submit to chemical reagents being wiped on my hands in order to detect bomb residue. Later, when I was about to board the plane, I was again pulled out of line, this time with my wife, and we both had full body searches performed on us, and again I was tested for bomb residue. This was all for me! Nobody else was going through this. I was personally targeted, and so was my wife because she was with me.
Understand that I have no criminal record. I have no mental health or substance abuse history. I have never made a threat against anyone’s safety. In fact, in my part-time role as a prosecutor, I am technically a member of law enforcement. I was also, for whatever it’s worth, appointed by the New Jersey State Supreme Court to the attorney ethics committee, which attests to my good character, and I’ve passed several background checks associated with my employment, as well as my lawful firearms purchases. I am the least likely person to need additional security screening.
The reason for all of this harassment, I figured out, was that an “SSSS” designation had been printed on my boarding pass, which I later learned stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” Many travelers have encountered it. It is opaque, unappealable, and no explanation is ever given.
I do not claim to know why I was flagged, but context matters. I run this modest political website with a readership in the tens of thousands, openly critical of the Biden Administration (and, incidentally, the Trump Administration, when it so demands). I do not pretend that this makes me important, only visible enough that the thought naturally occurs that the designation may not have been a coincidence.
That concern is not purely hypothetical. During the same period, several figures on the political Right publicly reported repeated use of the same designation, in circumstances that appeared difficult to explain on neutral grounds alone. You may recall, for example, Tulsi Gabbard being tagged with this designation. Whether those cases reflected error, overbreadth, or something more troubling, they underscored how easily such tools can be experienced as punitive, and how little recourse exists for those subjected to them.
What makes the designation even more puzzling from a security standpoint is that it is announced in advance. The traveler is told, explicitly, that enhanced screening is coming. For me, the warning came when I tried to use my phone app to check into my flight the night before, only to learn that I could not, and that I would instead be issued a physical boarding pass upon my arrival (so they could print “SSSS” on it). With that warning, anyone intent on carrying contraband would simply refrain from doing so on that occasion. Whatever else this system may accomplish, it is difficult to see how it meaningfully deters, rather than delays, a serious threat. It seems useful for simple harassment, or an ominous warning that one is being watched.
That thought cannot be separated from the broader climate of the moment. The federal government, under the Biden Regency (let’s not pretend he was in charge), was openly pressuring banks, social-media companies, and other institutions to marginalize political dissent, including efforts to de-bank certain conservative groups and speakers, restrict lawful purchases, and suppress speech. These were not isolated excesses, but part of a pattern in which informal power was exercised where formal authority would have drawn resistance.
When a system grants the state broad, unreviewable discretion over travel, finance, and speech, the absence of proof is not reassuring, it is the problem. A free society depends not only on good intentions, but on limits. Rights that exist only at the discretion of administrators are not rights at all.
We are now past the comfortable fiction that liberty preserves itself if only the right people are elected. Liberty cannot merely be a slogan Republicans campaign on, nor can it survive if voters content themselves with cheering for officials who do nothing once in office.
Let us never forget that Kamala Harris promised more of the same, a continued tightening of administrative power and a further erosion of meaningful limits. Trump, for many, was supposed to be the antidote. I fear he may instead prove an accelerant, not because he seeks the same ends, but because his excesses invite them. Time will tell.
For now, it’s sufficient to note that cheering for our President must give way to the harder work of insisting on limits on law, restraint, and the principle that dissent is not disloyalty. That work cannot be delegated, and it cannot be postponed. Nor can we take the next elections for granted. We are one administration away from a point of no return, where the state finally, and without apology, overpowers the people. If we do not now demand government accountability and transparency, we are unlikely to be given another chance, and we will long for the day were mere harassment at an airport was the extent of government overreach.
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