Originally Posted by Bbatchelder

This is ridiculous. The point of terrorism is not body count. It is to cause people to be afraid and change their way of life.

DHS and the TSA are our response to terrorism, and they have changed our way of life quite a bit. The terrorists "won" when these agencies were created, and they continue to win every time we give up essential liberties in the name of safety "from terrorism".

It is impossible to be safe from "terrorism". We can try to prevent future acts of terrorism, but the way we are going about doing it is amplifying our fears, eroding our rights, and allowing opportunists to grab up powers they would never have a chance to otherwise.

Our government has many options to prevent terrorist acts, which do not involve changing American's way of life.

Our government has many options to fight terrorism, which do not involve doing the terrorists job for them, by continuing to invoke fear.

Our government chose the wrong options, and the recent major overstepping by the TSA has caused some people to wake up to this. It was one thing to deal with stupidity like the 3-1-1 rule, the shoe carnival rule, etc - but techno-strip-searches and bodily searches/gropings have really pissed some people off.

Is it enough people to cause change? I don't know. But I do believe that they next ridiculous response TSA has to some new threat will not be taken as lightly as the previous responses. Eventually enough people will get pissed off. And eventually changes will be made, either through civil disobedience or elections.