A lot of what you say makes sense, but I've got to take issue with this. What you describe would bring a TSA checkpoint a giant leap toward being exactly the type of internal checkpoint that was common behind the Iron Curtain where you have to submit your "papers please" in order to proceed. This is a way to control who can and cannot travel, and nothing more.

Sure you might catch some bad guys by doing warrant checks. But you might catch some bad guys by doing warrant checks on the streetcorner in your hometown or at the shopping mall. That doesn't make it right or constitutional. There's a lot of good reasons why we do not allow the police to arbitrarily demand papers of anyone on the street and run a warrant check on them for no reason. Failing to present papers is neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or is about to be committed.

And a BDO interview, seriously? I haven't had to face these clowns yet at BOS, but when I do, I intend to exercise my right to remain silent. There is nothing in any regulation or law, let alone the Constitution, that requires me to speak to a government agent as a pre-condition of freedom of movement and freedom of assembly. When one of your colleagues eventually screws up and denies access to the gate to a silent passenger, I hope there's going to be a rain of judgement from the courts like none TSA has seen before. If the person they ban happens to be sympathetic (disabled, old, child, mom with baby/toddler, ethnic minority), the media and public will join in the hate fest.

Your BDO colleagues at BOS have already interrogated a coworker of mine about his employment, education, home ownership, time at his current address, family, etc., in ways that were completely inappropriate. And there are other stories of the same thing happening.

But, you'll likely say, what about enforcing the no fly list? Well, for one, it is completely un-American to maintain a secret blacklist of people who cannot engage in air travel but have no effective means of redress or due process. DHS Trip is not redress; a public courtroom is. If you're on the list, you can't find out why and can't get off it. How is that right? And it doesn't even help security. If someone is truly so dangerous that they should not be allowed to fly, then surely they 1) are also too dangerous to let roam the streets, and 2) have committed some crime that indicates they are so dangerous. So instead of a secret blacklist, these people should be arrested via good old-fashioned police and intelligence work, tried in a criminal court, and given all of the due process rights afforded to people on US soil. If the US wants to maintain a list of non-citizens who are blacklisted from traveling to the US, that's fine, but that should be enforced by CBP not TSA, and it should have no impact on domestic USA flights.

If you know anyone who lived or experienced life behind the Iron Curtain, you really should have a chat with them about internal controls, state security, etc. I have a friend whose parents literally ran out of Czechoslovakia under gunfire from the internal border guards; I have the utmost respect for those sort of brave folks. I was also fortunate enough to visit East Berlin for a single day before the Wall came down and get a glimpse of what life was like there. In that context, TSA's program of acclimatizing citizens to "screening," papers checks, and being submissive to authority, scares the h**k out of me.