Yes and this is the security model so many in this country think we should be emulating. Coming home to Peoria from your business trip in Kansas City? Prove it! Where are your business cards? Show me the notes from your meetings! Of course, most people will cheerfully comply: "No one should worry unless they have something to hide. I'm glad the government is providing all this Extra Security. The TSA can place a video camera in my cubicle and make me show up 8 hours early for my flight so I can tell them all about my week, if that's what they need to do to keep me safe. These people who give the TSA a hard time complaining about 'civil rights' and hiding behind things like 'the Constitution' make me laugh. What would they rather have - Less Security at our airports? Well, I have little patience for these unpatriotic individuals who think we shouldn't defend our skies against Big Bad Osama. From now on I'm going to make 30 photocopies of all my meeting notes so every TSA employee at the airport checkpoint can have a copy. Anything less would be letting the terrorists win." (Wow, that sounded like it was quoted directly from the Letters to the Editor at Frommer's.)

Much of the "security" and "anti-terrorism" we see these days is demagoguery, plain and simple. Unfortunately, it's political suicide in the current climate to go against the flow and expose these measures for the sham they are. We already saw in the 2002 campaign a number of ads branding opponents as "soft on terror" or the like. Maybe, as Brian is fond of pointing out, things will work themselves out in the end. It will be a good decade before that happens, though, if past hysteria is any indication. In the meantime, of course, immeasurable and irreversible damage will have been done to many thousands of lives. And if another major terrorist incident occurs in the next 10 years, all bets are off.