<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by FWAAA:
Multiply your experience by over 650 million (total number of passengers in USA this year) and no wonder the TSA needs 55,000 employees to do what the airlines did with less than half as many. All to constantly screen you, a nonterrorist. And while doing nothing to actually discover if you are, in fact, a terrorist. Almost two million people a day. 
Mineta's (and now Loy's) infantile preoccupation with finding and confiscating sharp and pointy objects instead of finding terrorists is the real reason behind the long lines and millions of wasted hours. All in all, our great sharp and pointy object search costs society many billions of dollars per year on top of the TSA's multi-billion dollar budget.
And it has nothing to do with prevention of a September 11-type terrorist attack (or any other credible threat, for that matter).</font>
You are correct in that the TSA has no way of knowing whether the passengers they are screening are terrorists or not, but even if they are, they will be terrorists without "sharp or pointy objects."
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Don't take life too seriously, afterall, you won't get out alive.