The TSA apologists and the 4th amendment activists on this board continually trade arguments like this:

apologist: Oh, yeah, what if a terrorist puts <weapon> in his <hiding place> and then gets it on the plane. We're just here for your own safety.

4th amendmenters: Current screening wouldn't find out if a terrorist had <unbanned item> and used it to <implement some diabolical plot>. So why should we submit to the current screening if it's obviously ineffective?

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This entire repetitive dialogue is missing the forest for the trees. The target on 9/11 was office buildings. Big office buildings. What justifies the enormous expense focused only on airplanes? This is just an irrational, emotional response. There have already been plenty of terrorist plots, worldwide and in the U.S., that targeted buildings and crowds directly without the intermediary of airplanes. A huge problem with the frisk-everybody-who-flies security model is that it ignores vast classes of other risks as it pours all available security money into a very low-value security measure. As the Eileen McNamara of the Boston Globe put it, "It is easier to frisk one another than it is to take the time and care required to figure out who hates us and why."


Real responses to terrorism include:
hiring more language experts and intelligence experts
investing in countries on the brink of radicalism
revising intelligence agencies' information sharing mechanisms

For more detail, see Congressman Jim Turner's (Ranking Member of Select Committee on Homeland Security) plan:
http://www.house.gov/hsc/democrats/p...ssrelease2.pdf
double special ops forces,
increase number of FBI agents 50%,
screen 100% of cargo entering U.S. for nuclear material
hire an additional 500 Arabic speakers at State Department
create a U.S. Reconstruction Corps,
"Marshall plan" for the Middle East,
secure unprotected nuclear material worldwide,
destroy all the world's chemical weapons by 2010.