but that is exactly the point that everyone is making. you should know who are the greater risks to security. this random appproach diverts huge resources away from actually finding someone who is trying to do us harm. TSA has taken a "needle in a haystack" approach to airport security while destroying the civil liberties we are trying to protect. The enourmous resources being spent on checking shoes and doing secondary screenings could be put to better use in other activities.
The other problem is that in most cases it seems that the procedures are either not being followed uniformly or are sufficiently vague to allow for interpretation on a wide scale. Being an upper level manager who sets policy for my company I can tell you that the worst problem I can have is when a procedure is not being followed or changed by the line people. There is NO way to effectively evaluate any program which is checking everyone's shoes in SEA and no ones in ORD. It appears that the procedures for things such as shoes and secondary searches are being changed location to location. You cannot have any effectiveness in a program where such broad implementations of a policy occur since there is no way to measure it from location to location.
Someone here has a great Franklin quote for a sig and I think TSA should really take the quote more to heart.