Quite a lot. The January/February issue of Atlantic Monthly has a great article by James Fallows entitled "Success Without Victory." Here's a free link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/fallows

And here's an excerpt, long but totally worthwhile reading:

Homeland Security: Keep Your Shoes On

Screening lines at airports are perhaps the most familiar reminder of post-9/11 security. They also exemplify what's wrong with the current approach.

Many of the routines and demands are silly, eroding rather than building confidence in the security regime of which they are part. "You can't go through an airport line without thinking 'This is dumb,'" says Graham Allison, the author of the recent Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, and the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard, which conducts many projects on anti-terrorism and security. "You have the two people whose job is to see if the name on your driver's license is the same as the name on your ticket—as if any self-respecting terrorist would fail to think of that. You have the guy whose job is to shout out a reminder for you to take off your jacket and get your computer out of your bag. You've got one-year-olds taking off their shoes. It is hard to think of a way you could caricature it to make it look sillier." At the same time, the ritual manages to be intimidating, as a standing reminder of how much Americans have to fear.

The airport screening process is surprisingly expensive, directly costing the Transportation Security Administration more than $4 billion a year. According to the Air Transport Association, the airline trade group, U.S.-based airlines spend about that much again—$3.8 billion—in security fees and other direct and indirect costs such as free first-class seats for air marshals. For purposes of comparison, the airlines' total losses for 2004 are likely to be about $4 billion.

Are the measures worthwhile? They certainly reduce one specific danger: that a plane will be brought down by a shoe bomb or some other explosive device concealed in a passenger's clothes or carry-on luggage. But they probably make no difference in the odds of another 9/11-style attack, now that cockpit doors have been reinforced and passengers know they must not let a hijacker succeed. And they also do nothing to reduce the risk of explosions in the cargo hold, since most airborne cargo containers are not screened at all, even when carried on passenger airplanes.

In a larger sense, such extensive screening at airports may actually make America more vulnerable, because of all the things the Transportation Security Administration is neglecting to do as a result. The TSA has a total budget of some $5.3 billion—more than 80 percent of which goes to airport screening. Although there is some money for transportation security in other parts of the federal budget, the TSA, which is supposedly responsible for all modes of transportation, has well under $1 billion for everything except airlines: roads, bridges, subways, tunnels, railroads, ports, and other facilities through which most of the nation's people and commerce move. "Nobody can 'prove' that it's wrong to have so little left for ports and roads and railroads, because nobody has done the analysis," says Daniel Prieto, who has worked as an investment banker and as a staff member for the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, and is now at the Belfer Center. "There is no good guide to prioritize what to protect. But it sure doesn't seem right, when trucks account for 70 to 80 percent of all shipping in the United States; when terrorist attacks globally, like the Madrid bombing, show that land-based transportation targets are among the deadliest and most easily hit; and when experts view insecure ports and cargo containers as among the most likely means of WMD entering the United States." Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer and the author of the book Understanding Terror Networks, says that with the disruption of its training bases and communications systems, al-Qaeda will find it harder to launch a complex 9/11-scale operation anytime soon. "The future is Madrids," he says—smaller, localized attacks that still do great damage.

Prieto argues that the roughly $4 billion now going strictly toward airline passengers could make Americans safer if it were applied more broadly in transportation—reinforcing bridges, establishing escape routes from tunnels, installing call boxes, mounting environmental sensors, screening more cargo. All these efforts combined now get less than $300 million a year, which will drop to $50 million next year.

Rationally, this is an easy tradeoff: less routine screening of passengers who don't call out for special attention (watch lists, travel and spending patterns, and other warning mechanisms can be improved), in exchange for more and faster work to reduce the vulnerabilities of bridges, tunnels, and ports. In wartime a commander would easily make such a decision to protect his troops. But politically this decision is almost impossible. Such a tradeoff would make it likelier that some airplane, somewhere, would be blown up. If that happened, whoever had recommended the change would be excoriated—even if more people had been spared equally gruesome fates in subways or near ports.

"Terrorism is simply too cheap, too available, and too tempting to ever be totally eradicated," says Stephen Flynn, the author of the recent book America the Vulnerable. Flynn is a former Coast Guard officer who has worked on the National Security Council and for the Hart-Rudman Commission. "What is required is that everyday citizens develop both the maturity to live with the risk of future attacks and the willingness to invest in reasonable measures to mitigate that risk." This point seems obvious, but so far it has escaped mention by our president or vice-president. Since the very point of terrorism is to distort our domestic life, the further we go in anti-terror measures, the more we do our enemies' work. For instance, the nation's capital has been turned into a bunker city. Visiting citizens can barely approach the White House or the Capitol. The damage on 9/11 was al-Qaeda's doing; much of the damage to normal life since then has been our choice.

"Who are the victims of terrorism?," Benjamin Friedman, a graduate student in political science at MIT, asked in the MIT publication Breakthroughs last year. "Those that the terrorists kill or maim and those that fear terrorism. Terrorism takes its name not from violence but from the emotion violence provokes. Terrorists are the enemy. So is fear … If we are all afraid of terrorism, we are all its victims. In the war on terror, policies that encourage fear are a self-inflicted wound."

Unfortunately, almost nothing about the Department of Homeland Security suggests either a willingness to distinguish large risks from small ones or a concern about needlessly generating fear. In part this reflects the department's origins as a mishmash of pre-existing groups. In the best of circumstances it would take a long time to make the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and many others behave as if they were part of the same organization. Even coordinating data systems has been a major challenge.

Still, that doesn't explain the department's policies, which have illustrated what Friedman calls the "democratization of risk," a term he does not mean as praise. By acting as if everyone poses an equal threat or is in equal danger—all passengers asked for their IDs, all motorists told by flashing signs to "report suspicious activity," all citizens told that the national alert level has gone from "elevated" to "high"—the department avoids making choices about which risks are most important. Since the DHS went into business, in 2002, news reports have chronicled a stream of pointless-seeming grants: half a million dollars to the town of North Pole, Alaska, for "homeland security rescue and communications equipment" to serve the town's 1,570 residents; $1.5 million to Grand Forks County, in North Dakota, for disaster-response equipment.

This past fall Veronique de Rugy, of the American Enterprise Institute, released a detailed assessment of where the money had gone. It noted that in 2003 Congress authorized the DHS to distribute $100 million in preparedness grants to the seven cities seen as facing the most serious threat: New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and Houston. This was a deliberately chosen list, because of the targets and vulnerabilities in each city. At about the same time, the Insurance Services Office, a private organization that assesses risks for insurers, came up with a very similar list of nine cities where the risk of attack (or "loss," from the insurers' standpoint) was worst. The two cities it added were Philadelphia and Boston.

The problems showed themselves within a year of the original congressional directive, when the list of "critical" cities ballooned to fifty, including Fresno, St. Paul, and Baton Rouge. A DHS spokesman has contended, in comments to The Washington Post, that "better intelligence and more sophisticated analysis led to the increase in jurisdictions eligible for this funding." Maybe. Government and press reports have shown that most of the grants are either misdirected—cities putting the money toward their normal fire and police bills—or actively foolish, enticing every village to create a superfluous hazmat team. State-by-state homeland-security funding demonstrates the same failure to discriminate. The main problem is precisely that funding is state by state. When authorizing homeland-security funds Congress mandated that 40 percent of all the money be divided equally among the states, regardless of population or threat level. New York and Idaho each get the same cut of this money, as do California and Delaware. Overall, according to Veronique de Rugy's calculations, Wyoming has received $35.30 per capita in homeland-security grants and North Dakota $28.70, versus $4.70 for California and $5.10 for New York.

Nothing about this is considered and serious. "U.S. Homeland Security policy has embraced the false idea that all American communities are likely targets of terrorism," Benjamin Friedman wrote. "It is time to stop indulging the expensive myth that risks are geographically distributed, time to abandon feel-good security, and time to accept reality: some risk is inevitable, some of us should be more afraid than others, but our fear is what our enemies intend."

If the United States decided to worry about terrorism only when that worry was immediately useful, and to accept smaller risks as the price of avoiding large ones, what would it do then? It could start by turning off the Big Brother—esque "suspicious activity" highway signs and eliminating the nationwide color-coded alert system. If there is a threat to Chicago or San Antonio that the people in that city should know about, tell them. There is no reason to have the "crawl" at the bottom of the Fox News screen flash "Terror Alert: High" to viewers in Seattle and Miami. Send most of the airport-security personnel home—and while we're at it, eliminate the sixty-mile-wide "no fly" circle that surrounds Air Force One wherever the president happens to be, disrupting airliners and all other air traffic.

We could also eliminate the ID checks at parking garages and the sign-in sheets at office buildings that many private firms have instituted to seem "secure." Each time I'm forced to sign one of these sheets, I look at the previous few pages. Usually someone has had the bravado to sign in as "Jack D. Ripper" or "Mullah Omar." The government could also start issuing visas at something like the pre-9/11 level. The drastic cutback in visas has reduced the flow of foreign students to American universities and of skilled foreign workers to American industries, while it may or may not have done anything to reduce the flow of future terrorists. Illegal crossings of our northern and southern borders are way up, as the legal flow has ebbed; these informal pathways will presumably be future terrorists' routes. Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard, wrote recently that the United States "will likely register slower economic growth in a few years due to post-9/11 visa restrictions alone."

In a less panicky mood America could apply a number of the recommendations that come up repeatedly in discussions with homeland-security experts. The essential concepts are these:

The country should undertake a systematic vulnerability study, something a number of states and industries have done piecemeal. The federal government has shirked an overall effort, in part because it would lead to awkward questions about why the money now goes where it does.

The country should prevent attacks where it can; but everywhere else it should concentrate on rebound capacity, so that when defenses break down, as they inevitably will, the damage can be contained. Improved public-health services are near the top of most "rebound" lists. They would be indispensable in any future biological attack, and helpful in all other circumstances.

Repairs to the nation's physical infrastructure, especially to its already shaky electrical power grid, are next on the priority list. And the country should recognize that certain potential targets—chemical plants in particular—are in private rather than public hands. The federal government now assumes that market forces will lead those industries to make the appropriate investments in security. But as Daniel Prieto points out, that assumption is unrealistic; as with pollution control, no company will want to go first unless it knows its competitors will have to follow.

Soldiers, police officers, and firefighters take risks to defend things we value. Our leaders explain the purpose of their sacrifice. They should also explain the importance of citizens' facing risks in order to preserve normal civic life.