Originally Posted by jalves
In many security related interviews, the questions and the responses are secondary to the way a person reacts to them. In the cited examples, the interviewer was trying to get a sense for the individual - are they hiding something or not?
They do a poor job of that or even catching blatant lies. And everyone that defends this stuff uses a handful of anecdotes to defend such practice.
X interviewed, with Y percentage of X being a credible threat to the security of a plane, with only Z percentage of Y "caught" (or "flagged" in any seriously meaningful way). If 10-100 times the number of people talked about in the most publicized anecdotes equated with the number of people that are Z percentage of Y, may we still be talking about a waste? Perhaps.
In any event, even the defence of such practices as part of the "layering" of security is just an excuse for weak security practices.
In a free country people should not be interrogated by security to be what we were born to be -- namely free people, free to choose with whom we speak and don't speak when in public venues and not violating the law. And if airlines want to make this a condition of travel, they better make such requirement an explicit -- and very visible -- demand. Sort of like naming themselves "Totalitarian Air".