El Al's security screening hasn't always stopped terrorists from flying on its planes. It's just those terrorists didn't care about hijacking or blowing up El Al's planes those days.

Intelligence agencies that are tightly monitoring individuals for days, weeks, months and even years get or focus on the wrong individuals often enough, so I don't see how a 15-minute to 240-minute excercise in mind-reading/body-reading at an airport would be effective over any large scale. All we'd get is a waste of resources and an increasingly counterproductive excercise.

Just because we've implemented a bunch of knee-jerk nonsense doesn't justify rolling out even more knee-jerk nonsense like harassing customers with even more questioning on the basis of data-mining and racist profiling (which is what it'll end up being). As is obvious from recent record, this will generate more false positives than anything -- namely, bigger haystacks in which to look for needles.

The sad testimony of the latest knee-jerk changes is that we are dealing with and will suffer the incompetence of governments because of historical and continued government incompetence.