Or perhaps hiring TSA personnel who can think and are given the responsibilty to make decisions?

I agree with Dov, and recently have been thinking about my two trips through Israeli airport security. It was qute a different experience from most airport security. Not unpleasant, but serious. You couldn't just blow them off and mumble something, they made eye contact and asked you to listen up and pay attention. Politely. (Some of the FTers attending the TLV DO elicited much more attention, and were quite disturbed, but they were in a different demographic group than I. )

Indian security has always been pretty heavy-handed, but one comes away thinking they at least know what they're looking for. They've been wanding travelers and confiscating batteries for years. You step off a flight and there's a guy with a machine gun observing the area and sweeping the plane interior between takeoffs.

Another thread pointed out that TLV only has 40+ flights a day, and their methods would be impossible say at Heathrow or DFW. Not if we're serious about security.

What needs to be decided is whether we are serious or not. If we are, we can do it, we just have to do it in a rational way. Asking travelers to throw out makeup and medicine to make the TSA's job easier is insane. And complaining that it's un-American to be questioned is also insane.

The TSA guy at the scanner needs to be trained and empowered to make decisions, not forced to follow a set of rules that may or may not be applicable to the situation. And they need to improve their attitude.

You all are going to laugh, but I think any good Nordstom exec could turn this fiasco around and make the security checkpoints less demeaning, more effective and for god's sake faster. Mostly by doing the Nordstrom thing of empowering their frontline people to make decisions that make sense. (And it's a given they wouldn't be taking away our toothpaste and lipstick!)