I'm going on almost no sleep in the middle of a 20,000+ mile BIS run, here, but...

It seems like governmental power structures that are motivated and perpetuated on fear almost invariably end up being abused by the human sorts that are charged with running them. Small tyrants enjoy their sense of control a little too much; "recoveries" from confiscated goods turn into outright thefts small and large, favors are distributed unequally. Often the populace that is on the losing end of this grow to hate the machine.

In some places (Nazi Germany) the hate of the commoners doesn't matter: the security apparatus charged with rooting out Reichstag terrorists and whatnot destroyed dissenters as well. You kept your mouth shut or you got killed.

In other places incompetence and corruption becomes the norm; the masses are demotivated by what they perceive to be a permanently unlevel and arbitrary playing field. I'm thinking eastern europe here.

Neither of these paths lead to an America I want to live in.

I am not a historian at all but my impression is that for much of the 20th century the United States has done a uniquely excellent job in balancing out the potential for abuse in govermental structures with other powerful governmental structures. Rank-and-file police will forever be in a position to get away with abuses small and large, but Hoover's FBI and its descendants aggressively pursued police corruption. Armies can be dangerous to democracies, but we've traditionally checked their potential for abuse with very tight civilian control and (until recently) a superbly professional officer corps. The tyrants and sadists that are a part of any army are supervised and limited. Watch the watchers.

The world did not change after 9/11, nor did human nature and its negative tendancies. What did change is people temporarily accepted the dangerous idea that we would be safer without the checks and balances, and incompetents like our current President espoused this. We got comfortable with the idea of torture to keep us safe and the moral invincibility of our martial efforts abroad. We discarded bodies of law that were inconvenient. We stood for the national anthem a little too quickly, admired non-journalistic "Portraits of Grief" in the New York Times a little too much, supported the troops unreservedly, and checked our criticisms.

In this context it isn't hard to see how the TSA with its bad manners and smug presumptions devolved to where it is now. Assuming I'm not just spouting crap here, the premise of this thread has a silver lining. That silver lining is that what we're looking at is a managable problem that can be managed by, um, better management. The Irish example I cited at the beginning of this thread is one model: someone at the top is telling the rank-and-file to knock off the horseplay, and requiring certain standards of professionalism. Not such a difficult thing.

I think we can do the same, but it may require that people of conscience do the opposite of what our leadership would like: improvement will come through criticism and creative destruction of the many things that suck in the current regime.

-KF