I've noticed that one of the criteria these 'brain trusts' use to select people for special screening is whether or not your driver's licence has an expiration date! Just imagine them going through their 'job training for moron robots' sessions, with the instructor laying down the gospel for them that they must always check mechanically for an expiration date. Then they encounter a driver's licence that doesn't have one. It's interesting to watch them melt down.

The foreign born ones are a lot more understanding than your US borne country bumpkin (or even bigot). These routinely whip out their pens, and hand-write in the four Ses on my boarding pass, which gets me subject to being groped and felt up by someone of questionable sexuality. I hate that.

That comes to the other criterion for selecting people for secondary searches. I've noticed that they tend to 'pick on' the young athletic guys. Women less so. It was especially remarkable one day when I was getting on in, and got 'randomly' sent to a special pre-check in baggage screen. I looked at the line for the screen, and compared that to the people being waved through, and it was clearly a case of 'male models' vs. the frumpy punters. For a moment there, I felt flattered to be included.

This inequity was not lost on the other members of the line, most of whom were in their twenties, much younger than I. One quipped, "Aw, you know, this is just an excuse to find out what kind of underwear we wear." Another replied, "Or more like, how clean the underwear is." A third came up with, "Oh come on, you know they really want to know what kind of condoms we use.". And a fourth, "Who uses a condom?".

In all seriousness, any time you create an overbearing security infrastructure like this which is labour-intensive, in order to cut costs, you'll have to resort to hiring cheap people that lost out in the education game, and can't get a job somewhere else. Working for the TSA has a bit more prestige than flipping burgers or cleaning toilets, but not much. It's also a collecting magnet for the kind of people who really get into feeling people up during secondary searches.

I don't think there will ever be a single terrorist caught by these invasive screening techniques. Face it, terrorists are driven and smart, whereas most of the people doing the screening probably couldn't even spell the word, much less spot one.

It will be interesting to see what effect programs like Clear will have on this. The information collected doesn't seem to be very special -- a potential terrorist could easily supply such information. It's almost like a bribe to get around the inconveniences of something created primarily for reasons of low-skilled employment.