You might want to check out Patrick Smith's ASK THE PILOT column in this week's Salon. It includes this passage...

<<< In Latin America, for example, our TSA requires local security personnel to set up gateside screening tables exclusively for flights to the United States. After passing through the standard metal detector and x-ray station, which does not enforce a liquids ban, passengers get in line to have their carry-on bags hand-searched for any oversized containers. Those headed elsewhere are exempt from such nonsense. These gateside checks are not only tedious, but useless. In South America recently I was sitting in a crowded gate and witnessed something hilarious -- or maybe sad is the better term: At the screening tables, a handful of contract guards were ransacking carry-ons, but there was no frisking or pat-downs of passengers themselves. So, as the line snaked forward in agonizing slow-motion, people would simply reach into their bags, remove any toothpaste or other personal effects they'd rather not forfeit, and slip them into their pockets!

Over the past six years I have written upwards of twenty columns on the airport security and the TSA. Through it all I've found myself searching for a word -- a single word that might possibly encapsulate the nonsense that we go through, from the pointy-object confiscations to the shoe removals to the childish folly I just described. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, there is no single word that can simultaneously account for things wasteful, pointless, humiliating and immature. Neither is there a word to describe the level frustration some of us feel when we are demanded, at the risk of confrontation and hollering, to treat obviously silly rules with unmatched seriousness.

What we're dealing with is, to some extent, human nature. At this point the TSA is the kind of self-perpetuating beast that inevitably results when a bureaucracy is granted lots of power and little actual purpose. But also, we have also spent six years living in a state of institutional denial. Our government, willfully or otherwise, refuses to admit a basic and irrefutable premise: that the attacks of September 11th were not, in fact, caused by a failure of airport security. >>>

You can read the full story here, for free....
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/...skthepilot270/

Watch for the "Skip this Ad" or "Enter Salon" link on the gateway page.

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