Where has the optimism gone? The article states immigrants from the Middle East are under suspicion of being under terrorist training programs. I don't think they mean ordinary Americans or protestors.

Sorry, but I really can't imagine the government would actually consider its' own people to be terrorists just because they protest or think differently from others. That is not the America I grew up in.

Welcome to the new Amerika. 9/11 changed everything, Citizen.

Of course it does! To be a little more complete, the article said, "...Often immigrants from the Middle East" which implies that the people could be anyone but makes you think of the stereotypical terrorist that the government consistently rants about. Thus, when the noose is tightened around everyone you won't complain because you think you're "safer" with the new restrictions. Just remember, McVeigh wasn't from the Middle East...

Regarding optimism, there is no room for that when dealing with the power-hungry doomsayers (of both parties) currently running the US.

As a matter of interest how amny of you are becoming afraid of who you voted into office... or put in another way how many no longer think the person you voted into office in the best person for the job or even worse totaly unsuitable for his /her job!!

Apparently you weren't in NYC during the Republican National Convention.

A telling quote from the article, <snip> "They preferred bookstores or hookah bars to mosques. They stopped listening to pop music and instead surfed Web sites promoting radical Islam. They threw away their baseball caps and grew beards. New York Police Department intelligence analysts have concluded those were some of the telltale signs of homegrown terrorists in the making..." <snip>

So now, not wearing a baseball cap and growing a beard is a sign of a terrorist in the making. Or going to a bookstore!

Brilliant, NYPD, simply brilliant.

Clearly. The mileage balance in a person's FF account is a concrete measure of his or her net worth as an individual. It's refreshing to know how I fit in in the grand scheme of things.

Oh, I don't hate to say it at all. You know, while it's still legal.

As PhlyingRPh so excellently put it, we're focusing our resources on the wrong things. But terrorist attacks are unknown and scary, no matter how rare they are. They make an excellent Boogie Man for anyone who wants to scare the crap out of Americans (and thereby sell newspapers, get elected, etc.).

Mike

That's the thing in my book - I don't think it's about control so much as elected. They like their jobs and perks and want to be seen as Doing Something.

Not that terrorism isn't real - it is. But where in the scale of problems this country faces (and the world, for that matter) does it lie?

35,000ft above. But more or less likely to be a terrorist? Certainly not. I'm sure there's 0.1 (give or take a few) terrorists in the 100,000+ membership here.

.1 of a person (or .1 of a terrorist) has no limbs, and probably no eyes and ears either. Even giving you room for 6 times that, still no single person capable and willing of doing anything.

Terrorists are less likely to be frequent flyers or care about frequent flyer miles -- certainly most terrorists don't have a frequent flyer account or join FT.

FTer = Terrorist?

Depends on how you define it. "FTers are all above average citizens"...and therefore more dangerous for they are more apt to point out the fallacies and foibles of Security Theater. They also point out that the Emperor and his minions have no clothes. As such, if enough of them can sway the sheepl, er, Ameican public into their way of thinking, well then that will cause trouble for the gub'ment.

And we all know that the authoritarian types (those who don't question anything that "they" say) consider troublemakers to be akin to terrorists. After all, only a troublemaker would dare question the OBVIOUS security risk posed by little bottles of things that go squish!

Besides, aren't oragnizations like PETA and GreenPeace now branded as "terrorists"?

I'm quite aware. Let me poke fun at a semi-reasonable estimate of, say, 1 in 1,000,000 people being terrorists? About 6,000 terrorists of 6 billion people on Earth feels about right.

The average human is a hermaphrodite.

We don't have a good profile of what terrorists do or do not, other than do terrorist-y things like hijacks, car-bombings, plane collisions, etc. That's the thing about terrorist profiling. The sheer amount of information on FT is a treasure trove for airplane-attacking terrorists, as well as for the non-terrorists (that vastly outnumber the former) that just want a reasonable trip from A to B. And for a terrorist (or non-terrorist) that wants more information, joining the forum is a pre-requisite to actually asking the questions they need answered.

Edit and aside: I'm reminded of the Sony Rootkit makers, that joined public developer mailing lists to ask questions about writing CD-ROM drivers, without disclosing their final intent. They got helpful advice from other mailing list members on how to do some of the things they needed their software to do. Do you really think people with malicious intent won't join relevant fora to gather necessary information? It's just that people with malicious intent are (hopefully) badly outnumbered by good people, that a priori helping a random stranger is helping the public at large.

Yes, I agree that it's security theatre. Yes, I agree that things that go squish are not real threats compared to the annoyances they cause in getting banned. No, I'm not willing to say whether terrorists are "more likely" or "less likely" to join FlyerTalk.

Agreed. What's worse is that a lot of these threats are being overlooked. Why is it that in 2007, this is just making news like it is new information? Terrorists already in the US? Unbelievable!

IMO, the gov't has been searching for a new enemy since the end of the Cold War. This culture of fear serves as a good means to distract us from the social and economic ills right outside our front doors. I do think that there are certain people who live in the Middle East who are a threat to US security, but there are a lot of other threats out there as well. Personally, I'm waiting for the gov't to realise:

1. Not all people from the Middle East are extremists,
2. Not all people from the Middle East are Muslim,
3. Not all Muslims are extremists,
4. Not all Muslims are from the Middle East,
5. Not all extremists are terrorists,
6. Not all terrorists are religous extremists,
7. Terrorism comes in all shapes and sizes. Profiling or singling out one group makes it easier for the rest to slip through the cracks.