Good piece today in the New York Times about airport security: Theater of the Absurd at the TSA.
The blog of the Indiana University PhD student referenced in the article has some good stuff, too: slight paranoia.
The case against the alleged liquid bombers in London from a few months ago has been thrown out of court, by the way. There’s little chance that this will actually mean we’ll be able to bring full-size tubes of toothpaste onto planes, of course, despite the repeated assertions by chemists that there wasn’t much of a threat there, anyway.
I like the phrase “security theater” quite a lot. I’m not cynical enough to believe that the TSA is actually putting absurd policies out there for the actual purpose of keeping us afraid. I think, really, the problem is that they’ve been given a job that’s impossible but they aren’t permitted to admit it. The best way to make sure nothing’s getting onto airplanes would be to require people to bring absolutely nothing onto the plane, and make people fly naked, but you really don’t want to see most Americans naked.