Why is it that we all - myself included - believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power? It's because everything seems so arbitrary, because there's no accountability or transparency in the DHS.

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.

The more technological a society is, the greater the security gap is.

It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore.