Unfortunately I don’t see anybody hitting the issue from that point of view. I cry for my country when I hear people talking about promoting freedom by attacking Afghanistan, or when people talk about war on terror with a straight face. Instead of being a great country promoting freedom and developing itself, we’re beholden to people half a world away.

And one consequence of this is . . . yep, asshole airport employees and ridiculous regulations to “keep us safe.” Strange how many other countries in the world are keeping safe just fine, all without having to invade and occupy sovereign nations.

http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/flying-home/

That management is the TSA. Do you even know what the TSA is? It seems you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have made the statement you did.

“unprecedented acts of terrorism and attempted terrorism”

Unprecedented? No. Even before 9-11, there were TWENTY-THREE attempted hijackings. We’ve been dealing with this for a long, long time.

“Finding dangerous items is not a science – I would rather have them be overly cautious and take an extra few minutes to screen everyone on the place than get blown to smithereens by a terrorist’s bomb.”

Except…these new regulations do nothing to make it more difficult to set off a bomb in a plane, if you read my response to them (and believe me, I do know what I’m talking about, as Marc works in security and did his master’s thesis on domestic terrorists). These new regulations are what is called “Security Theatre“, which is a lot of invasive and elaborate practices that give the appearance of security, but are of very questionable practicality. Any terrorist capable of making a bomb is capable of doing the math to know where they are without an animated cartoon map. The pants bomber would not have been stopped by the nothing-in-lap rule, as the item was hidden in his pants. It *might* have been detected by the pat-down, but as I said in the post, the pat-downs are largely performed by untrained airline staff that aren’t likely to really find anything. I have no problem with pat-downs, but they need to be performed by trained professionals, as I said.

Next time you want to make claims, do some research first.

@Sonja: Yeah, see, the good airlines like Air France, KLM, etc, don’t worry me. The ones that worry me in regards to these sort of regulations are airlines like Aeroflot, Air Italia, South African Airlines, etc. (By the way, I am NOT looking forward to having to fly Aeroflot to Mongolia. Really. Really really.)

@Irondad: The hilarious thing about this whole increase in security is that part of the objective of terrorism is to harass your target and cause disruptions. Well, I think they’ve successfully accomplished that, indirectly!

@Financial Samurai: I hate checking bags, but with new carry-on regulations, it has been getting harder and harder. One of the things that concerns me is that if they truly reduce the carry-on to one bag, I’m going to have to figure out a new laptop/camera bag. Right now my camera bag and laptop bag are separate, and I refuse to check either one for obvious reasons.