Seriously. Ever since 9/11, I have wondered why the TSA only used fake pat downs. By fake I mean that they avoided touching you all the areas that you would naturally used to conceal a weapon or explosives. One could conclude that the pat downs were only being done to reassure the public.
Of course one could similarly conclude that about a lot of security features, including the fact that the US has very weak identification of people in general, some luggage and cargo still flies un-scanned on passengers flights, etc.
Still, if you know anything about security, you know that its a multi-layered approach. Just because you have a weakness in one area doesn't mean you abandon the others...
I always felt that real pat downs would start after a plane was blown up by another underwear bomber. That is our normal reactive mode, after all. So I am very pleased and reassured we decided not to wait until then. But dismayed that it took almost 10 years.
So I feel a lot better about flying now, which I must do every couple weeks, now that we have something resembling a real pat down. (If you have ever been in a law enforcement setting you would realize that the TSA pat down is still a little weaker and less intrusive then it should be but it is a good start).
No, we are not going to get the so called “Israeli System” here. In the US we have no internal passports and something like a zillion flights a day, so intelligence driven systems are helpful but are only part of the solution.
I am so tired of hearing people complain about the TSA. And it scares me that there are actually people out there who are bothered by either the non existent scanner radiation or the back of the hand sliding down your crotch. Geez, who really cares?
The last argument I heard was that since people are now going to put explosives in either a body cavity or swallow them, we might as well just not bother. This is an even sillier argument. Its all about the odds. A swallowed bomb might be so absorbed by the body that it was less effective. And cavity bombs would likewise be less effective unless ejected first by the wearer.
So yeah, while its probably true that someday in the future cavity bombs will get perfected and I'm sure our security people are working on that too, in the meantime I say please bring on “all of the above”. I'd far prefer my wife and kids get patted down then read about them on the news one day.
Leno said it best when he joked that he just wasn't sure “who to tip”. Its just hard to understand why the nation that downloads ten zillion porn images a day is so scared your buttocks may be touched.
The only explanation I can think of is homophobia...