I saw this headline and just started shaking my head. This article reads like propaganda, that security is "something we need", not a single question of "Is it effective?" or "What does this mean for our privacy and erosion of our freedoms?"
After checking their luggage, passengers would identify themselves not with driver's licenses and paper boarding passes, but by scanning fingerprints or irises to prove they have an electronic ticket.
Passengers would walk with their carry-ons through a screening tunnel, where they'd undergo electronic scrutiny — replacing what now happens at as many as three different stops as they're scanned for metal objects, non-metallic items and explosives.
Those who voluntarily provide more information about themselves to the government would be rewarded with faster passage.
My husband found this article recently, and I have to say I agree. We are reacting in fear, giving up our freedoms, and letting those who wish to destroy us, win. The last time he was in DC (last 4th of July on a boys weekend out with his brother to watch the Cubs play in the capital), he said he felt like a criminal the entire time with the way the public was constantly treated.
Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears. ...An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers' inability to take that kind of stand -- and their inability to truly lead.
Some of them call terrorism an "existential threat" against our nation. It's not. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn't make an existential dent in our nation. Automobile-related fatalities -- at 42,000 per year, more deaths each month, on average, than 9/11 -- aren't, either. It's our reaction to terrorism that threatens our nation, not terrorism itself. The empty monument would symbolize the empty rhetoric of those leaders who preach fear and then use that fear for their own political ends.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
But, but, but, it' is the name of security, saftey. If it saves 1 life.
Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security.”
Ben Franklin
Yes, it's a shame that shortly after the Dept of Homeland (Fatherland?) Security was created, anyone who questioned the need for intrusive searches and over-reaction was declared a "non-patriot" by those swell folks that dreamed the ridiculously named "PATRIOT" Act....
It is a balancing act, and I do think security concerns are tipped a little too far on the paranoid side, but I also wonder if it is preventing another 9/11. We won't ever know if the terrorists try something else rather than re-create it.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
when you see insanity --- exploit it, don't fight it. You simply can't reason with crazy people.
Nope, I don't expect the trend to suddenly reverse --- so I have opted to take a train (less TSA ---- for now) ---
and buying shares of LLL (institutional insanity) --- and SWHC (individual insanity).
(this is not investment advice -- it's simply my own thinking).
Martin Ent Inc wrote: But, but, but, it' is the name of security, saftey. If it saves 1 life.
Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security.”
Ben Franklin
On a related note....This should probably be in a new thread, but here it is.
In a Congress noted for its political polarization, legislation to check drone use has the potential to forge "a left-right consensus," he said. "It bothers us for a lot of the same reasons it bothers conservatives."
Giving drones greater access to U.S. skies moves the nation closer to "a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities," the ACLU warned last December in a report.
The backlash has drone makers concerned. The drone market is expected to nearly double over the next 10 years, from current worldwide expenditures of nearly $6 billion annually to more than $11 billion, with police departments accounting for a significant part of that growth.
'Checkpoint of the future' takes shape at Texas airport
By Bart Jansen, USA TODAY Updated 19h 33m ago
DALLAS – At a terminal being renovated here at Love Field, contractors are installing 500 high-definition security cameras sharp enough to read an auto license plate or a logo on a shirt.
The cameras, capable of tracking passengers from the parking garage to gates to the tarmac, are a key first step in creating what the airline industry would like to see at airports worldwide: a security apparatus that would scrutinize passengers more thoroughly, but less intrusively, and in faster fashion than now.
After checking their luggage, passengers would identify themselves not with driver's licenses and paper boarding passes, but by scanning fingerprints or irises to prove they have an electronic ticket.
The key to speeding up checkpoints and making security less intrusive will be to identify and assess travelers according to the risks they pose to safety in the skies. The so-called riskiest or unknown passengers would face the toughest scrutiny, including questioning and more sensitive electronic screening.
Those who voluntarily provide more information about themselves to the government would be rewarded with faster passage.
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"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..." - George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
And I highlighted the same quote...OMG are we thinking alike now?! :VeryScared: 
