A Scripps News editorial by Peter Copeland begins:
Just in time for the busy Thanksgiving travel week, Americans seem to have reached a tipping point for how much inconvenience they will tolerate in exchange for flying safely.
Okay, stop right there. There is a fundamental flaw in the first sentence. This is not a question of exchanging inconvenience for safety. It is not “inconvenience,” anyway. It is privacy invasion and violation of our right to be free from unreasonable searches. But more to the point, there is NO exchange of either for safety as there is simply NO evidence that these techniques have made flying any safer for any of us.
Don’t suggest that I’m trading A for B when A doesn’t get me B. Even I know that’s a bad deal by any standards of trading.
You can read the rest of their editorial here, if you want, but they lost me with their first inaccurate sentence.