Lets see .. you're a terrorist, and you want to get a bomb into place. So:

o) you make yourself as conspicuous as possible
o) ... put antisemitic stuff all over your baggage
o) ... post TONS of antisemitic stuff on the internet just to be sure
o) ... enter Israel from a country known to harbor terrorists

Get my drift? It's that very kind of behavior at a border crossing that makes her the least likely candidate to be carrying explosives. Also, most explosives have a residue signature that can be easily scanned for in Israel because they keep that kind of tech handy at customs points. A few swipes with a swab and a portable scanner later .. you know -exactly- what's in the bag. Five minutes or less. I can't say if shooting her bag was an over-reaction, but I can say that at least at that facility -- they had options.

At the end of the day, it's a wash. She is getting reimbursed for the laptop, and the Israeli security forces look good inside of Israel, but look silly to the outside world. Nobody really wins.

Gods, don't be so melodramatic and naive. These days Usenet is full of posts, and the pornographers are posting to everything from alt.comp.literacy to alt.binaries.pictures.landscapes and everything in between. Perhaps even the FBI is posting it as well, who knows.

To preserve privacy on your machine, for whatever reason, it's as simple as:

a) Use TOR! Preserver your privacy online by using onion routing networks. It's good sense for web browsing.
a) Use the built in privacy features in your browser to delete the cache when you finish browsing.
b) Use any of a number of utilities to overwrite the free space of your drive with zeroes. Heck, it's built in with mac OS X

--no-- computer forensic techiques exist to recover data once it has been overwritten once with zeros. There is a long standing challenge for any data recovery company to retrieve data from a hard drive that has been "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/whatever"ed to death. They won't take it, and for good reason.

That's what it boils down to. You don't need to smash your hard disk. You do need to be a levelheaded, smart person.