Airport security (Score 1)

The comments are full of examples about how annoying the over-zealous airport security measures are. But I could live with that if I for one moment believed they would keep me safer than if they were dropped. But there are so may ways to circumvent it that I don't believe it:

- You can have anything in your carry-on bag up until the point you pass through security. So you could easily fill a maximum-allowed-size bag with dynamite and set it off in the middle of the line to security, probably killing as many people as if you blew up a plane and probably disrupting traffic even more.

- If you don't want to be in the line when the bag blows up, find a nice elderly couple and ask them to look after your bag while you go to the bathroom. If you look like white middle class, there is little risk they will refuse.

- Arrange with 20 other people to each bring in the allowed amount of liquids and mix it to a sizeable amount of explosive after getting through security. Or -- equally effective, and a lot easier -- to a poisonous gas.

- Many synthetic cloths are highly flammable and develop dense, poisonous smoke when burning. So just take off your jacket and set fire to it.

And many more. A problem is that the security measures are mainly reactive -- they handle only the things that have been tried before, and it is not difficult to come up with new idea. And when that happens, they just add new measures, but tehy can never stop everything.

I'm not saying that all security should be dropped, but the measures that are most invasive and annoying should be. I don't mind sending my back through X-rays etc. and walking through a metal detector. But please let me keep my shoes on and belt on and have a deodorant and a laptop computer in my bag without having to dig them out.