[UPDATED: Great post on this topic by Tom Evslin here]
Following last week's arrest of the terrorists planning to explode airplanes mid-air by mixing explosive liquids, the Homeland Security Office released these new boarding regulations:
NO LIQUIDS OR GELS OF ANY KIND WILL BE PERMITTED IN CARRY ON BAGGAGE. SUCH ITEMS MUST BE IN CHECKED BAGGAGE. This includes all beverages, shampoo, sun tan lotion, creams, tooth paste, hair gel, and other items of similar consistency.
Ugh... I guess the US Homeland Security uses the old cliche about 'preventing the previous attack instead of the next one' as its founding principle.
You see, the problem is not the bad stuff, but rather the bad guys.
For example (and I know this may come as a big surprise to members of the law enforcement forces here in the US) the risk to planes is not inherently in this...:
...or in this: 
...but rather in this:
I simply can't understand the 'no profiling allowed' policy. What it essentially means is that collectively we're willing to sacrifice the whole lives of hundreds of innocent people, just to prevent a couple of minutes of inconvenience or embarrassment to those unnecessarily profiled[1]. Huh?!?!
In Ben Gurion airport in Israel, security seems to be based primarily on profiling. Between the time you approach the airport and the time you board the plane, you are "casually" spoken to probably 5-6 times by security personnel (not necessarily in uniform). Asking a seemingly casual question and observing the person's response, stress levels, accents, behavior, etc, etc has 100000000x higher chances of catching a plotting terrorist than does asking millions of people to dispose of their toothpaste and take off their shoes.
Sure - once in a while, an innocent person with a combination of accent, skin tone, behavior, whatever will be mistakingly delayed for screening for 10 minutes. Sure, it's annoying when you're picked out of the crowd just for being an Arab, black, Jew, young, Muslim, single, Pakistani, whatever.
But that's all it is. It's annoying, it wastes 10 minutes, it might be embarrassing. That's it. Put that in contrast to a plane loaded with 400 people crashing into a building.
Any claims that profiling is racism or prejudice are ridiculous because profiling isn't about discriminating anyone eventually, but rather about making everyone more secure by focusing the effort on higher risk groups[2].
Furthermore, trying to prevent the previous terror attack makes life real easy for terrorists because they have a simple play book they need to avoid. "Hmmm.., OK... so I can't hide my explosives in my shoes, and I should avoid liquid explosives... but it should be fine to hide some gun powder in a capsules looking like Advil, and try to explode the emergency exit mid-flight". Hey - even Richard Reid could figure that one out! (and I hear that intelligence was not exactly his sweet spot). It's a whole different story for a stressed-out, sweaty, 25-year old Pakistani male to disguise the fact that he's a stressed-out, sweaty, 25-year old Pakistani old male...
If you try to stop exclusively bad stuff (vs. trying to find the bad people), you are bound to spend shitloads of money trying to prevent yesterday's attacks while practically ignoring tomorrow's.
So stop wasting time on wanding her for 20 minutes (even if, god forbid, she attempts to board the plane with shoes and toothpaste!!):
...and pick up your head to look for folks like him:
Worst case - if he turns out to be an innocent artist with high anxiety, a sweating problem and strange shoes, apologize for the 5 minutes of his time wasted and move on.
[1] Not to mention the humongous price we pay for hoards of people and machinery we buy to scan people who a 3rd grader would know beyond doubt are innocent.
[2] Here's a possible solution to this problem: Provide special "no-passenger-screened" planes on which you board all those folks who resist being screened for profiling reasons, together with all the hypocritical politicians who pass laws preventing profiling, and with basically anyone else who prefers to fly those planes. This will both guarantee that no one ever feels discriminated by profiling, AND will reduce terror attacks on planes flying reasonable human beings to practically zero.
I've recently volunteered to join the executive committee of a non-profit organization called Tevel. Tevel is the first angel club established in the US, focusing exclusively on bringing US angel investors together with young Israeli startups.
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