Amadou

Tou keep saying that, but it doesn't mean what you think it means.

Yep. Of course if that engineer had perspective he would have to wonder if there was more to the story than just what he was being shown. It is easy to doubt the people we already think are wrong, the hard thing is to doubt the people we agree with.

That's basically Brin's theory and it is a bad one because it assumes, against all evidence to the contrary, that people will just simply stop looking for ways to judge other people as being inferior.

Evil like in the movies doesn't exist. In the real-world evil is simply a lack of perspective (some would call it empathy instead).

No one ever wakes up and decides they want to be a villain. They always have some sort of logic that rationalizes their actions as being reasonable if not outright good. The more they act on that lack of perspective the greater the evil they perpetrate.

One of the biggest is the destruction of creativity. When people know that their actions are under constant surveillance it creates an enormous cognitive load. They have to constantly evaluate everything they do as to how it might appear to a critical observer. The end result is that people will simply stop doing anything that might have a social risk associated with it.

A panopticon society will be a dull, stagnant and repressed society. Think of every little backwards town where everybody knows everybody's business and anyone who steps out of line is ostracized. That is what our entire society will turn into with total surveillance.

You mean Paul Anthony Ciancia who was pissed off about all the excessive security and deliberately targeted TSA agents hoping to commit suicide-by-cop?

Lots of less than spectacular events have occurred on soft targets over the past 10 years. Each of those may have easily converted in to a more spectacular attack.

Citing all attacks anywhere as justification for the TSA is a recipe for the unlimited ratcheting up of security. It is an enormous leap in logic to assume somebody with a semi-auto rifle or a crock-pot bomb is capable of getting them past pre-911 airport security and also doing something effective with it once they have. An attack on an airplane is simply too challenging for the vast majority of people to execute.

Looking back through your history, the last 129 submissions are all [dead] it changed right between #129 and #130.

Your #130 was "Startup - Bill Watterson, a cartoonist's advice" which got 192 karma points, but starting with #129 "Brilliant Resource on Typography (practicaltypography.com)" posted one day later, everything is marked [dead].

These programs are the ultimate sign of just how pointless airport security is. There is simply no way that $100 is even remotely enough money to cover an investigation of any effectiveness whatsoever. It's probably just enough to cover the cost of checking the same lists the TSA already checks on every ticket booked and then adding you to the list of people who get to skip security most of the time.

Those programs are just a way for the TSA to co-opt the ire of the kind of rich and powerful people who might have the political influence to reform the agency. 10 to 1 every member of congress has signed up for Pre-Check. If you believe that the TSA is defending against a real threat, these programs, by their very existence, create a giant gaping hole in the TSA's security. The only reason it hasn't been used to perpetrate an attack is because there is effectively no risk in the first place.