Those of us from so-called 'visa waiver' countries have to go through the US VISIT programme at US immigration, from my recent experience this looks like another colossal waste of time and money.

As well as filling out the little green slip to confirm that we're not members of the Nazi party, we all line up at immigration to place our fingers on a no-doubt horribly expensive electronic reader that takes scans of our fingerprints. Then we have a photo of our eyes taken with a $19.99 Best Buy webcam. At this point we enter the Department of Homeland Security's biometric database. The green slip is stamped and stapled into our passports.

According to the literature from Homeland Security, when we leave the US we're all meant to line up at a terminal where our fingerprints and eyes can be checked against our entry in the database. In theory Homeland Security knows when we entered and when we left the US and can identify those overstaying on their visas...

...except, I've never seen one of these terminals when leaving the US. Instead the airline staff at check-in just remove the little green slip.

So why take my biometrics in the first place?

Has anyone seen one of these machines?

The question your article begs to ask is "Are Americans willing to justify a temp TSA employee digging through their baggage to avoid the federal government going through their daily mail, phone calls, e-mails, library and bookstore transactions etc, what it perceives as necessary for "good investigative police work" to be successful?"

Relying of a feeble last line of defense and its inconveniences may allow us some perception of privacy in out daily lives.

I feel so much safer with these restrictions in place. But Mr. Smith is correct, we our not focusing our attentions in the right places, because there are so many other things we should be banning to protect ourselves. For example consider all of these things that we should be banning with a higher lifetime chance of premature death than a terrorist attack on a plane:

Automotive Vehicles (1 in 78 chance) Noxious Substances (1 in 193 chance) Boats (1 in 6,541 chance) Swimming Pools (1 in 7,278 chance) Ladders (1 in 8,988 chance) Dogs (1 in 117,127 chance) Bitten or stung by nonvenomous insect and other arthropods (1 in 312,339 chance)

I, for one, will not feel safe until the arthropod menace has been vanquished. Only then will I be able to retreat from my plastic sheeting and duct tape fortress.

...except the lifetime chance of death by suffocation is 1 in 672. Uh oh....

When was the last time you read about a Caucasian male, 50's, travelling with his wife and children blowing up an airplane? When was the last time you read about a Mexican male, 50's travelling with his wife and kids blowing up an airplane? When was the last time you read about an African American male, 50's travelling with his wife and kids blowing up an airplane.

When was the last time you read of an Arabic male 19-35, Muslim, travelling alone or with other Arabic males, 19-35, Muslim, blowing up an airplane....

Actually, it was flying airplanes into buildings, not blowing them up.

On a more serious note:

Oklahoma City. Richard Reid. I do not recall the name of the woman flying out of Tel Aviv who was found to have a bomb in the luggage packed for her by her boyfriend.

I'll also point your google to the term "Carnival Booth". You'll find it enlightening; it's about how to defeat profiling systems, and the less effective the profiling system, the better.

(I'll also point out that you engaged in a conflation, above.)

If your life depended on choosing one or the other... If you would be held solely accountable for the safety of your family based on choosing one or the other, which would you choose?

The nervous one. The one who was acting in an unusual fashion, who seemed particularly awkwardly loud, or particularly withdrawn.

For that matter, the "Caucasian" man traveling alone, rather than the Arabic male 19-35, traveling with his wife and kids.

Why are we now disregarding what is known and what has been proven to help us survive? The answer is political correctness. The dumbing-down of the human race (particularly Americans).

I'll also recommend to your attention the film "The Battle of Algiers" -- in which particularly European-dressed women are used as bomb carriers -- because of the stereotyping of the French troops at the checkpoints.

Something that I find fascinating in all of this is that the mechanisms that most people call for -- profiling, etc. -- will stop amateurs. Someone with the technical skill and dedication to carry out the kind of co-ordinated operations we're all afraid of already knows how to defeat profiling tricks. And won't be carrying bombs in their shoes.

For those who are stoking the old issue of passenger profiling, you might wish to revisit a couple of prior Salon columns that addressed this issue – and its potential pitfalls:

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/06/16/askthepilot190/

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2004/08/20/askthepilot99/

How many millions did the latest scare and newly imposed restrictions cost the airlines, the airports, businesses large and small, and the tax payers? We are at a point where terroists merely need to concoct crazy diabolical schemes for killing lives, start some sort of planning and then allow themselves to get caught and they win. Perhaps, the next strategy will include "anonymous" interviews with the media about their upcoming plans to knock 40 planes out of the sky over every continent simultaneously using the secretly explosive nature of Silly Putty -- not really a liquid or a solid -- won't that confuse the masses? Not only making for great ratings, these interviews would alert everyone from Jon Q Public to the FBI, CIA, TSA and the WTF of the ominous, iminent attack, cause mass panic, the cancelling of flights, and new costly security procedures to be implemented--not too mention the reserach dollars that would be wasted on analyzing silly putty. Sure the terroists would probably get caught and their concocted never-to-be-implemented plan foiled, but another win notched for the fanatics.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has made over $300,000 since 2004 from "surplus property" confiscated at airports by reselling it on eBay. (One item confiscated was a sausage grinder. Is Al Qaeda planning to grind passengers into kielbasa?)(Samuel L. Jackson, there's an idea for your next movie!)

And since we're all sharing Tales of Airport Idiocy, I once forgot to pack my pocket knife in my suitcase, leaving it instead in my coat pocket. My coat sailed right through the X-ray machine with nary a comment from the TSA inspector, and onto the plane went the blonde-haired, blue-eyed anarchist.