You may say the searches are tyrannous and unconstitutional but you're hardly persuasive when you say that they do not protect us. A bald assertion simply does not persuade. The fact that our intelligence and screening system broke down and let the Fruit of the Loom bomber get as far as Detroit tells me that I do not wish to fly with my life dependent solely on our State Department.
There is rarely a silver bullet in technology but technology can change the game when properly supported by intelligence and other kinds of screening, including racial profiling. The problem with relying on profiling alone is that once the terrorists understand that we are not searching grandmothers or toddlers in diapers they will put bombs in their own children's diapers as they have done in the past. They already found a couple in their 60s to try to carry bombs.
I do not understand the logic of saying that we should take high risks of passengers smuggling on bombs which can kill us because the system failed to detect a human in the wheel well who might have been a bomb instead. I don't understand why one wrong justifies another or one failure of one system means that we should abandon other parts of another system to detect bombs. I think the solution is to have better checks on wheel wells but not to abandon checking passengers.
That would be ridiculous.
