What Sam misses is that we have not needed and do not presently need any security at the airport for passenger flights. That's right. Ever since September 11, when the passengers aboard United Flight 93 realized their aircraft was gonna be used as a weapon, we have been completely safe from this phenomenon. Huh? Every flight since that day where a terrorist has attempted to destroy or commandeer a passenger aircraft has been a total failure – the passengers know that in these situations their lives are worthless unless they immediately attack the terrorist and ensure the danger is nullified. This will continue to be the case, any terrorist who tries to take an aircraft will be inevitably met by suicidal passengers convinced they have absolutely no choice but to disarm or kill the terrorist(s) or inevitably forfeit their lives. This makes passenger flights utterly safe: they cannot be commandeered for use as weapons against anyone other than the passengers, and the passengers know it, and will always be willing to give their lives to stop the plane from being used as a missile.
No sane terrorists can believe they will be allowed to successfully use a passenger plane for an attack. Sane terrorists will now perforce seek a different weapon – one unguarded by a plane load of civilian passengers utterly willing to stop them. Airport security can ignore passenger flights safely and focus on commercial planes such as UPS aircraft and the like – planes that sane terrorists would seek to commandeer since if they succeeded in getting control of the plane they would indeed be in a position to use it as a weapon. Well, maybe. If terrorists took over a UPS plane, they'd also have to understand that discovery of the hijacking would automatically mean that the U.S. Air Force or other available military actors would not hesitate to shoot it down. The terrorists would have to act fast, taking the UPS aircraft quickly to its target before it was attacked by modern anti-aircraft weapons. In fact, since September 11, 2001 the only incidents on passenger aircraft have not been designed to commandeer the plane, but to blow it up. Both the “shoe” and “underwear” bombers were subdued by the passengers and flight crew before detonating explosives. Naturally it would be good if airport security could prevent any effort to kill travelers, but it is only efforts by terrorists to commandeer jet planes that actually present a national security situation and thus might require or justify extensively invasive security measures.
As terrorists have not and will not attempt to grab passenger aircraft, there is no security interest in the type of security we have used on passengers. Profiling at the airport will not help stop terrorists for the singular reason they are no longer interested in incurring the high risk of failure involved in such an operation. Forget profiling at airports, there is no national security reason to search the passengers any more extensively then we were doing before September 11, 2001.
