Edited by author 12-22-2002 05:58 PM
Woot, America may have some problems, but get real. Get real. We are no "fascist military state worse than anything Soviet Russia could ever be". Go read a history book. We have a perhaps misguided planned war against a cruel dictator, some threats to personal privacy, and sundry other problems. And silly incidents like these.

In this case, we have paranoid and undertrained security guards who are forced into perfoming these absurd searches on random individuals because any "profiling" of likely threats is racist, or sexist, or ageist, or whatever. This problem is, if anything, symptomatic of America's very high sensitivity to civil rights.

And hey, CatherineTheGrand. The fourth amendment says "unreasonable" searches and seizures. You don't have any right to be free from search if you're going to ride on an airplane. First, airports and airlines are (mostly) private enterprises, not public. They can impose any sort of regulation on you they want. They are not the government. Regardless, though, it is silly and selfish to think that your "right" to be free from search overrides the rights of the other passengers to not be blown up. If you can have body searches at courthouses and rock concerts, you certainly can at airports.