Quote Originally Posted by smilingcat View Post
If TSA was serious about stopping sabotage, hire psychologists who are trained to pick out the nervous traveller or pick out those who are hiding something. EL AL questioning takes less than a minute. No search, no rude questions. Also use bomb sniffing dogs. Dogs can distinguish between fertilizer nitrates versus explosive type nitrates. Nitrogen sniffing machines fail miserably with garden variety fertilizer. The back scatter x-ray goes everywhere so even if you are NOT in the machine, you ARE being exposed. So going for a humiliating enhanced pat-down does you no good.
I agree about increasing use of sniffer dogs. As far as hiring people who are "trained to pick out the nervous traveler", the problem I see with that is that there are a lot of "nervous travelers" who are not terrorists--flying is just plain nerve-racking sometimes. I'd hate to think that I would potentially get in trouble just because I am a bit stressed out by the following: the crowds and lines at the airport, trying to find where I need to go and get there in time, being interrogated (like the person who posted her experience flying from Amsterdam to the US, I had to go through all that when doing so this spring--necessary but still unnerving, like being treated as a criminal), and just the fact that I am about to put myself in a situation where if something goes wrong, it could be really bad news. How would they guard against those kinds of "false positives" so to speak?