From Poor Robb's Almanac

Reading some of the comments to an excellent Forbes online column by Wendy Milling, I couldn't fail to be dismayed by the readers there (if that is the word) who failed to grasp what she was saying, so I had to leave my own comment:

Too many of these commenters are forgetting what Ben Franklin said:

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Milling is right. The solution to air security is to destroy the states that train, sponsor, harbor and support terrorists, not to expect all Americans to sacrifice their Fourth amendment rights (and now First Amendment, too, judging by the TSA's new policy of collecting intel on opponents).
If we as a nation choose to passively and meekly accept the routine, daily violation of our rights as the norm, America as an ideal will have died.

A friend remarked that Wendy's article should be "must" reading for everyone in Congress.  Agreed.  Someone care to send that telegram?

http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/29/tsa-body-scan-pat-down-opinions-contributors-wendy-milling.html

(excerpts only here)

Commentary
Nude Scanners Vs. The Foundations Of Capitalism
Wendy Milling, 11.30.10, 10:00 AM EST

To make travel safe, improve foreign policy rather than violate our rights.

Just as the moral is the practical, so is the immoral impractical.

By now, anyone who does not live in a cave, and everyone who does, is aware of the TSA's policy of putting passengers through the Scylla of nude scanning or the Charybdis of "enhanced" pat-downs, which involve breast and genital contact.

...The right to liberty includes your right to physically move about in the world in pursuit of your goals.

...The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness therefore include the right to be free of interference with flying.

...You cannot reach your flight destination if you are sitting in jail or prevented from flying, and being offered an alternative that you cannot accept because it goes against your values is not a "choice," but coercion.

...The nude scanners and enhanced pat-downs are desperate measures to achieve a marginal return on security in order to compensate for a patently failed foreign policy, and they represent a crossing point--not a Rubicon, but an event horizon of a national security black hole.

...All it would take to return to the era of safe and unmolested air travel would be to ruthlessly stamp out Islamism by completely destroying all the states that support it and laying down the law for the survivors in those states. Terrorism cannot occur if its perpetrators are dead and its sympathizers thoroughly demoralized.

...People should not have to prove they are not terrorists before boarding an airplane...

(continued)