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quote=chiefburg] Common sense must be inserted into this somewhere.[quote] 
Chief,
I hope you understand that I have been just "playing the devils advocate" here to draw out people's experiences and ideas...
Anyhow, a certain number of people are probably looked at much harder- on a purely random basis- where the officer has no discretion. For example, every 18th person or every 11th male and 19th female, or whatever. This is what is done to make drunk driving roadblock stops legal. The Supreme Court has determined that such a stop does not involve any officer discretion or profiling and, therefore, is lawful because the intrusion of/on the driver of each vehicle "de minimmis". Sort of a balancing test according to some...
As to old people, pilots, people in military attire and the like, think about what you would do if you were a terrorist and you knew these people simply never got stopped- you would disguise yourself as one of them or use one of them to get whatever you need to on board. So, as a matter of precaution, there may be a valid reason for publicly giving a harder look at people such as yourself. Think about it a bit...
As to the airlines, they are the very last people I want as the last line of security. We can't even trust them to take off or arive on time...its own standards. Etc., Etc.
FWIW, my father, who was pretty much wheel chair bound with Parkinsons, was searched all the time. he would have been a great type of person to "plant something on" or agree to mething on himself, if he were a terrorist.
I really don't know how succesful TSA is. Is their success to be measured by the number of people they stop or catch? Or, is it measured by some form of deterence or degree of societal sense of safety?
Who knows. Time to serach the net about the legal technicalities of all of this...
