Homeland (In)Security at Airports

Jeffrey Goldberg has a fantastic piece in The Atlantic on the many, many, holes in airport security crap that we go through. What are the different things that he carried with him and was not stopped or pulled aside? Plenty that you think any fifth grader will know how to stop. And, of course, the fake boarding passes that pretty much the entire world knows about. It is all Bullshit as Professor Harry Frankfurt might say :-)

An excerpt:

And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary
screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a
neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube.