TSA Fiasco

There is a lot in the news about the new TSA procedures. Apparently, if you don't want naked photos taken of you using undisclosed amounts of radiation by a new scanner, your other choice is to have a TSA agent fondle your junk looking for bombs and non-metalic firearms.

Someone somewhere decided to see how much we are willing to be intimidated in order to have the "privilege" of acting upon a contract between an individual and an airline.

There is a simple solution. Listen up TSA:
To enter a port on the water to do work, since some post 9/11 point, you need a TWIC card. This is the Transportation Worker Identification Credential. This lets you get through the fence and load the boats, unload the boats, work on the computers, gas up the boats, etc. A TWIC card costs about $100 and gets you fingerprinted, background checked, and a cool hologram ID card.

What we need in the airports is a similar card. Picture a card with a difficult-to-copy embedded chip that has to be scanned and visually verified when you get to the airport. This card allows you to go through the short line at the airport. No radiation shot, no emptying your pockets, and no taking away of your nail clippers and shampoo. This card would cost $100/year and requires a full background check. Law enforcement officers and the military should get one for free, and be encouraged to carry a firearm on their flights. We could all be safer and terrorists would be better behaved, if a portion of passengers were armed Law Enforcement Officers (LEO's).
If you accumulate enough miles with your favorite airline, perhaps the airline would pay the fees for your flight card. The civilian card probably shouldn't include the firearm option, but allowing frequent fliers to carry shampoo, drinking water, and small folding pocketknives would NOT hurt the real security of any flights.

The 9/11 terrorists would have been stymied with a background check. The expired student visas and the Al Keida ties should have/could have raised red flags. With 90% of flyers going through the "quick" line, the 5 guys with box cutters paying cash to go from Boston to LA might have helped someone think about something a little more. Arming the pilots would have stopped the hijacking to begin with anyway, but that is another story.