Airport Security - Necessary Sacrifice of Rights or Gratuitous Violation of the Fourth Amendment?

See a related article in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111206580.html?tid=wp_featuredstories&sid=ST2010111206598

Bad, bad passengers resenting good, good TSA. Take off your shoes. Surrender your personal belongings for inspection. Pose for the machine that images your naked body through your clothing for inspection by anonymous security personnel in another room or submit to a "full body" pat-down that includes your most private parts. If you are asked to remove your bra or wig, just DO IT. Protest or refuse and face removal from the area and the potential of serious fines.

Just wondering - are cavity searches next?

Every time passengers submit they are permitting the NSA to violate their Fourth Amendment rights: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Airport security personnel effectively have been granted a blanket warrant that covers every person who travels by common air carrier.

For some, perhaps most of us, the sacrifice is worth the added security of airline travel. For others, it is a security travesty the sole aim of which is to make us ever more fearful, ever more obedient to the institutions that control our lives.

Parents are forced to stand by without protest as their children are either photographed naked or patted down in a way guaranteed to traumatize them. Business people can be forced to permit the confiscation of computers and cell phones which might or might not be returned to them. Persons who value their personal dignity are forced to surrender it.

Do the TSA protocols make air travel more secure? Questionable. The 2009 Christmas underwear bomber probably would have passed through the imaging machine without protest, his nasty cargo undetected. The famous shoe bomber would have checked his shoes, then picked them up at the other side of security and continued on his nefariously intentioned way.

Both these individuals, like the 9/11 terrorists, would have been picked up with efficient, adequate intelligence screening and vigilant security checks. But that is HARD. Sooo... while we spend billions on a Homeland Security Department that spins out tentacles into ever greater aspects of American life, the genuine bad guys just think up new ways to elude the net.

Could it be that the thing the "powers that be" fear most is an American populace that is not "dumb, docile and dependent?"

How did we get to the place where corporations have more access to Constitutional Rights than individual citizens?

God help us all.