Looking forward to the ineffective security theater harrassment that this will produce at the airport for the post-holiday flights.

Two articles with further links on the theatrics that pass for security at our airports:

Economist's Gulliver Blog

Atlantic article

We need to separate and be honest about the components of airline security: the things that actually can defeat attacks (most of which should happen well prior to the TSA security check at the airport), the things that deter attackers from trying even though they won't defeat a trained attacker (the TSA security check), and the things that are wrongheadedly added in for good measure to make people feel like the government is doing something and/or is being fair (half-assed harrassment of grandma whose body language, travel documents, IDs, luggage, etc shows that she isn't trying to pull anything over, but doing a frisk on her anyway that is embarassing, annoying, and insulting, but would not find even the most poorly hidden contraband). And as one Israeli CT expert told me, we need to focus more on resilience when it comes to strategic message to our populations than fearmongering approaches that make them afraid of the threat.