I've got one of those stories.<p>My parents live on the opposite side of the country. I flew to see them one Christmas and then flew back home. As I unpacked after the trip, I discovered that my huge hunting knife had accidentally been in my carry-on bag the whole time. I had carried it through both Salt Lake and Philadelphia International Airports. Literally no one bothered me about it.<p>Someone once told me that America is "fully prepared for the past" with regards to terrorism. This experience makes me wonder whether even that is really true. And indeed, when I read up on the actual security practices, I discovered that on an alarmingly frequent basis, it is not our security measures that foil terrorists, but their sheer ineptitude. The underwear bomber, the attempted Times Square guy, and a whole host of other idiots had the opportunity to seriously hurt people, and had they even a modicum of expertise, they would have succeeded. Our security forces may be able to take credit for stopping some of these events, but how many? These were incredibly simple strategies, and given that they still couldn't identify and neutralize the threat before it would have been too late, I can't imagine it's an astonishingly high number.<p>In spite of this I'm not worried about terrorism at all. If someone started a security-free airline, I would fly on it every single time I had the option. What does frighten me is that we spend so much money on this stuff. Why isn't the TSA held accountable by the government? (And if it is, why are they so bad at it?) Do we honestly know that increased spending in technology catches more terrorists? We are trying to identify very sparse features, and it is not at all obvious that this is the best way to catch them. On the other hand, the American government has eliminated (I'm told) 200 of Al-Quaeda's top leaders. This seems like a much more effective method for demolishing this behavior.