Profiles in Petty Tyranny

There are lots of (logical) arguments in favour of "profiling" in law enforcement and security, but this one is as good as they get:

... when a group of 2,000 elderly British cruise ship passengers docked at Los Angeles for a short stop-off during a five-star cruise around America it was, in the words of one of them, more like arriving at Guantanamo Bay.
Although they had already been given advance clearance for multiple entries to the country during their trip, all 2,000 passengers were made to go through full security checks in a process which took seven hours to complete.
The fingerprints of both hands were taken as well as retina scans and a detailed check of the passport as well as questioning as to their background.
Passengers claim that the extra checks were carried out in “revenge” for what had been a minor spat over allegedly overzealous security.

I totally believe this. I have a friend who was banned from entry to the USA for five years for getting in an argument with one of their border guards, and that was before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. I've said it before and I'll say it again; as long as visiting the USA is an ordeal, I won't subject myself to it.

A group of elderly Brits on a high-end cruise ship is about as unlikely a group of terrorists or illegal immigrants as you could ask for, and nothing about the situation justified what was done. So some old guy compared you to North Korean border guards (maybe not literally, but you know what I mean), does that mean you have to act like them? This is the result of too much power being given over completely banal situations, and petty functionaries the world over are prone to get drunk with such power.

Stories like this abound about "the land of the Free and the home of the Brave". Efforts to control everything to this degree are born of Fear, and they make people distinctly not Free. I know that the US is having problems, but is the place really so fragile that anything that a six-year-old or a group of elderly tourists could possibly do (saying nothing about what's probable or even likely) bring the whole rotten edifice down?

Fear drives most of security thinking, but fear should be used as a tool and not take over or be a means to further a plan which loses sight of the basic rights of the citizens and even of visitors who shouldn't be assumed (at least not all of them) to be terrorists. This requires intelligence and flexibility, not something you'll get from the sort of people who want to be TSA screeners.

"At the end of the day, the United States is down, for sure, but it is not out," ; this is from a statement about oil prices and investment from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, but I'm not so sure. The US can certainly come back from this, but it's increasingly difficult to see how. What hope I do see is in this general direction and comes from the grassroots; the government and the malignant bureaucracies it has spawned needs to be torn down and rebuilt. That I don't see happening, so I'll just stay away until they prove me wrong.