Regulation Vol.27 No.3's cover story A False Sense of Insecurity is interesting. Among other points:

Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.

The problem is that humans have a lethally incompetent intuition about probability. Until you've bothered to train your understanding of probability by studying statistics, any chance, no matter how remote, looks likely. Monkeys aren't good at statistics. While humans are still fairly stupid primates, they are capable of learning, of studying statistics, and of sitting down and figuring out what the actual facts are.

For example, buying lottery tickets is foolish. You won't win, and the state keeps most of the money, it's essentially just a tax on stupid people. Someone will win, somewhere, but the odds that it'll be you are so miniscule that you'd be better off giving that $1 to a homeless person in hopes that he's actually a billionaire in disguise, waiting to reward the first generous person. You're as likely to be struck by lightning... Or killed by a terrorist attack.

So now, because of a preliminary investigation that the U.S. government forced the U.K. government to blow early and arrest a bunch of people who may or may not have had anything to do with a potential terrorist attack on an airline, your luggage gets searched even more when you board a plane.

This does not make you any safer. This just irritates you, is a gross violation of the 4th Amendment, and costs an already-hurting airline industry millions or billions more. The enemies making it harder and harder for you to fly are not the terrorists, it's George W. Bush and the Republican party. They're the real terrorists here.