“Don’t touch my junk!” may be today’s rallying cry at airports across the country, but the inevitable need for increased security cannot be denied. Following the near-success of last year’s Christmas underwear bomber, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) has been evaluating a number of alternative ways to increase security while minimizing additional disruption. The tradeoffs are not easy and are sometimes controversial.

Travelers now have the option of full-body X-rays or pat-downs. The so-called “porn scans” only seem to bother a minority of travelers – most find it preferable to physical groping. Others however object to both – a knotty problem for the TSA that has so far defied solution. Some advocate the Israeli method of individual interrogations for each traveler. Although this works well in Israel, critics suggest that the idea won’t scale up well with the much larger airport traffic experienced in the U. S.

Pilots were recently exempted from the new screening rules. This makes sense because if a pilot wished to blow up a plane, he would just fly it into a mountain. More irritating are the high-profile exemptions, such as the recent one for House Speaker-to-be John Boehner – the public may feel that there are two classes of travelers, the powerful and everybody else. Certainly this is a public-relations nightmare for the TSA, if not a substantial policy question.

In the end, most people accede to higher scrutiny if it results in tighter security and foiled bomb plots. Perhaps it will take the interception of such a plot to quiet the current ruckus. The flip side of this argument is that a plane bomber, when confronted by a large well-armed TSA employee wearing rubber gloves, may decide to take out the boarding line rather than the airplane. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to stop a suicide bomber. The TSA know this, and will probably continue to calibrate its policies in response to perceived threats and traveler responses.