Before proceeding, note this: if these naked scanner machines and intrusive pat-downs make us safer from dying in a terrorist attack on a commercial airliner, itself a controversial question, we are infinitesimally safer at best, and even complete success securing our airports from attack likely won't make us safer overall, for terrorists need not attack us there -- every elementary school, shopping mall, and municipal bus in America is a potential target for a determined enemy. Thus the folly of subjecting so many innocents to intrusive searches to slightly harden a single target. Doing so doesn't reflect a rational calculation of costs and benefits, except to the bureaucrats responsible for the airports. It is their interests, not our interests, that the naked scanners and intrusive pat downs serve: pushing the public past its comfort zone enables them to argue, if there is an attack, that they did all they realistically could, and meanwhile changes the relationship between a free people and its government in troubling ways.

Opting out calls attention to the change. Passing through the naked scanner, where passengers cannot see the resulting images, the magnitude of TSA's intrusiveness is obscured, as is the possible safety hazard of a malfunctioning machine that pumps into a person too much radiation.

But standing in the middle of the screening area, fellow passengers all around, with your arms and legs spread apart, and an agent of the state running a glove clad hand up your inner thigh? It's a spectacle. And watching it, most people are viscerally repulsed. It is discordant with our image of ourselves as the citizens of a free and freedom loving country. There's only one thing I'm conflicted about when I evoke this reaction: I lament the prejudice in airports against people perceived as being Muslim, but am painfully aware that some American travelers harbor this prejudice; and when the prejudiced see me, a professionally dressed white guy getting patted down, they take notice in a way they wouldn't if I were, say, a young Ethiopian guy. There's an upside to that. And indeed I am glad when I see a guy in a military uniform or an old lady or an attractive young woman or a teenage girl opting for the pat down: provoking a visceral reaction is the idea! Yet it is perhaps unseemly to benefit from this prejudices.

I hope the effect isn't for xenophobes to conclude that we should be racially profiling so that "real Americans" aren't needlessly demeaned. In fact, I rather wish that they'd opt out and experience for themselves what it's like to be "stopped and frisked." Though obviously less fraught than a street stop, the airport security line sure helps me grok how oppressive it must be to go through analogous scrutiny at random times on the streets that surround one's apartment.