You see where this is going, right? This is exactly why terrorism "works": because the kinds of people who will frisk children "because terrorists have been known to use children" can be goaded into doing just about anything in that fashion. That's the real threat from terrorism: not to our overall physical security, which even at their worst no terrorist group has ever threatened existentially, but to our psychological security --- which they demonstrably have threatened to that degree.
So far we seem to be objecting to the wholesale copying of phones, aggressive physical inspection of women with back braces, and the frisking of children --- each of which you've defended as vital to defending against the terrorist threat.
I think you underestimate the difficulty in loading a child with explosives and successfully getting them onto a plane then detonating them in flight. There are so many places along the chain where this would almost certainly fail. We could easily make this a nearly impossible threat without abandoning our civil rights. We already have sniffer dogs, explosive materials swabs, backscatter machines, and layers of human intelligence before this point. If we're at the point where TSA has to grope everyone, why bother, the terrorists have achieved their goal, as we are no longer a free society.
Additionally I think you are vastly overestimating the number of terrorists out there trying to carry out these attacks. We didn't do much at all in the 1970's and 1980's beyond signals and human intelligence and attacks were very rare then. And this was when we were engaged in several proxy wars with Russia. There just aren't that many people out there that are both willing, interested, and capable of attacking US civilians in spectacularly deadly ways.
You are fear mongering. You are part of the problem, and people making you arguments are destroying our freedom of movement and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
To quote Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
> We already have sniffer dogs, explosive materials swabs, backscatter machines, and layers of human intelligence before this point. If we're at the point where TSA has to grope everyone, why bother, the terrorists have achieved their goal, as we are no longer a free society.
Perhaps I'm misinformed, but I thought pat-downs were only used on people who refused to go through the back scatter machines.
And I haven't seen sniffer dogs or explosive detection swabs routinely used on all passengers.
Insult me if you wish, but at least try to be honest about reality.
> If terrorists know you don't search children, they'll place bombs on children.
Do they have the operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks like this a year? You might as well say: "if we only lock cockpit doors, but don't weld them shut, well then they'll cut through them."
We make exceptions all of the time based on feasibility and cost/benefit.
> Do they have the operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks like this a year?
They don't have operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks per year outside their primary area of strength by any means, and this isn't really all that relevant to attacks in that area.
So the question is: how much of an impact on their operational capacity to strike into, say, the US would it be to do this. Doesn't seem like it would be much.