[notahacker]

To be honest, I'm not sure that surrendering my bottle of water at airports has impacted my confidence that much. It's not like the experience of passing through airports was an effortless pleasure before. A couple of days ago I spent an hour waiting in line whilst a couple of hundred passengers, some of them possessing five or more suitcases, put every item of their baggage through a single X-ray machine, whilst other security operatives hand-searched the entire contents of selected suitcases. I'm pretty sure the reason Quito doesn't have a green zone in customs has nothing to do with al-Qaeda setting up bases in the Andes though.

As for other measures like the Patriot Act, I'm not sure that security theatre was the prime motivation for their introduction.