The trouble with this sort of theme is that we all want 'them' to do something to provide 100% guarantees of safety, but only if it doesn't inconvenience us in any way.
The only possible manner of doing this - save lives, perhaps - is to do the politically incorrect thing: provide separate flights/airlines for the separate types of people. After all, as with much of the bullshit about 'victimised' minorities, there is little point in looking for religious terrorists within a clearly non-ethnic group. Of course, you may find one, but the chances are not good. Until the obvious becomes obvious enough to be unavoidable, we all shall suffer.
How tragic that it has become the rôle of the outcast to say such things within the political medium, the rest ignoring it for fear of alienating part of the possible voter base.
Hope this doesn't kill the thread, but I believe it needed saying.
Rob C
Rob, as a bunch of traveling photographers we are looking for ways of being able to carry our stuff safely while being reasonably assured of reaching our destinations intact. No-one in their right mind should expect "100% guarantees of safety" because there is no such thing, and everyone for the better part of three decades now has been tolerating inconvenience in the name of safety. So I don't think your starting premise is on-point. What we are now facing from Transport Canada is a different animal: extreme and irrational procedures which they considered necessary because they didn't have in place the optimal stragegy and resourcing to deal systematically and systemically with a peak danger event, while minimizing massive inconvenience to travelers and the commercial damage which results therefrom. It is in this sense that Ray Maxwell has a point when he says the terrorists are winning.
As for targeting - that already happens, and the focus of the US Administration since this incident is to find out exactly how their targeting procedures were flawed. Targeting needs to identify really dangerous people regardless of their passports or how they dress. The smarter the targeting, the less inconvenience and the less danger for the rest of us. But smart targeting does not mean segregating people by ethnicity. Even if it were "politically correct", which it isn't, the terrorists would soon work around it.
I see three strands of a solution to the problem we face: (1) political - to deal with root causes, (2) improved intelligence processes and (3) much smarter and better resourced passenger scanning at airports. Once enough additional headway has been made on these three fronts, it may then be possible to carry our stuff into aircraft with relative ease and convenience.