We should all be disturbed by the story of a man who was questioned and missed his flight because he spoke on his cell phone in Tamil. Some paranoid thought it was suspicious, reported it, and so the guy gets pulled and misses his flight.

This is not the first time. People have been treated as suspicious for speaking in all sorts of languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Urdo or just being Arabs or Sikhs. Sometimes it's been a lot worse than just missing your flight.

So here's a simple rule. If you want to report something as suspicious, then you don't fly until the matter is resolved. After all, if you are really afraid, you wouldn't want to fly. Even with the nasty foreigner pulled off the plane, you should be afraid of conspiracies with teams of villains. So you go into the holding cell and get a few questions too.

Now frankly, I would want to do much worse when it turns out the suspect is very obviously innocent. But I know that won't get traction because people will not want to overly discourage reports lest they discourage a real report. But based on my logic above, this should not discourage people who think they really have something. At least not the first time.

TSA employees are of course in a CYA mode. They can't screen out the paranoia because they aren't punished for harassing the innocent, but they will be terribly punished if they ignore a report of somebody suspicious and decide to do nothing. That's waht we need to fix long term, as I've written before. There must be negative consequences for people who implement security theatre and strip the innocent of their rights, or that's what we will get.