TOM BEARDEN:
Some Americans believe those enhanced pat-downs, which started within the last year, violate their constitutional rights. They're just one part of a raging debate over how far the TSA should be allowed to go.
Since 9/11, security procedures have steadily escalated after a series of failed terrorist attacks. After 2001, passengers had to walk through security in their stocking feet after Richard Reid tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes.
In 2006, people started having to carry liquids in small containers inside a plastic bag after a plot to detonate liquid explosives was uncovered. And when Umar Abdulmutallab tried to set off plastic explosives hidden in his underwear in 2009, the government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to speed up deployment of advanced imaging technology machines that can peer beneath clothing.
Some accuse the agency of simply going too far. Take the case of Nick George. In August of 2009, he went through security in Philadelphia on his way back to college in California. He was taking an Arabic language course and was carrying a stack of homemade flash cards.
NICK GEORGE, airline passenger: There were about 200 of them, and most — the vast majority of them are just vocab words from a textbook, things like, to graduate, to smile, the color purple, these sort of, you know, things that anyone learning any kind of foreign language would be learning.
There were about 10 of the flash cards that said things like bomb or terrorist. I had been recently trying to read more of Arabic news media. And these are words that, you know, come up.
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