I don't doubt there are scary grouplets out there who want to hurt innocent people. But the idea of easily-manufactured liquid explosives is a bunch of horse manure. Terrorism is a police issue, period. What the Brits did was classic terror-baiting -- they had the perps under surveillance, but instead of arresting them, they go and criminalize every mother carrying baby formula for her kid on every commuter jet.
[WS:] Inconvenienced - sure, but criminalized? C'mon.
In any case, you seem to argue that if the probability of risk is small, that risk should take the back seat vis a vis the interest of many people.
Since the argument is a normative statement, it cannot be verified against evidence, but at least it should be universal, as that old fart Kant had it. So let's apply this argument to, say, the Katrina debacle. The risk of major damage was small so the federal government decided it was not worth wasting taxpayers dollars on improving levees. The left-of-the center folk criticized the government for ignoring that small risk, when it materialized. Yet the same people blame the government for exaggerating small risk when it comes to terrorism.
The industry is minimizing or altogether ignoring a relatively small risk of major environmental catastrophe as a result of human-triggered climate change. The left-of-the center folk criticize the industry for ignoring the risk of environmental disaster, but when it comes to terrorism, they criticize the airlines for overreacting to small risk of terrorism.
Is this a double standard or am I missing something?
Wojtek