Madam Speaker, a witness who appeared before the transport committee this morning is one of the chief executive officers of a very large security firm from Europe that conducts most of the aviation security on the ground there. His comments about what has happened over the past decade is that after 9/11 we created an aura of paranoia and, in some cases, delusion about what was correct in terms of aviation security, the need for information and the use of the security apparatus that we have put in place. He said that we needed to review that.
What we have here is probably one of the last gasps of the American empire in its desire, through its paranoia, to carry forward this information gathering system in a way that is really not appropriate.