by Barbara S. Peterson

Breaking news: Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano is a leading contender for Michael Chertoff's job as Homeland Security secretary.

And, some more on the last post: The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) blog is entertaining reading in part because of all the mostly unfavorable comments that inevitably follow each post from the in-house bloggers. Case in point: TSA put up a post yesterday about its new PR campaign, headlined "Why?" which purports to be a way of communicating to the public the reasons behind some of its "more controversial" measures. Typical comment: "Without even viewing your videos, I can see that you are again misleading the public." Meet the bloggers here.

The latest "successes" touted by the TSA are again being dismissed as "security theater"--just feel-good measures that don't really achieve anything.  TSA was ready for that, though, and Kip Hawley actually had a good point: Even the fairly low-tech "family lanes" are effective because they have cut down greatly on the number of fliers that set off alarms because they're befuddled (e.g. they forget they have car keys in their pockets). That has the beneficial effect of freeing up screeners' resources to focus on more important things.