I read many times that one of the goals of terrorists is to panic and freeze the citizens out of fear of an attack. And this fear is worse than an attack itself.
The security theater solves this problem - people are no longer afraid.
BTW: I am not advocating theater instead of security, I'm just saying it does have some value.
I don't know about other folks, but I'm more disturbed by the number of resources devoted to this security theater, than comforted by it. I'd much rather see a focus on better inter-bureau communication and intelligence gathering.
Raising the "threat level" to "Orange" for political purposes, as we saw during the last presidential term can't possibly solve any real problems.
Real security is not really possible anyway - not without profiling, which people won't accept and not without spending far more resources on security - and if you are disturbed now, imagine if spending goes up tenfold.
I agree the "threat level" is a joke though.
When I lived in London in the early-mid 90s the threat of terrorist bombing by the IRA and their offshoots was a constant problem - you could figure on a significant commuter train delay at least once every two weeks. Mostly they were false alarms, but real bombings were just frequent enough to make caution a necessity even though casualties were low - arguably the most effective result for the terrorists was to disrupt with a bomb but phone in a warning ahead so that there would not be any casualties, or detonate one where there were not many people. But although it was a constant problem and there were lots of warning signs of the 'be alert!' variety, I didn't feel the sort of theatrical approach I do here. That changed later, after a variety of both terrorist and ordinary criminal incidents were solved with the aid of CCTV video, and the UK went insane for CCTV, putting up so many cameras that (to me, at least) London started to feel like a prison camp. I think over-reliance on technology is part of the problem here. I don't mind seeing a lot of uniformed police or security personnel about, even though many of them may be more for display than anything else. But what I see in the US right now is lots of security devices like magnetic gates and so on, plus the same number of (usually bored) uniformed personnel to man them. These have become so ubiquitous that in Washington DC people can no longer walk up the steps into the Supreme Court, they have to enter via a side entrance where the magnetometer gates (or whatever they're called) are installed. At least one justice has complained about the small but symbolically significant failure implied when people can't walk into the nation's highest court (the rather lame response has been that people can still exit via the famed steps, so justice is seen to be be in the building that way...whoopee). What we have here is a case of 'nondurable precautions' - putting a machine in there to avert liability, because while machines may be no more reliable than humans, if a failure occurs it's much easier to blame the machine and diffuse the liability than to scapegoat someone for being closest point of failure, even if they were truly at fault.
People weren't afraid before 9/11 either.
Of terrorists? Perhaps. Of being strip-searched for no good reason? Not so much.
I am reading more pushback on the X-ray devices so that may be the point where people draw the line.
And - there's your proof. People want the appearance of security, but when you give them a real security improvement it's too much.