I think that's being a little too naive. Let's face it. The trend is turning USA into a police state. How isn't that not clear by now? Every other day they add new stuff like this, or breach more privacy or expand TSA in other areas, and so on.
The TSA is not an intelligence organization. Its job is not to secretly develop intelligence. It does not have the same problem of needing to not be accountable to the public as, say, the FBI or the NSA.
Second, that claim is a lot stronger than you're pretending it is. If you're going to throw around a term like "police state", you will need a lot more proof than hand-wavy "every day they add new stuff like this". Everything in your argument is attributable to selection bias, and if you're going to level a convincing point, you will need to do more than appeal to the fact that people seem to want to believe this stuff. TBH when you say that, it makes me wonder if you really know what a police state even is.
Third, my point is not that there is no abuse or that the government is incapable of doing bad things, it's that we should be evaluating pie-in-the-sky predictions with actual evidence. "We are becoming a police state, DUH" is not evidence. And neither is the ridiculous claim that tomorrow the OWS people will be barred from flying.
What you're describing is an invisible exercise of power. What I'm saying is, exercising power in a public fashion, particularly when such a display involves technology that people are nervous about to begin with, causes there to be more attention focused at the organization in question. Generally they avoid this because it means they have more oversight. Maybe this opens doors to things like the above, maybe it doesn't.