On the first thing, my eyes can usually see black light when other people don’t notice it, and I didn’t notice it and therefore was curious. Like most people, I kind of keep my nose out of questioning law-enforcement officers unless they’re way out of line, and so I didn’t bother having a discussion at the time. I go thru customs all the time, and unless there’s something out-of-the-ordinary, I just keep quiet. Even though I’m just a regular traveler doing nothing unusual.

Second, it is clear that TSA is paying attention to their public image and to questions. That’s a good sign, I think, as long as they’re listening and not just defending. I think we got the appropriate response in this case.

And third, to take the line of reasoning Bruce Schneier might take, it is likely to assume that in the future, air terrorists would want to use real documents, not forged documents. And TSA will be catching lots of “petty criminals” who are indeed breaking the law, but probably not a threat to security. So the outcomes are unrelated to air security, but are germane to law enforcement of various (other) types.

So that said, and being generally positive about it because all of my documents are in order … as you should guess, my concern is for the *number of places* that data about citizens’ travel could possibly be recorded. In the US, information about individuals’ travel used to reside primarily with private companies (airlines, rental car companies, credit card usage, etc.) – and it has migrated increasingly into governmental databases over the last 7 years. The more places the data is available, the more likely it could be abused. Take care of that data!