Instead of paying to get my rights back, I make a point of calling the TSA's bluff. I always refuse the pornoscanner and wait for the in-person pat down. If more people did this, the system would collapse, because - last time I shuffled through some back-of-the-envelope calculations, anyway - even the TSA's monstrously bloated budget comes nowhere close to the cost of hiring enough screeners to pat everyone down individually.

Of course they'd just change their already-arbitrary rules and force us all through the X-ray machines anyway, if we started refusing to use them en masse; but that'd create its own kind of legal push-back, and hopefully something good would come of the resulting mess. In any case, I'm not putting up with their nonsense while there is some means left I can use to resist it.

And I always fly in a kilt, regimental-style. TSA training has improved over the years, but the handful of times I managed to utterly flummox a TSA screener, suddenly confronted with a man wearing a "skirt," went a long way toward making me feel better about the humiliation of the whole exercise.