In another case of life-imitates-science-fiction, Bruce Schneier reports that someone has discovered the perfect description of today’s “security theater” in a 1956 Asimov story.
(For those of you not following along at home, “security theater” refers to all the crap the TSA is doing that is trivial to get around, but that they’re doing just so they’re seen to be doing something. Which, unfortunately, is essentially everything they’ve done to date. The TSA knows it, the terrorists know it, and any citizen who looks into it figures it out in minutes too, but they have to do something to justify their jobs.)
Isaac Asimov always was good at finding interesting visionary ideas to write about. Maybe he wasn’t so good at character development, but he was the Golden Age SF’s “idea man”.