The war on terrorism is changing the world we live in at an astonishing pace. After the recent developments with the so-called “underwear bomber” and a double agent that took the lives of eight high-level CIA operatives in Afghanistan, authorities in the United States are scrambling to beef up security at home and abroad.

In the end, strengthening the Patriot Act and concocting all sorts of new measures will not ensure peace of mind for the American people. We are playing a high stakes game where civil liberties are beginning to play second fiddle to national security.

At first glance, this would seem like a marvelous idea. Let’s put armed guards in every terminal sporting camouflaged fatigues and  grenade-launching M-16 machine guns, just like in the good old days. While we are at it, let’s put up 15-foot walls around our homes, complete with barbed wire and an observation deck with a guy dressed in medieval garb brandishing a bow with flaming arrows.

Some would argue that we have no other choice but to become more like a “police state,” akin to some horrible nightmare from George Orwell’s novel “1984.” This is a dangerous slippery slope and before you know it we might be living in a world where Big Brother constantly watches us, tells us what to think and how to act. If anything, we are well on our way.

Fareed Zakaria recently wrote a piece in Newsweek where he said he believes that the worst thing the American people can do is overreact.

“Overreacting to terrorist attacks plays into Al Qaeda’s hands,” he wrote. “It also provokes responses that are likely to be large scale, expensive, ineffective, and perhaps even counterproductive. More screening for every passenger makes no sense. When searching for needles in haystacks, adding hay doesn’t help.”

So how exactly do you deal with a Muslim woman that is outraged at having to take off her burqa, or the scarf covering her head, when entering a security checkpoint at the airport? She cannot claim racial profiling or humiliation if she sees the Sikh gentleman in front of her take off his turban. Fair is fair. If she does not want to get on the plane because it offends her religious sensibilities, then she should not be allowed to board. Boarding an airplane should be a privilege, never a right.

Full–body scanners might violate constitutional rights, may be humiliating and may even create serious concerns about personal privacy; but if these machines are the least invasive way to detect the explosive PETN, then we should put one in each terminal.

Instead of focusing on people’s civil rights and how they are being trampled, we first need focus on the facts. The underwear bomber’s father notified federal authorities and they did nothing. In this day and age, there is no such thing as a terrorist threat that should go unchecked. What goes without saying is that authorities, at all levels of government, need to learn to work together. What’s needed is a larger, more robust watch list crafted by all authorities as a joint effort, instantly available to all relevant agencies in the government.

Why must the greatest military strength on the planet always play catch-up to the terrorists? The federal government seems to be coming up with many hollow measures that aim to make us safer, like having to stay in your seat one hour before the plane touches down. I agree with enhanced security, but it should be sensible. After all, the underwear bomber could have assembled the device right in his seat, without even having to get up to go to the lavatory. There are a lot of older men out there that must be very angry at the fact that they cannot relieve themselves during the last hour of the flight.

When we learned that shoe bomber Richard Reid hid PETN in one of his shoes, we made everyone in America take of their shoes if they wanted to get on an airplane. The underwear bomber used the same material, but hid it in his underwear. What should the TSA do in direct response to this; ask every man, woman, and child to drop their pants and unhook their brassieres?