A lot of people make stupid cases. Should giving birth be dangerous so that people are reluctant to have unwanted children? Should sending email be dangerous so that people receive less viagra spam?
If each email cost a penny to send, 95% of spam would disappear. A little impedence can be a good thing.
There are many good reasons not to make war too easy or efficient. Too often politicians trend toward groupthink and acting en masse, like a faceless feckless mob. Making invasion as easy as sending spam would be very bad.
There's a big difference between "a little impedance" and "risks human life". War waged with robots will still cost money.
If politicians make bad decisions, perhaps you should try fixing that instead of sacrificing the lives of young men for a small chance of making those decisions more painful.
Or, maybe, there could have been bugs in the code.
If I'm an expert in some domain and a computer is telling me to do something completely different ("Trust me--just drive over the river!") I'm certainly going to question the result.
Sure, in theory, 1password MIGHT have better private auditing and review. But there's no reason to believe they do. To the contrary, when asked about open sourcing 1password, one of their developers explained that they don't do formal code review because it's too expensive, and that none of the external experts they consulted with have ever performed a full review.
Calling it an illusion implies that air travel is not safe, when in fact it is very safe. However, people did not feel safe, so the government constructed an agency (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not) to provide security theater and help people feel safe.
In general, American citizens today are safe from terrorism. If anything, the greatest danger comes not from terrorists themselves but from the American peoples' unjustified fear of terrorism. We could use some more security theater.
This is either sarcasm, or, the most perverse and backwards logic for government sanctioned security programs that I've ever seen.
The ostensible reason that the government has created the TSA and its ilk is for actual security. Claiming that it's been created to intentionally achieve security theater is quite a extraordinary claim to be making. Furthermore, the origin of danger does not come along a single axis running between "terrorism" and "people's fear of terrorism". The government programs themselves can have negative impacts (c.f. any discussion on the TSA, NSA, border controls), which you are conveniently ignoring.
Firstly, I said "perhaps deliberately, perhaps not" because I am not claiming that they intentionally wanted to provide security theater. I don't think that motive is relevant. I'm replying to a specific statement to explain that there is a benefit, even though it is intangible. Of course there are other bad effects, like inconvenience to travellers, and other good effects, like providing stable jobs to otherwise unemployably stupid Americans who live in or near airport-bearing cities.
In retrospect, I should have mentioned that last bit instead as a tangible benefit, but I only just now thought of it.
I find it unlikely that consumers are as safety conscious as you imagine them to be. Think about how many people currently text or do other things to distract themselves while driving. They willingly choose less safety in order to be able to do something else while in transit. Pushing this behavior to its natural conclusion is what will allow self driving cars to be accepted even if they are 10% less safe than normal drivers.
People text while driving because they think they are better at doing two things at once than they actually are. For the same reason, they will expect that they can out-perform a robot unless those robots are so overwhelmingly safe that conclusion can't be rationalized. No consumer will be thinking about the big picture.
Even if they had similar access, a leak is still dangerous because it allows them to behave as if they have the information without divulging as much about their own capabilities.
