That’s all true but that is not what people say. People often use the term to refer to the whole visible risible operation regardless of effectiveness.

Fixed.

(Calling it something like “security theater” does not automatically prove that such theater has no function.)

No. That would be fallacious. However, security theater is defined as meaningless, expensive, showy crap that really does nothing to increase security. (That is, you have it backwards.)

If it actually increases security in a meaningful way, it isn’t security theater.

The apparently debatable point would be whether the airport security arm of the TSA (or anything done in the name of combating terrorism after 2001) is security theater or not.

It does have a function, though. Security theater is meant to allay the fears stoked by politicians and/or terrorists, feed bureaucracies and corporations, and increase the power of the military/police state we’ve been working on. (The end of the Cold War was such a bummer.)

Ya never will know what goes on in the evil minds of subversives – so, what ever it takes to protect the American Way – IS the American way of doing things !!!!!

AND – the American Way IS the MOST Democratic Way of Leading a good, clean, wholesome life – so dig it – or DIE !!!!!

But DIE – as a example TO Democracy !!!!

Already dead – well – ashes to ashes, dust to dust !!!