Five years later

Sunday night, in my room at the Hampton Inn nearest the Baltimore airport, I reached inside my toiletries bag and found that my shampoo had leaked, that the cap hadn't been screwed on tightly.

That's odd, I thought. I distinctly remember checking the cap for tightness while I packed this morning.

My next thought was: The security guard who opened and searched my suitcase after I checked it must have opened the shampoo bottle to make sure it was shampoo and not an explosive.

There was no polite card in my suitcase like the ones I occasionally found in 2002 and 2003, cards saying, in effect, "So sorry we had to search your suitcase, we trust we didn't disturb anything too badly, thanks for understanding." I don't really expect those cards anymore.

Earlier Sunday, at the Charlotte, N.C., airport, the polite federal officer who tested my CPAP machine -- which never was pulled at a security checkpoint before 2006, but which invariably gets pulled now -- told me some airports now ban CPAP machines as carry-ons, requiring them to go into the hold as checked luggage instead.

Such a reassuring sound "checked luggage" now has in the mouths of security experts. We'll all be OK, they imply, if we just get the dicey stuff out of the cabin and into "checked luggage." Never mind that checked luggage brought down Pan Am Flight 103.

I didn't say any of this to the security guard, of course. He doesn't make the policy. I'm not sure anyone does.

Here's a quiz. Was my assumption that my suitcase and shampoo had been searched

A) Likely correct, given our current search-and-surveillance society; or

B) Likely incorrect, possibly even paranoid, but understandable given our current search-and-surveillance society.

Whatever my answer, it must be A or B. I can imagine no C.

All this went through my mind as I stood in my hotel room, staring at my suitcase. I shook my head and thought: Enough. I secured my shampoo and went to bed.