I don't know. The whole thing sounds fairly reasonable to me--considering some of the stuff that they have declared unilaterally since 9/11. As a non-US citizen, the paranoid one in the not quite circular office REVOKED my licence privileges for some time last year simply because I didn't hold citizenship. Then they let us have our licences back so we could fly, but only if we (and our company) get a security check. Now we get a security check every time we do any kind of recurrent training or checkride or the ride isn't legal. That did a whole lot of good for national security, I'm sure! As if I'm going to worry about having a current licence to embark on some terrorist scheme. I can see it now "Sorry boss, but I can't fly that suicide mission today because my 61.58 is past due and I can't get a security clearance to do the training!"
Don't even get me started on the whole train the rent-a-cop deal that's supposed to make rocket scientists out of the barely literate in two easy days! I don't mean to sound condescending to the illiterate here, but really, wouldn't it have been better to train a couple of them at each airport PROPERLY rather than rubber stamping ALL of them at EVERY checkpoint and getting nothing out of it?
A clear case of the incompetent being led by the stupid IMHO--but I'm not pointing fingers!
