When the Transportation Safety Administration was created in the wake of Sept. 11, then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said. “You can’t professionalize unless you federalize.”

This has shown to be anything but the case, thanks to new regulations mandating full-body scanners and more stringent pat-downs for travelers in the runup to the Thanksgiving air travel rush.

Starting Oct. 29, the TSA mandated the use of full-body scanners to search for weapons or bombs. Travelers who opt out will be subject to greater scrutiny with an added bonus — screeners may now use the front rather than the back of their hands to search passengers.

Scanners blur the image of a face, but show a passenger’s naked body. The government insists the image is erased after a passenger is cleared, but what happens when an unprofessional TSA employee posts some of them on the World Wide Web?

Many people feel violated by the searches. It’s an unnecessary invasion of privacy under the guise of political correctness.

The Israeli airline El Al sets a threshold for probable cause to subject a passenger to heightened security. If you hail from a terror-prone country or fit several archetypes, you’re going to be searched. El Al has never had a hijacking or a bomb plot on any of its airplanes.

Instead, we have 3-year-old children, nuns and elderly women being searched in the name of avoiding profiling. This does nothing to advance the cause of safety and is an affront against our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

“Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither,” Ben Franklin said.

In this case, we’re getting neither.