Chertoff's Trick Question

In an interview in today's USA Today, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff defends TSA's information-collection plans with a remarkable false dilemma:

"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"

Neat trick! Set two aspects of our right to privacy against each other so it sounds like we really only have a right to one or the other! You can keep your personal identifiying information to yourself or you can avoid a warrantless search of your bag. I thought we were entitled to both! More sinisterly, it sounds like Chertoff is saying we can either give up our privacy rights the easy way or the hard way. Rather like the police banging on the door and saying "Let us in or we break it down!" Or perhaps the better analogy is from Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, in which the protagonist Rubashov is given a choice by his Soviet interrogators: either he can confess, cooperate in a public show trial, and be executed, or he can maintain his innocence and be shot summarily as an administrative case without any further ado. Some choice.