The breakdown of who gets searched is also secret, but anecdotes abound, and the results have not always inspired public confidence in the system.
Our cynicism toward politics may be depriving us of the resource we most need to deal with a challenging world: inspired public citizens.
Like government-financed buildings, though, it also inspired public investment of £4.5m to develop an adjoining performance site.Alan Grieve of the Jerwood Foundation hopes 100,000 people a year will pay the admission fee.
"The public services are the most heavily unionized group today, and these people deal with the public much more often than workers did before so their strikes get sympathy where before they inspired public anger".
But Suffragette hasn't just inspired public protests, it's also persuaded screenwriter Abi Morgan, who penned the movie, to work only on projects that focus on women for the foreseeable future.
It also inspired public gratitude for a career devoted to the spiritual and unifying qualities of music, pursued by an artist who refused to be trapped by rigidities of style, orthodoxies of technique, or preachings of a cultural clergy.
Terrorism experts said the Bush administration may have also hurt its own cause and inspired public skepticism this week in how it alerted the public to the possible attacks.
Beyond the accusation that she used the secret services for personal reasons, Ms. Nagyova, the chief of staff who has been arrested, has also inspired public contempt for her lavish lifestyle, including a penchant for Louis Vuitton purses and Champagne breakfasts.
There was a lovely circularity about the release of 1980's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and its accompanying No 1 single, Ashes to Ashes, at the height of the New Romantic movement he'd almost singlehandedly inspired: public confirmation that Bowie was the most important and influential artist since the Beatles.
He lit a fire for prevention that inspired public health action and awareness.
