I'm not a fan of the TSA, but this isn't exactly fair. To put into perspective that a lot of people here might understand:
Hey, Sysadmin person, prove why we should keep paying you! You sit here all day doing things, and yet nothing has happened to our servers since you got here. Why do we need you?
Acutally, a sysadmin can do exactly what you say he cannot.
1. Wait for a server hdd to crash, and tell people that they suffered no interruptions because he had the foresight to do disk mirroring on the servers.
2. Wait for somebody to do 'rm -rf' on an important dir on their laptop, and help them recover from the hourly backup procedure he'd implemented on the day he joined the company (this has happened in a company i've worked).
While I agree with you, the sysadmin would be able to provide evidence of specific actions that prevented something bad happening. TSA has made zero arrest related to terrorism so far.
Plus quoting the end of the article :
He said that the laptop rule is about appearances, giving people a sense that something is being done to protect them. “Security theater,” he called it.
Hey, Sysadmin person, prove why we should keep paying you! You sit here all day doing things, and yet nothing has happened to our servers since you got here. Why do we need you?