Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Fly During Ramadan

varnull.adityamukerjee.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 986 posts

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#181

Post by spindritf »

pinaceae wrote: post #56

Contrarian perspective: He fits a certain profile. Triggered a bunch of attributes (address move, chemicals on him, etc.). The 9/11 attackers walked through the scanners with knifes. The Boston bombers were flagged, but still traveled freely. After both attacks people were laughing at the stupidity of the enforcement agencies, uselessness of the TSA, etc. Here, the process worked. His account is subjective, everyone…

> gets offended by simple questions about religion, etc. OK, good for him. The more you push back, the more self righteous and arrogant you are during security checks

I agree with the other parts of your post. Here though I think he wasn't assertive enough. No need to get snarky but a request for a cup of water is not something you just let the cop/whoever shake off with a wink.

>> "You also said a lot of things, kid," he said with a wink.

You say "yes, like that I want something to drink, repeatedly." Another thing is to always ask people for their official identification, a badge, a name, a number... They're not supposed to be anonymous.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#182

Post by GFischer »

JackFr wrote: post #105
lukeqsee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment I had never heard of this.

Are you an American? I'm curious, because in my experience the American interment of Japanese is fairly well known among Americans and Japanese, and not well known by everyone else.

It's been linked to several times in Hacker News, here is where I read it first (I'm from Uruguay, South America).

Over here, the U.S. are reviled due to their part in the local dictatorships (they trained torturers, among other things).

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#183

Post by ferdo »

tty wrote: post #128
maxmcd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are far more efficient ways to flag people that fit a certain profile. They should have checked all of his belongings and let him go, and not focused at all on his "attitude". That allows for more checks of other suspicious people with the available time they wasted questioning this one person. The Boston bombers should also have been allowed to fly freely. Their actions had nothing to do with air travel. E…

>There are far more efficient ways to flag people that fit a certain profile. They should have checked all of his belongings and let him go, and not focused at all on his "attitude". Did you miss the part where the machines gave him a positive for explosives?

> Did you miss the part where the machines gave him a positive for explosives?

Since there's no proof of this "positive", this claim sits in doubt. If he was already targeted, they'd claim the machine would say anything.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#184

Post by msrpotus »

corresation wrote: post #72

It is a terrible ordeal, but for all of the other factors brought up the critical factor is that he set off an explosion detector (and clearly it doesn't get false positives often given the response they showed). Everything else (about Ramadan, being Hindi, the color of one's skin, etc) may be nothing more than decorations, and no one here knows what would happen if John Smith Anglosaxon set off the same detector in…

If it was just the false positive, that would be one thing but the utterly humiliating, quite frankly stupid, way they treated him was completely unjustified. There's nothing that warranted denying him water and not treating him with dignity.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#185

Post by chimeracoder »

amirmc wrote: post #152
jrockway wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distressing thing is that we've been putting so much machinery into place, and gotten the noose so well fitted, that when the bottom drops out we'll only have the briefest of short, sharp shocks before we find ourselves in a terrifyingly efficient machine of oppression. Or you can take the train.

TSA does more than just airports "With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyo...

That thought is terrifying.

I was afraid I was going to be put on the no-fly list afterwards and would have to travel back to NYC by train (a four-day trip).

Even before this experience I used to avoid flying in favor of taking the train. I don't know what I'd do if the TSA became commonplace at train stations.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#186

Post by mistercow »

corresation wrote: post #154
skaevola wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the airline which denied him the flight, not the TSA.

JetBlue were total idiots about it, but at that point they were "victims" of this situation as well, and it seemed that the representative simply wanted to exclude him as quickly as they could to wipe their hands of the consequences of it.

If the TSA officer was being truthful when they said the flight would be held, then JetBlue may have just been ensuring that they could take of on time.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#187

Post by sukuriant »

tty wrote: post #128
maxmcd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are far more efficient ways to flag people that fit a certain profile. They should have checked all of his belongings and let him go, and not focused at all on his "attitude". That allows for more checks of other suspicious people with the available time they wasted questioning this one person. The Boston bombers should also have been allowed to fly freely. Their actions had nothing to do with air travel. E…

>There are far more efficient ways to flag people that fit a certain profile. They should have checked all of his belongings and let him go, and not focused at all on his "attitude". Did you miss the part where the machines gave him a positive for explosives?

Did you miss the thread of conversation where false positives happen often and are explained away with lesser screening?

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#188

Post by jlgreco »

legitsource wrote: post #111
ck2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know they don't have a button to push to make it give a false positive so they can hold people? Cops have dogs trained to give false positives on signal and we are constantly spied on and lied to by our own intelligence agencies. So please don't tell me this idea is far fetched, I think it's very plausible.

The dogs aren't purposefully trained to give false positives, that's just a side effect of how social dogs are. They want to please their handler and the handler gives them rewards.

It could be the dog trying to naturally please the cop, or the cop could have inadvertently trained the behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans), or the training may very well have been deliberate.

It would be damn hard to prove the last, but what is relatively easy to demonstrate is that dogs do give false signals that correspond to certain biases of the owners. Regardless of whether the last is true or not, the way we view detector dogs needs to be revisited in light of these clear biases. As it is, detector dogs seem to be barely better than dosing rods.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#189

Post by omarali »

cperciva wrote: post #123
corresation wrote: post #72

It is a terrible ordeal, but for all of the other factors brought up the critical factor is that he set off an explosion detector (and clearly it doesn't get false positives often given the response they showed). Everything else (about Ramadan, being Hindi, the color of one's skin, etc) may be nothing more than decorations, and no one here knows what would happen if John Smith Anglosaxon set off the same detector in…

he set off an explosion detector (and clearly it doesn't get false positives often given the response they showed) False positives are fairly common, but usually easily explained -- e.g., "I was target shooting yesterday, there must be some gunpowder on my clothes". A false positive which the individual involved is unable -- or unwilling -- to explain is far less common.

My dad had food (dates) set off the detector. He's now on the no fly list.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#190

Post by jrockway »

jwr wrote: post #73

The land of the free. As I read more and more of those stories I can't help but wonder at how things changed. I am from a formerly-eastern-europe-soviet-bloc country (Poland) and these kinds of oppressive techniques sound very familiar. The haziness of procedures, lack of basic rights, intimidation, no accountability of state officials -- we've seen all that until 1989. At the time, while the communist regime was imp…

I don't think this is that oppressive. He went through security and set off an explosives detector. The cops showed up and asked some questions. Then he left.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say the government can't hamfistedly accuse you of a crime. All it says is that they have to charge you or let you go in 24 hours, give you a trial, and punish you in a consistent way. They did that here; they asked some questions and they let him go.

You can argue about the techniques; religious questions, not giving him water, but it's all a well-documented psychological game that they're trying to play. If they make the suspect mad, the suspect is more likely to start yelling hysterically without thinking, saving the taxpayer the cost of a long trial. It's worth a try, right? (I think the correct answer to any question is, "my lawyer will answer that. get me my lawyer.")

Anyway, I look at this like the lottery, but in reverse. Sometimes you lose the reverse lottery and a day of your life gets fucked up. But ultimately, life moves on and you have an interesting story. You can say that the government is an oppressive regime that is out to get you for your political views, or you can say you rolled the dice and lost.

Let me ask you this: say you want to check for guns and explosives before people get on an airplane. How do you do it?

Post reply on HN