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1. Dress in ethnically ambiguous clothing.
2. Coat myself in insecticide before heading to the airport.
3. Look shifty.
4. Refuse the millimeter wave machine.
5. Get Detained.
6. Take off ethnically ambiguous clothes.
7. Scream: "I'm a white male... what now bitches!"
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I've always wondered what happens if you set off the detector. The fact is that they allowed him to fly afterwards. Overall it's not so horrible. Assuming the thing about the photo isn't true, of course.
A friend of mine set one off when we were traveling in Australia. We talked with the guard (who very 100% ralaxed) and he said that setting off the detector is incredibly easy. While he was searching my friend's purse, we were told that some of the chemicals used in make up can set it off. After finding nothing, we were free to continue. Took all of 3 minutes, no additional security, no prolonged questioning, just a…
For at least a decade, but more markedly so in the last eighteen months or so, I can't get on the Internet without seeing a story like this. Authorities of all sorts ignore any laws they feel like to provide the appearance of security against threats that usually don't exist in the first place. Revelations in technology that show absolutely nothing is secure unless you are manually rolling dice to construct one-time pad keys, and god help you if you try to store them on a post-2000 PC. I'm coming steadily closer to panic, as a citizen, as a technology professional, and as a human being. What can we do? No rational discussion of this ever takes place, both online and off, because of the hordes of comments insisting that the US will NEVER be as bad as a real authoritarian regime NO MATTER WHAT, and the equally radical comments that we are already WORSE than the USSR. So far as I am convinced, there is nothing an individual can do. This is a Big Problem, and going back over history texts, political activism only solves about one Big Problem per decade. So, for the sake of argument, I ask we suspend whatever structural beliefs we have. Assume, for this comment thread, that the current decline into a rightless police state will continue unabated, only stopped by the random sudden social upheaval that, without fail, takes place sooner or later. What can an individual do to be safe, or feel safe? Anything? Or is the only option to shut up, take our Xanax, and live with the Cold War-esque existential fear that you could be violated or killed at any time just because an agent doesn't like your ethnicity/choice of cleaning supplies/fact that you work in technology?
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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.
Internment is a revisionist word to make it sound less harsh. They were concentration camps.
Concentration camps are where you send people to die.
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Agreed. If I set off an explosive detector, I would expect to have a hard time, too.
I've set off the explosion detector before. I didn't receive anything like what OP did. And honestly, I chalk up a decent amount of that up to having the good luck of being white. I did get pulled into a separate area, and treated like criminal. Two agents stood by me the entire time while another one gave me another pat down. They opened up my backpack and rifled through everything (which was, I think, the most offe…
I think there's been too errors: His ethnicity made him endure more interrogation and your ethnicity allowed you to endure less.
I think the next threat to airport security is as likely to be perpetrated by someone who doesn't fit the ethnic profile. Everyone in law enforcement really wants there to be a profile, but looking for one will only lead to the wrong conclusion and costly mistakes.
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…
My bags have set off the explosives detector before, twice. (In both cases, due a heart medication that apparently triggers false positives). I was not taken into a back room or interrogated for hours. They searched me and my bags in more detail, asked some questions, and concluded it must have been a false positive. The experience took about 15 minutes each time. This was a few years back, but I don't recall if it w…
Back in the 70s or 80s a group of friends in Britain were sentenced for participating in a terrorist act because they set off an explosive test. They spent years in prison before it was determined that it was a false positive caused by the coating of a popular brand of playing card.
Look at it from the TSA/Police/FBI perspective: Someone goes to the airport on the first day of Ramadan, refuses the scan, sets off the chemical detectors, then asks to leave. During further interview he indicates that he hasn't eaten yet that day, is travelling for religious purposes, has just moved and is travelling alone. This further investigation doesn't seem insane to me. In fact if there was a clear profile fo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps the terrorists knew this would happen all along. They knew our paranoia would surpass any efforts they could ever hope accomplish. Instead of terrorizing a few thousand, they could terrorize a whole nation—daily and officially. It's brilliant and pathetic at the same time.
There's no "perhaps" here. Of course they knew this would happen. That's the whole point . It's right there in the name: they're terrorists because they create terror . The US is now terrified and burning piles of cash and lashing out at its own citizens, which is exactly what the terrorists wanted to happen.
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.
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…