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Don't Fly During Ramadan

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Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#281

Post by AznHisoka »

spindritf wrote: post #181
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 also didn't do himself a favor by saying "We’ll be visiting some temples." Is that the best lie he could come up with?

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

"Well DUH! YOU GUYS were the ones that made me come here! I'm a quiet guy, minding my own business. I don't want to say anything to anyone"

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#282

Post by judegomila »

A few years ago, a US border official didn't even know about my visa type (O1) and put me through secondary because he didn't know that the visa existed.

This also happened on the US/CA border to me - the official told me I had the wrong visa to which I responded I had the correct visa. We went round 15 times in a row back and forth, with me stating it was the correct visa until he gave up and let me go.

A close friend of mine also had a gun put on the table to intimidate him in a secondary screening when coming from the UK to the US.

So much for wanting to be an "immigration magnet" like the Google hangout tomorrow with the CTO of the US.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/08/21/we-immigrant-geeks...

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#283

Post by monsterix »

gk1 wrote: post #115
monsterix wrote: post #37

Thank you for posting this. I was about to book a ticket on Jetblue for next week but I am now decided not to fly with them or recommend them to anyone. While we can fix private airlines and businesses for their stupid attitude there is, of course, no way for people to fix NSA/TSA and all those inverted bullshitters living on taxpayer's money.

Most airlines reserve the right to remove passengers from a flight if they feel it is safer to do so. This happens all the time, and I'm sure from the perspective of the expelled passenger it's always "unfair." I trust you will follow your own principle and boycott every airline.

For that matter every restaurant, home owner, bus driver, taxi, parkway, condominium, hospital, school, university or business has the right to remove a person from their premises. That doesn't mean people do or have to do it illustriously and then come back and say: we'll fly with you tomorrow - we'll let you travel on our airline only tomorrow because you're not "safe" today.

When the TSA circus cleared the person in question there is absolutely no reason for him to be prevented from travel.

> I trust you will follow your own principle and boycott every airline.

I hope you'll find someone who buys your ad hominem/bait elsewhere. On hacker news you might want to read up the guidelines [1] on quality of discussions and disagreements.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#284

Post by chimeracoder »

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.

It's hard to explain a false positive when you're given no context about what it could be.

As explained in other comments, nitroglycerin is found in things as bizarre as desserts.

Unless someone happens to be incredibly knowledgeable about how to make explosives out of common household supplies, it's hard to expect them to say, eg. "Oh, that's because I happened to eat dessert last night and forgot to wash my hands."

(In fact, if somebody does know that, that may be cause for all the more suspicion!)

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#285

Post by ferdo »

tty wrote: post #263
ferdo wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Since there's no proof of this "positive", this claim sits in doubt. ...and since there's no proof of his story, his story sits in doubt. Right? Is that the modus operandi? I was commenting under the assumption that his experiences were conveyed truthfully and that the explosive alert actually happened and wasn't bogus. Is there reason for me to automatically doubt the sincerity of those who tested him? Is there rea…

> since there's no proof of his story, his story sits in doubt. Right?

Not for me. The author has more credibility in my eyes than any employee of the TSA.

> Is there reason for me to automatically doubt the sincerity of those who tested him?

Since they lied to him through the entire ordeal ("We’ll just be a few minutes, and then you’ll be able to go."), the rest of their declarations are equally suspect.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#286

Post by Zimahl »

gutnor wrote: post #262
jrockway wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ques…

By coincidence I was watching again the "Don't talk to the police" video on youtube. Seems to me that this guy had to talk a lot, answer a lot of questions, without any of the protection the 5th amendment is supposed to provide.

You don't get protection from the 5th without actually using it. He didn't have to talk to the police/TSA/FBI/DHS but he willingly did. If he simply said 'I don't want to talk' and shut up that would've been the end of the questioning - but obviously not the ordeal.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#287

Post by jlgreco »

mason240 wrote: post #204
ck2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internment is a revisionist word to make it sound less harsh. They were concentration camps.

Concentration is a revisionist word to make it sound more harsh. They were internment camps. Concentration camps are where you send people to die.

The term "concentration camp" really only came to mean "death camp" during/after WWII. Before then it was used more or less literally, a camp where people are concentrated (which is not to say that they were not often brutal and deadly... but the purpose of the camps was not extermination)

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#288

Post by genericresponse »

mistercow wrote: post #207
genericresponse wrote: post #107

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…

The problem is that the lack of decency is critical to the whole situation. If they had shown decency in the first place, he wouldn't have reacted in a way that they construed as "suspicious", and then they wouldn't have wasted several hours and harassed an innocent person.

I tend to apply some expectation on him as well as the TSA. He knows they might think he's fasting. Say: I ran out the door and didn't have a chance to get breakfast. I'm pretty hungry. He knows that they might be suspicious of religiosity. Explain the details of your trip. Yes he doesn't have to and it should have been easier for him, but use some common sense. It's the same reason that when you're pulled over for speeding 5 over you don't refuse to answer any questions. You try to be polite and hope the officer will let you off with a warning. The likely outcome is better.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#289

Post by nolok »

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…

It is also my perception that as western european countries (France for me) want more and more surveillance and US-like "security" laws, former soviet block countries are adding to our safeguard in the European parliament.

The number of small level scary stuff I have seen discarded because the EU told us "seriously, you can't do that" is crazy (did you know that until recently, you could be detained by the police with no lawyer for several hours in France ? The EU forced us to fix that [1]). That is the one and only reason I have always been against turkish being in the EU, not religion or anything else like that like the medias like to claim.

One has to wonder what will happen when the former soviet countries start to forget what oppression means too.

[1] http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garde_%C3%A0_vue_en_droit_fran%...

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#290

Post by ganeumann »

solistice wrote: post #213
corresation wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it's plausible. It's just incredibly unlikely (not least because this notion that the TSA is some white power apparatus seems to be at odds with the reality that the TSA is a very diverse workforce. Add that the passenger list in most urban centers is incredibly diverse, and this idea that it's just xenophobia seems quite nonsensical. Another post talks about how this demonstrates how the US views "foreigners" -…

Also, if you have a "secret button" used by hundrets of TSA officials, with at least some borderline irresponsible, how long do you think it takes for those news to leak out? Two weeks? The only way to keep a secret for long periods is that few know about it.

Well, we had thousands of people violating the 4th Amendment willy-nilly looking at our email and phone data and it's taken years for that to credibly leak out. Bucking authority like that is not only unusual, it's downright rare. Don't count on it.

Not that I believe that there's a secret button.

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