Maybe I'm just neurotic and work is getting to me, but the tone of the article felt oddly erotic to me...
Don't Fly During Ramadan
391–400 of 986 posts
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#392Earlier 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…
> I think the correct answer to any question is, "my lawyer will answer that. get me my lawyer." Hopefully. But their answer to that might contain the word "Guantanamo" and there's a chance, given that you're now an uncooperative brown person, that they're not bluffing. I'm normally not one to buy arguments that the US is truly on a slippery slope to becoming a police state, but this year has made me seriously rethin…
At the very least, their answer will likely involve a permanent extrajudicial no-fly status as punishment for being insufficiently patriotic.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds terrible. Police make me very nervous. I avoid them if possible, especially making eye contact. How would I show up in Israel's interview?
There's a difference in reaction between someone nervous of cops vs. someone about to die in the willful act of mass murder.
> There's a difference in reaction between someone nervous of cops vs. someone about to die in the willful act of mass murder.
That's a pretty nuanced decision for the inspector to make. Polygraph machines and their operators routinely mess that one up.
I doubt that they themselves claim they can make that differentiation, and if they do so make that claim, I'd bet cash on it that it has been untested as far as accuracy regarding false positives.
Generally speaking, teaching 'technique' to a layman and expecting them to all be of equal caliber is just simply wrong.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's OK to be racist if you have another reason to be suspicious?
I don't think that's what I said... I think it's more than a little hyperbolic to describe their actions as 'rabid racism' They had a legitimate reason for suspicion. That reason wasn't the color of his skin, it was the color of a computer screen (a screen that flashes green hundreds of times a day flashed red in this case). It's quite obvious that much ignorance and xenophobia followed, but I don't think it crossed…
>It's quite obvious that much ignorance and xenophobia followed, but I don't think it crossed (laughably subjective) line of 'rabid.'
I suppose we could get into definitions of racism here. We're likely talking about "institutional racism", for which "prejudice plus power" is a pretty good definition, but I think perhaps "prejudice multiplied by power" might be even more apt. The prejudice was clearly considerable, but the power, and how it interacted with that prejudice, is what raises it to the level that I think could be called "rabid".
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#395This happened to me - because of incense. Specifically, the Nag Champa in the Red box (not the blue box). It is super good stuff, but the machine does not like it too much.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you and I even read the same story?! The guy was clearly being profiled on race and religious background, not just the false positive of the explosives machine.
I'm not sure if you understand what "profiled" means. He was pulled into questioning because he repeatedly set off the bomb detector. The questions about race/religion weren't profiling, because they weren't used to select him for additional scrutiny. They are part of a psychological battery designed to evaluate him without a harsh interrogation. These sorts of batteries were pioneered by the Israelis and are very ef…
We should be more precise.
> "... because he repeatedly set off the bomb detector."
No, the initial pat-down set off a chemical detector. He set it off once before being pulled into the private room. From that point on, it doesn't matter how many more times it was set off. It shouldn't increase the level of suspicion each time.
Would they have let him go if one time it suddenly stopped giving a positive signal? I doubt it.
> "These sorts of batteries were pioneered by the Israelis and are very effective."
But this is not how the Israelis run their security procedures, so the comparison isn't fair. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Gurion_Airport#Security_pro...
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#397The 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 ques…
As someone who was in a fraternity in college that practiced a waterboarding procedure as part of the initiation process, around our time in Iraq, I have come to never accept torture as someone who experienced one of the basic methods.
So, go ahead, try it. Call me a troll but you should check your moral compass. Do not argue for the torture, psychological or physical, of others if you cannot hack or attempt to at least once. That is where I draw the line.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#398Earlier 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.
Even if you ignore the fact that the US government considers airports and a 100 mile border zone around the US to be a "constitution-free zone" [1] and assume that the TSA, FBI, NYPD, and Homeland Security officers would have respected his rights fully and treated him with courtesy, invoking the 5th guarantees that you will miss your flight, and the security apparatus at airports is well aware of this. So you can invoke your right to remain silent, but only by sacrificing your right to move about freely in the process.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-us-co...
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#399It 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…
I flew out of SFO last week and set off the explosive detector after opting out. My experience was rather different. The TSA agents took my backpack and made a cursory hand-search, doing explosive swab tests on my electronics. After failing to find a source, they took me to the booth to do a more through check. They didn't ask me any questions at all about myself or why I might have set the system off other than the normal 'any sensitive areas' questions. I did volunteer that I'd spilled a small amount of gasoline on myself when fueling my car the previous day and that I was wearing new clothes that had not been washed since purchase. They seemed entirely disinterested. The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes longer than a regular opt-out pat down.
So, apparently that's how it goes when a white male sets the thing off.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
how much of that applies to the TSA? I'd like to know for my own benefit during travel. I know how to speak to a policeman, but I was under the idea that the TSA had even larger authority.