Don't Fly During Ramadan • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#481

Post by turar » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:31 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #387

guard-of-terra wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's her experiences with Kazakhstan exactly? I've never been there but would expect from any post-soviet country a great deal of nobody caring about you and not many secret police anywhere.

The ex-soviet central Asian republics are packed full of secret police -- until 2006, Turkmenistan boasted one of the world's most famous totalitarian regimes under his Amazingself-for-life President Niyazov, and although his successor has made some reforms, things haven't gotten much better since Niyazov's death. The other republics share the same kind of government to a greater or lesser extent. IWPR at http://iwpr…

Kazakhstan is nothing like Turkmenistan in this regard. In fact, it's nothing like Uzbekistan even.

In terms of personal freedoms, average life in Kazakhstan is on par with the US, if not "freer" than the US. It's certainly no police state.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#482

Post by makerops » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:31 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #177

angersock wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've a friend who spent a good deal of time recently in Khazakhstan, and she was very amused by my attempts to express my fears of the United States becoming an authoritarian police state. She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues. The distressing thing is that we've been putting so much machinery into place, and gotten…

> I've a friend who spent a good deal of time recently in Khazakhstan, and she was very amused by my attempts to express my fears of the United States becoming an authoritarian police state. She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues. And she is right — the US is nowhere near being an authoritarian police state. But it i…

I saw some random headline today, that said something along the lines of "The US is in that awkward position, where we can't fix things within the system anymore, and yet aren't far enough along to start hanging the bastards"

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#483

Post by vxNsr » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:32 PM UTC

amirmc wrote: post #396

rayiner wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dou…

The Israeli procedures are kinda interesting, the second you enter the airport you are put in a line, you'll probably end up waiting in that line for about 15 min before you get to the "questioners" but once you're through everything else is really quick, especially the formal security check, you don't have to take off your shoes, remove your wallet, keys, etc or even take your laptop out of it's bag, just drop your bags on the belt, and walk through metal detector. Easily my favorite airport.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#484

Post by tn13 » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:32 PM UTC

As a TSA officer if a person/his baggage sets off an explosive detector alarm, I think I wont let him fly until I am fully convinced that he is traveling with no malicious intent. How soon and how well I get convinced will depend on how competent I am at my job. Clearly the officers that handled this person were incompetent, unsympathetic and ignorant. That is a different problem altogether nothing related to freedom.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#485

Post by darklajid » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:32 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #190

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 ques…

  > say you want to check for guns and explosives before people get on an airplane.
  > How do you do it?

The way we did it before the one-off event that made airports unbearable and sane people behaving like headless chicken.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#486

Post by koenigdavidmj » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:32 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #422

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rail has the advantage that they can just shut down commerce across the country for a few days if the government does anything they don't like, and they have the balls to do it.

Well, Amtrak doesn't have that power, and I doubt the freight companies care what TSA does with Amtrak.

Amtrak doesn't actually own the rails (except in the northeast, I think). That's where we're talking about here, but in Seattle BNSF owns the track so TSA would have to deal with them.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#487

Post by jrockway » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:36 PM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #485

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…

> say you want to check for guns and explosives before people get on an airplane. > How do you do it? The way we did it before the one-off event that made airports unbearable and sane people behaving like headless chicken.

Things have changed since 9/11. Explosives have gotten smaller and more stable. And nobody checks bags anymore, because it's cheaper to carry them on. So now you have to do the same screening you did before, but in "real time" and looking for something smaller.

9/11 did cause a lot of hysteria, but the risk profile has also changed since then. (Also, if you get TSA Pre, the security standards become essentially what they were pre-9/11.)

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#488

Post by lotyrin » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:36 PM UTC

kareemm wrote: post #327

enraged_camel wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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. The view you have expressed here demonstrates that you have literall…

The explosives detection machinery doesn't care what you look like or believe. I don't know about you, but I want the TSA / FBI / NYPD to look into it so that they're sufficiently convinced the individual is not a threat.

Chemical detection doesn't even get used except under "random" search.

There are so many chemicals to test for, and so many of them have other common uses that using chemical tests as a proxy for malicious intent has poor accuracy. Even assuming tests are extremely accurate, false positive rates would still massively exceed the incidence of threats.

What you look like will greatly increase your odds of being "randomly" searched and thereby odds of false positive chemical detection, at which point what you believe may become a liability during your interrogation.

Having an objective mechanism in the mix doesn't really put a dent how culturally and racially biased the present solution is.

Whether you feel a need for there to be such a system in place only changes whether such a bias is a matter of xenophobic overreach or a technical weakness against threats that resemble the majority.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#489

Post by mindcrime » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:37 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #381

mindcrime wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the pertinent detail is the fact the man set of explosive detectors. I'd argue that the pertinent detail is that he wasn't actually carrying any explosives. The other details, far from suggesting oppressive state apparatus, suggested an assortment of rent-a-cops and airline staff that really weren't particularly well-prepared for the guy that couldn't account for the explosives and flagged other profili…

I'm not sure whether you're arguing the state was "oppressive" because it had the temerity to put in place a policy of investigating people that set off explosive detectors, or because they weren't competent enough to establish his innocence within minutes, but I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree on both counts Minimal security theatre isn't oppression, and neither is bungling for five hours. Let's put things…

Minimal security theatre isn't oppression, and neither is bungling for five hours.

Yep, we'll have to agree to disagree. As far as I'm concerned, being detained against your will for five minutes is oppressive.

But, I'm a radical individualist who believes in the primacy and sovereignty of the individual and who barely tolerates the idea of the modern nation-state at all. So I'm fairly biased.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#490

Post by ZoF » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 8:38 PM UTC

JackFr wrote: post #227

ck2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"the American encampment in a higher ethnic concentration of Japanese" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily. I'm not sure what the distinction is you're trying to make. That calling them 'interment camps' is somehow better than 'concentration camps'? Both words refer to holding a designated group of people, perceived to be a threat against their will without evidence or trial.

The distinction he is trying to make is quite clear... The term 'concentration camp' has a far greater negative connotation associated with it for glaringly obvious reasons...