571–580 of 986 posts
""@mherdeg The govt agencies can speak for themselves. We stand by our crewmember's decision, and regret the inconvenience this caused.""
Interesting.
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…
That has already happened. You can probably go back to the last ten presidential elections and this statement would hold true in some form. I'd say the same about moat senators and representatives. It's a disaster we've been engineering with great consistency for 50 years.
I don't know what it will take for the US voter to wake up. Actually, no, I know, things have to get substantially worst. Most people don't pay attention to politics and how the country is being run often enough to be aware. They watch tv networks during elections to be told how to vote, and then they go back to sleep. Politicians love it. Whole blocks of people will always vote the same way. Nobody thinks. We are watching our destruction from the inside and there's precious little we can do about it.
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Genuinely hope you get hellbanned for this. If the HN moderators apply the same standards to you as they do to everyone else you should be.
What, because of the cursing? [EDIT: which has now been edited out; too bad, I always appreciate a sincere " Fuck you! "] Let's not be censorious. I can think of some hellbanned who didn't obviously deserve it, but most of the ones I've seen did obviously deserve it. Are you seriously going to argue that jrockway is as bad as the guy who posts all his personal revelations from the Lord? [EDIT: I'm talking about the r…
By analogy - should someone automatically be pardoned for a crime they commit today (let's go extreme and say murder), because they had displayed good behavior in the past?
All of this said, I am a bit surprised by some of jrockway's comments in this thread, given his posting history. Almost enough to wonder if someone else has taken control of his account.
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You don't have to say your name, for obvious reasons, but would you mind giving an example of an Indian name, and how all of that information is encoded in it? That's REALLY fascinating to me.
Any name that ends in "-jee" or "-ji" is a British variant on an Indian Bengali name[0]. Almost anybody who has it (Mukerjee, Banerjee, Chatterjee) is originally from West Bengal, a state in India that borders Bangladesh. Beyond that's, it's a Hindu name. Almost all Hindu names are specific to a particular caste (the origins of the caste system are simply a precise codification of socioeconomic status, so it's simila…
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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…
> 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. She's right, and like her, I have found it next to impossible to explain this to Americans who think the US is turning into a police state. People making this claim should spend a few hours reading on history and learn about the Gestapo or the Stasi. What's happening in the U…
US involuntarily have all pieces of the puzzle for a very high quality totalitarian state. The question is whether someone will be able to assemble them before the immune system of the american society activates in full force and dismantles them.
Surveillance capabilities: check
Militarized police: check (Balko has some scary data, but haven't checked it thoroughly)
Obedient propaganda machine: not quite there, but as the lead up to the Iraq war showed - achievable.
Secret laws: check
Btw - KGB means "Комитет Государственая Безопасност" which translates into " Committee for State Security" not that far from "Department of Homeland Security"
As John Oliver said a few weeks ago about NSA: "We don't say you broke any laws with what you did, we are surprised you didn't have to."
Lets just hope that the US society will be able to reverse the trend.
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…
The prolem is not that he was interrogated. It's rather how he was interrogated and how the agents conducted themselves. They treated him like a spy and employed some psychological techniques. Was that even necessary? Doesn't e deserve to be treated with respect? Why did they immediately assume he was a criminal? Especially when they knew the machhines were defective?
Considering the fact that they knew the machines weren't perfect and that household items set them off, they should've considered him innocent until proven otherwise and treated him with respect. Even more so if he's a citizen. They should've atleast told him that "hey, the following items could set it off, have you used one of these?" They could've then verified his claims with the chemical that showed up.
All this will only become obvious once it happens to you I guess.
Don't downvote if you disagree!
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Just because I'm not hysterical about the TSA doesn't mean I can't comment here. When you travel by air, you are cramming yourself into a small metal tube with 300 other people. The other 299 people want everyone there to be checked for weapons, so the government does this. If you want to be able to travel without being screened, there are tons of options available to you. But the reality is, you have no right in the…
news.ycombinator.com/leaders may prove enlightening. [EDIT: he really did make this argument, but it seems to have disappeared.] What happened? Did you have a stroke? Are you actually jrockway's brother-in-law, "borrowing" his handle?
All I can say is that the hysteria is at an amazingly-high level. I am not sure why I even read TSA-related articles anymore.
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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…
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IANAL, and I would love to know this. But at the time, what else could I do, besides wait for the police to show up?
For the lawyers out there, this sounds like an excellent business opportunity. 20-minute legal emergency response to people in trouble at the security checkpoint. Could assist directly with regards to asserting rights, filing suits if the passengers' rights have been violated and extracting every dime that can legally be extracted from airlines that involuntarily re-book passengers. Sorry that you had to go through t…