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Don't Fly During Ramadan

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Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#691

Post by derefr »

angersock wrote: post #104
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'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

You know, it strikes me that one of the large differences between most of these countries, and the US, is the relative size of the population to the government+military. For having a population of 300mm people, somewhere less than 5 million people (~1.7%) work in the US public sector.

What this means is, we could have just as many secret police following people as happens under any repressive regime--but the vast majority of US citizens would never be aware of it, since in relative terms "being followed around by a black van" would be about as rare per capita as "being struck by lightning." You wouldn't personally know anyone it had happened to, you'd only read about it--and so you'd think it wasn't really a thing that happens here.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#692

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

zaroth wrote: post #621
jlgreco wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "set off explosive detectors. Repeatedly." If I walk back and forth through a metal detector with a belt buckle multiple times, do I become increasingly suspicious each time it beeps?

It's nothing at all like going through a metal detector with your belt on. Metal detectors check your present state, trace analysis checks your PAST state. False positives are possible, I've had it happen to me. When "the machine beeped", I got a thorough pat-down and re-swabbed, and the next time "the machine did not beep" and I was on my way. It's my understanding that TSA agents will not allow someone to pass who…

They were specifically highlighting the pointless use of the word "repeatedly" for emphasis, I believe. Well of course it happened "repeatedly"; they just repeated the same test with the same articles.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#693

Post by stfu »

Tloewald wrote: post #192
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's an appalling story and the behavior of the TSA is often reprehensible, but seriously -- this is not a fair comparison. So yes, security guys don't know Hindu from Muslim or Indian from whatever, but it's well-known there is a heightened alert right now, US embassies all over the middle-east and Africa are closed out of security fears, and this guy fit a crude profile AND did something slightly unusual (opted out…

Somewhat unwillingly, but I agree with your comment. There was an acceptable level of suspicion given that triggered the event. Sure, this whole thing went far to long and the missing picture story is mysterious, but most of the other "bad" stuff can be attributed to typical bureaucratic incompetence combined with playing dumb in the hopes to trigger up some reaction.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#694

Post by biot »

icambron wrote: post #665
biot wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI agent's statement rephrased in boolean logic: nervous = background && companions && alarm If the value of alarm is false , nobody gets nervous because the whole expression evaluates to false . The FBI agent did not say "You are being subjected to additional screening because of your background and because you're traveling alone". That they are nervous because of his background and lack of companions is orthog…

I think you're missing that there is a sequence of things that happens here: 1. he sets off the chemical detector 2. he is pulled aside for questioning 3. in that questioning, they discover he has a background that makes them nervous 4. they hold him for a great deal more questioning 1->2 is standard and would happen to anyone. As other people have pointed out in this thread, it generally takes 15 minutes and is no b…

I understand what you mean now. Your original statement was:

  They even admitted to subjecting him to additional security because
  of his "background".
This is ambiguous and can be interpreted in more than one way. How I interpreted what you said:

  1. He sets off the chemical detector
  2. He is pulled aside for "additional security"
You can see why I disagreed as anybody ought to be pulled aside for additional security if they set off an explosives detector. Upon reading your reply, the interpretation you were going for was:

  1. He sets off the chemical detector
  2. He is pulled aside for "additional security"
  3. They probe into his background to build a profile
  4. This profile yields further rounds of "additional security"
     that people not matching that profile wouldn't be subject to
I lack knowledge on whether or not making security-related decisions based on a profile is useful or irrelevant, so I'll bow out of this aspect of the conversation.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#695

Post by mpyne »

icambron wrote: post #665
biot wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI agent's statement rephrased in boolean logic: nervous = background && companions && alarm If the value of alarm is false , nobody gets nervous because the whole expression evaluates to false . The FBI agent did not say "You are being subjected to additional screening because of your background and because you're traveling alone". That they are nervous because of his background and lack of companions is orthog…

I think you're missing that there is a sequence of things that happens here: 1. he sets off the chemical detector 2. he is pulled aside for questioning 3. in that questioning, they discover he has a background that makes them nervous 4. they hold him for a great deal more questioning 1->2 is standard and would happen to anyone. As other people have pointed out in this thread, it generally takes 15 minutes and is no b…

I believe the issue with the alarm is that most people don't repeatedly flag the same alarm.

E.g. if a given test were to generate a false positive, you would expect that it wouldn't generate a false positive the next time if run on the same article, especially if the machine correctly doesn't alert on other innocuous articles.

So in the normal situation someone sets of the chemical detector, once, gets pulled aside for questioning. Their gear doesn't set off the detector again and so the agents are able to conclude it's a false alarm.

To be clear, I don't agree with the treatment OP received in this case, but I fail to see how it is sinister that someone repeatedly sets off chemical detector alarms (that no one else sets off repeatedly), has burned all ties to his residence, is religious and is going up to meet family for a religious gathering.

It's not that such behavior is automatically suspicious, it's that the behavior is still almost indistinguishable from those who previously have caused terrorist attacks.

In this case the FBI agent isn't trying to prove OP a terrorist as much as he's trying hard (and failing) to prove that he's not.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#696

Post by greedo »

jrockway wrote: post #487
darklajid wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Everytime I travel, I notice a huge number of people checking bags. See how that anecdata works?

And if explosives have magically gotten smaller and more stable in the last 12 years (somehow defying chemistry and physics), why aren't we seeing more successful attacks? Or arrests of terrorists who underestimate how good the TSA is? Could it be that we're protecting ourselves against a miniscule threat? I bet if we invoked some type of placebo security where the guards just watched a rerun of South Park instead of the xray screen, we'd be just as "effective."

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#697

Post by mpyne »

jellicle wrote: post #476
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? Like this: you check them for guns and explosives. Finding none, you let them on the plane. Total elapsed time: 5 minutes. It's really not that hard.

How do you check for explosives?

There are AQAP designs that involve zero metallic parts, and they've been attempted twice.

In both instances the bombs actually made it on the plane and the attacks were only prevented by other means. That's one of the reasons TSA is trying to shift to machines that detect explosive chemical residue directly instead of just magnetometers, but that necessarily brings with it false positives.

I certainly think false positives can and should be handled better than what happened to OP, but you have provided no insight on how to check for guns and explosives here.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#698

Post by cranefly »

We are only getting one side of the story here. Would love to hear it from the other side. I think if one swabbed positive for explosives in a triage you could expect something like this in or out of Ramadan.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#699

Post by jcromartie »

lightcatcher wrote: post #473
sneak wrote: post #212

Do not talk to the police. Do not talk to the police. Do not talk to the police. http://youtu.be/6wXkI4t7nuc Police includes any federal agents, border patrol, CBP, et c. Do not talk to the police. You cannot talk your way out of being arrested or explain your way on to a flight. They record everything and even an accidental misstatement is a felony. You gave them address history, work configurations, business associ…

Umm, you definitely can explain your way on to a flight. When a TSA agent asks if they can search your bag, saying "yes" has always lead to me catching my flight, and I'm pretty sure saying "Let me talk to my lawyer" would lead to me missing my flight. Also when they asked if there was any reason you might have set off the bomb detectors, answering with a valid reason can definitely lead to you catching your flight.…

When they take you to a separate room, that's when you stop talking.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#700

Post by greedo »

notahacker wrote: post #541
greedo wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that authoritarianism requires competent enforcers is false. The Gestapo, the NKVD, the Stasi, the SD were all full of losers who were the mall cops and malcontents of their day. What they did have in common were a lust for power.

You miss the point. The most obvious explanation for the author's experience is that it was unpleasant because , rather than in spite of the various parties' inability to handle the situation. They were fumbling over what to do rather than lusting for power, and if anything half the problem was down to nobody having enough authority to insist that no further questions were necessary. Of course, that's only an interpr…

And you missed my point. I'm saying that it doesn't matter whether his experience is due to incompetence or malice. The fact is that his experience is not a black swan event. It's one that many, many people traveling to and from the US have to deal with. And yes, CYA is the norm in most three letter organizations, after all, no one gets fired for abusing someone.

If it's caused by malice, it's wrong and needs to be addressed. If it's caused by incompetence, it's wrong and needs to be addressed. If it happened to you, would you feel more comforted by the idea that hey, these are well-meaning but untrained and ignorant buffoons who couldn't use the common sense possessed by a housecat? Would it really matter?

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