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Don't Fly During Ramadan

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Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#721

Post by khaylindris »

"Oh Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain..."

What has happened to my beautiful country? The one that I learned about in 2nd grade, the one that always gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling, the one that I was proud of even before I knew what 'proud' meant. Where is that dreamy land?

In a way, we do it to ourselves. We elect officials that are 'tough on crime' that support enormous police forces. We empower the police state (not just the police but the gov't at large) out of fear. People in this country need to grow a pair. One of my friends actually said something to the effect of, "No, I don't care if the NSA searches through my private stuff, so long as it makes me safer." Mr. Franklin would've had a word with that young lady. Unfortunately that sentiment prevails a large number of people.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#722

Post by ChuckMcM »

I realized on the drive home that if we could sneak a sed script into the tools used to write appropriation bills in Congress, and had it swap budget allocation for NSA and NASA (only one letter difference!) next year we could be looking at half a dozen space stations and a base on the moon!

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#723

Post by rusabd »

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…

I was in Kazakhstan recently. I am Muslim, religious, have beard etc... I had interview with nice КНБ (http://www.knb.kz/) agent right after customs. It was about 1 minute after which I was free to go. Nothing like experience described here.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#724

Post by foobarbazqux »

nohuck13 wrote: post #715
foobarbazqux wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those criteria, plus I think an extra criterion that they have to happen to so many people that it reaches some kind of tipping point where there's a mass consensus that things are authoritarian. Just to be clear, I'm not excusing the abuses you've listed.

The thing about rule law is that it's not about critical mass. It's the edge cases that are important. It's easy to have justice the majority of the time. If the state can arbitrarily subvert the rules just because they think it's really really important, that's not rule of law. I know you're not arguing that it is, you're more talking about public opinion. I think you're probably right. But I wish that weren't the r…

Well, perhaps we can see things on a line from perfect rule of law to perfect authoritarianism, with the understanding that no state is ever completely at one end or the other. I think we're still less than half way to authoritarianism.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#725

Post by jarek »

ctdonath wrote: post #344
fennecfoxen wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bit that got me as incontrovertibly hilariously-stupid was... they got all upset that he hadn't identified to them that he'd checked some baggage. If the guy is an adversary, you can't rely on him to bring that fact to your attention. If the guy isn't an adversary, his failure to identify it is (by definition) innocent in nature. In neither sense does harassing the guy about it make sense.

You think that was a stupid mistake? Probably a deliberate documented procedure: throw the person off-balance with some unexpected "stupid" weirdness. "You told the border guard you're entering the country to work." "What? No! I never said that! I'm entering to marry my fiancé!" "I'm here because of the MBA conference." "NBA? We didn't know there was a basketball event in this building." Yeah, I've seen it a number o…

My favourite was a CBP asking me "what do you do for work" (lovely unspecific question, that) then pretending to get upset with me for not telling him I was unemployed at the moment. I resisted telling him I personally don't consider unemployment a career...

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#726

Post by ferdo »

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…

> the US is nowhere near being an authoritarian police state.

The US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet and perhaps in history. I'd say we're there.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#727

Post by icambron »

mpyne wrote: post #695
icambron wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

I don't think that's true. Remember that the test doesn't actually detect bombs. It detects certain chemicals. Now, sometimes it might just randomly report a false positive and then you'd expect it not to trigger the second time. But some of the chemicals it is built to detect can be found in everyday products, such as hair products, soaps, some medications, and--as I learned today--bug spray. And so for those chemicals, it's going trigger repeatedly because the chemical it's looking for really is there. So that second failure mode is actually pretty common, and so even when that happens, it's normal to take the person into a side room, search them more throughly, talk to them for a few minutes, and send them on their way. What we see here is quite different.

Which leads us to the real reason, which you wrote:

> 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.

That's precisely profiling: "the bad guys have profile x and you fit profile x, so we think you are suspicious" where x isn't inherently suspicious. It sounds like you're saying, "profiling isn't such a bad idea", which I strongly disagree with, but I suppose that's a different discussion.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#728

Post by enneff »

hyperbovine wrote: post #649
nrivadeneira wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you really experience it (as in, you were in NYC at the time) or were you just a casual observer?

I don't think it was necessary to be in NYC at the time to have been deeply affected by 9/11, but no matter: I, the guy who wrote this article, and 310m other non-NYC Americans still have to live under the draconian post-9/11 regime, regardless of where we were on that day. Also, "casual observer"? Really?

> Also, "casual observer"? Really?

Yes, really. Shit happens around the world all the time. Just because your media and government tried to make all Americans feel like they were under attack, these were isolated incidents that affected few Americans. (In fact, the people most affected are the countless innocent civilians murdered by reactionary war in the middle east.)

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#729

Post by spc476 »

jrockway wrote: post #578
jessaustin wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't understand why everyone is so outraged that I don't think the US is a police state. "Airport security is horrible", so I say to take the train. Have you ever taken the train? The security is not that bad. But instead, I get downvoted to -4 and people accuse me of having a stroke. 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.

I no longer fly since the TSA started. I have also looked into taking the train, once from Ft. Lauderdale (where I live, close enough) to Las Vegas (where some friends of mine live). To say the results were amusing is an understatement.

First, it was easily three times the cost of a round-trip ticket. Okay, I'm willing to pay. Second, we're talking about four or five days worth of travel, which, again, might be okay, except that I end up at Salt Lake City (yeah, that far north) on a bus headed south to Las Vegas.

So much for a train to Las Vegas.

Okay, how about Seattle? The company I work for (in Ft. Lauderdale) is headquartered in Seattle. That was an easy $2,000 train ticket taking a week to travel one way.

If I wanted to take the train to Washington, D.C.? No problem there. Same with a train to New York, New York. Boston. In fact, if you are somewhere along the east coast of the US and want to head to the major northeast cities, you will probably have no issues taking the train. Elsewhere? Probably not.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#730

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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