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Don't Fly During Ramadan

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Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#731

Post by mindslight »

greedo wrote: post #706
mindslight wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an emotional argument to soothe their conscience by asserting that there was a legitimate reason for this to happen. If you want to see a major part of why the TSA is still molesting, you don't have to go searching for mythical sheeple in far away states - just look at a third of the comments in this thread.

As much as I agree with your first sentence, I find your second offensive with the use of "sheeple." It's a tired perjorative that makes you look like you belong on some tinfoil covered forum.

Eh, that's why I prefixed it with 'mythical'. There isn't one large group of clueless people that need to receive a message - it's that propaganda is so incessant that for every topic, it overloads a significant fraction of critical thinkers and tricks them into supporting that broken system because they crave simplicity.

Also, I had a tinfoil covered basement once. It was pretty sweet.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#732

Post by jarek »

DannyBee wrote: post #338
goostavos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've set off the explosion detector before. I didn't receive anything like what OP did. And honestly, I chalk up a decent amount of that up to having the good luck of being white. I did get pulled into a separate area, and treated like criminal. Two agents stood by me the entire time while another one gave me another pat down. They opened up my backpack and rifled through everything (which was, I think, the most offe…

"I don't think his treatment was in any way justified by setting off an explosive materials detector." He set it off multiple times. It is likely you didn't. He could not provide current id, anything that showed his current address, anything to prove any part of his story, etc. Any attempt to prove any part of his story was met with no available info. His answers were plausible, but again, there was simply nothing co…

"id" means identification. Your identity doesn't change just because you move. He had "id" just fine. It just didn't have his two-day-old address on it.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#733

Post by einhverfr »

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 and all these other sorts of issues.

That's the NSA's job, or so they think....

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#734

Post by jlgreco »

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…

> 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.

Well yes, I would. Some false positives can be transient, others are not. If I just came from the shooting range I would not be surprised if I got a non-transient false-positive. Now that is an obvious case and I would immediately tell them that I had been to the shooting range, likely resolving the issue, but it is just a simple example of a false positive that is not transient.

How common is a non-transient false-positive where the victim doesn't immediately have a good idea what the cause is? Well, there are several reports from HN users in this thread that describe situations in which it could allegedly occur. One cites hand lotion as a potential cause of non-transient false-positives; luckily for his wife the agents volunteered that hypothesis so she wasn't left guessing. The author of the article supposes that an over-the-counter chemical was the cause of his non-transient false positive; it's not like he was a lab tech working with synthesized stuff that nobody else ever comes into contact with.

Unless the machines are shit (a distinct possibility), I would expect transient false-positives to be relatively infrequent while non-transient false-positives would be reliably and regularly caused by a wide range of substances that share chemical properties with known explosives.

Most of these non-transient false positives are likely quickly resolved without much ado. His was not.

Edit:

Perhaps the real problem here is with the terminology. These machines are not really bomb detectors, or even explosive detectors. They are chemical detectors. Calling them bomb or explosive detectors is like calling a metal detector a "gun detector". Sure, finding those things may be why it is there, but that is not actually what it does.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#735

Post by krelian »

belorn wrote: post #677
jwr wrote: post #177

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. And she is right — the US is nowhere near being an authoritarian police state. But it i…

If the US is nowhere near being an authoritarian police state, at what point will US become a authoritarian police state? When they have kill lists without any trial, jury or judge? When they keep prisoners in jail indefinitely without a trial? When they torture prisoners? When state officials lie to the public? When state officials lie to public representatives? When the secret police interfere with lawyers communic…

When we can longer have this discussion, either because access to the means that make it possible has been barred from us or because the risk is too great.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#736

Post by throwawaykf »

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.

Just because you didn't find explosives on them doesn't mean there are no explosives. It could also mean they set them elsewhere and are now at the airport to make a getaway, like the guy who set up that unsuccessful car bomb attempt in Times Square.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#737

Post by enneff »

pmorici wrote: post #386

"Ironically, when I went to the other terminal, I was able to get through security (by walking through the millimeter wave machines) with no problem." Why go through all of that only to give into the body scanners!

Presumably at that point he just wanted to get on with his trip.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#738

Post by bobsil1 »

marccuban wrote: post #404

This article has very little to do with Ramadan...Muslims don't fly more often during Ramadan than the rest of the year, do they? 9/11 didn't happen during Ramadan. Take a look at this objectively. A brown guy, traveling alone, tested positive for explosive residue while going through a TSA checkpoint. After some brief questioning, they determined that there was a 99% chance that he wasn't a terrorist. How stupid wou…

"Traveling alone" = half the business travelers at the airport. "Brown" = most of the world. "Explosive residue" = hand lotion or bug spray. "Brief questioning" = 4 hours, ticket canceled, $700 new ticket cost and apartment search.

This is racial profiling, straight up, and ineffective security. How about you go through this and tell me it's all good.

I (of brown skin) was once taken aside INSIDE a jetway, after clearing all security, and quizzed: how much cash was I carrying? Where did I go to school? And this bizarre national origin totem: who won the World Series last year? I'd have had a better chance of telling them what RSA stood for or who Stallman was than baseball.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#740

Post by einhverfr »

will_ wrote: post #548
msrpotus wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the scariest parts of this is that it seems like surveillance (if not censorship) is much more targeted. If you aren't the NSA's focus or on a TSA watch list, you might not know anything is going on. But if you are unlucky enough to trigger something, you might be visited with unimaginable torment like @chimeracoder was.

The racist overtones are also scary.

Actually I found two things very scary.

1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim?

2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.

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