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Don't Fly During Ramadan

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Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#791

Post by beedogs »

hollerith wrote: post #660
joering2 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about... " It is too expensive and inefficient to follow everyone personally. You can instead shoot a satellite in the space that each second takes high-definition infrared photos of Earth and can pinpoint/track/identify each person by their uniquely located veins/blood packets on their shoulders. See? Khazakhstan v.…

The URL does not support any of the assertions in your comment.

FYI, drivebyacct2: you've been hellbanned for some reason as well. I looked through your comment history and have no idea why. Just thought you might want to know, as it looks like it happened 2 months ago.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#792

Post by kylebrown »

Cryode wrote: post #770
baddox wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not try to talk your way out of anything. And you do NOT have to and should not answer any questions from law enforcement or the TSA. Ask repeatedly: Am I being detained? Am I free to go? Unfortunately, this is a pipe dream. At that point, they can do whatever they want to you . Legally? Probably not. But they can still do it, because there is simply nothing you can do except try to fight or escape physically (w…

And when do we finally decide that those principles are worth fighting for? When do we decide that "absolutely nothing you can do" is unacceptable?

Of course you should fight for your principles, but don't do it in a situation where you're guaranteed to lose. To pick a losing fight when there's no attention, no context, and no message, is not martyrdom. Its just dumb.

To create a Rosa Parks moment, it takes a lot of strategy, planning, and cooperation. Not spur-of-the-moment frustration.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#793

Post by beedogs »

msrpotus wrote: post #279
amirmc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about... " The thing is, they don't need to follow you around the same way as in the 'old days' because, like many things, modern technology makes it easier and more efficient. The tyranny of the future isn't going to be like that of the past. That makes it difficult to explain the dangers to people.

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.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. but at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#794

Post by jellicle »

vecinu wrote: post #524
jellicle wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explosive detectors give false positives all the time. Any kind of lotion or hand soap contains glycerin - beep! Any kind of preserved meat product contains nitrates - beep! Fertilizer? Beep! Fireworks? Beep! Heart medication? Beep! The tests they use are intentionally cheap and fast. Accuracy is not the primary criteria. For white people you get an extra 30 second pat down. For brown people you get detained and…

You don't think the tests are cheap and fast to allow waiting lines to move faster and to save money? Everything would move much slower if you had to wait 5 minutes in an 'expensive and slow' device.

I agree with you entirely - that's the correct kind of test to employ. My point is that getting a positive on such a test doesn't give you grounds to believe someone has handled explosives. Out of every 1000 positives provided by such a test, approximately 1000 are false positives, give or take 1.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#795

Post by jellicle »

mpyne wrote: post #697
jellicle wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 posi…

Do they also have magic bombs that are invisible and intangible? If not, hands and eyes will do a good job of finding such things.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#796

Post by downandout »

Whether it's the NSA or the TSA, the American public is finally getting a glimpse at how shockingly little freedom our laws actually afford us. For every protection we think we have, there is a gaping exception that can be invoked by virtually any government employee that feels like it. The US government of 2013 essentially can and will do anything it wants, when it wants, with very little resistance from the courts, the public, or politicians. Sadly, I'm not sure that the political will exists to fix any of it.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#797

Post by acdha »

cenhyperion wrote: post #439
jrockway wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the bus? Drive?

Have you driven near the border? Driving through west Texas I was met by stop and go traffic for 5 miles. Middle of the desert. I kept driving and realized border patrol had blocked the interstate and was diverting traffic through a checkpoint. Hundreds of cameras and drug dogs everywhere. I drove up and the agent asked me if I'm a US citizen. Then I was free to go. It's not that simple. It's very very hard to travel…

Try driving from San Diego to Los Angeles: there are permanent checkpoints a solid hour's drive from the border — and quite a few non-white residents complain about getting unpleasant levels of attention.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#798

Post by seanmcdirmid »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #717
gsnedders wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 hour? Wow. Longest I've ever had at Heathrow Terminal 5 was 15 minutes or so (it's been a decade or more since I last went to any other Heathrow terminal) — and I fly through both there and Amsterdam a fair bit. Typically quicker than Amsterdam, in my experience.

What terminal do you fly into? T4 is quite bad since it seems to handle all the flights from Asia. It really was 4 hours, but this was also before the Olympics while they were also busy doing renovations. If you are European, the experience is obviously faster (different lines), though being American doesn't seem to help. Schiphol was still 30+ minutes (was in line behind a flight from...Iran), but not incredibly ann…

I should google first:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2012/04/immigration-...

I don't know if they've fixed the problem, but its permanently soured me on flying into England.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#799

Post by foobarbazqux »

smokeyj wrote: post #789
foobarbazqux wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All governments demand obedience. That's why they have a monopoly on violence. Any entity which wields a monopoly on violence for the purpose of controlling the actions of others is authoritarian in nature. I can't imagine what you mean by "perfect rule of law", but I do know it isn't the antithesis of authoritarianism. The opposite of strict obedience to authority is no obedience to authority -- meaning no hierarchy…

That's a good point about anarchy. Although anarchy and authoritarianism are opposites, they behave in very similar ways: the people with power call the shots as they please. In the middle, you could say we have perfect rule of law. This means that no officials act as if they are above the law, and that every moral injustice is handled by some law or another. Clearly we'll never have that.

So the first continuum I proposed is actually one half of the continuum between anarchy and authoritarianism.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#800

Post by beedogs »

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…

> 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 questions and they let him go.

They also broke into his apartment while doing that, and detained him for the better part of a day with no real probable cause other than "this machine said something".

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