Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Fly During Ramadan

varnull.adityamukerjee.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

951–960 of 986 posts

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#951

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

> As I read more and more of those stories I can't help but wonder at how things changed.

People have stopped reading manuals. Bed bug spray is highly flammable. Basically it's one category below explosive...

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#952

Post by madaxe »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #924
madaxe wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and I don't think that a mass consensus is in any way relevant to determining whether something is an authoritarian regime or not. There was never a mass consensus in the USSR that it was authoritarian, because it was not permitted. When I say not permitted, I do not mean that they had people with guns going "THINK THIS!", but that social pressure and group-think were utilised to ensure that nobody broke ranks -…

So, okay, how do you determine it then? If those things listed each happened once, it wouldn't be authoritarian. (Would it?) What about twice? Three times? There has to be some threshold. I couldn't think of a better threshold than some kind of consensus, because it's essentially a value judgment. But, it's a good point about group-think. Maybe there has to be a consensus among people outside of the marginalized grou…

> Or, maybe it's more sinister than that, and we only truly recognize authoritarianism in retrospect.

Bingo, you get it. Put a frog in a pan of cold water, bring it to the boil. It'll stay there, perfectly content, until it cooks.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#954

Post by BlackDeath3 »

Sprint wrote: post #917
BlackDeath3 wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if there were some sort of dead man's switch functionality in-case phone access was denied. I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but I think it's an interesting idea.

Use GPS and cell tower tracking to determine if you are inside an airport. If you are inside for longer than X minutes, send a message to selected people stating that.

People sometimes spend much more time in airports than they'd like to for legitimate, non-interrogative reasons.

Perhaps take into account authenticated activity, or lack thereof? Activate this special functionality when you anticipate possible issues (e.g. going through airport security) and you've got a timer waiting on some element from Action Set Y to occur every X minutes before notifying emergency contact(s) Z, specified previously.

Sounds like an idea...

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#955

Post by jarek »

DannyBee wrote: post #933
jarek wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think moving within 10 days of taking a flight is an "odd" story, but I don't think any further discussion will go anywhere.

Could you at least answer who you believe they are supposed to be targeting if not people who set off explosive detectors and can't provide concrete evidence of anything they say?

Claims made by OP that had been backed up:

- "My name is ___" (ID)

- "Until two days ago I lived at NYU" (NYU ID)

- "Previously, I lived at $address" (ID)

Thousands of people in the U.S. fly without business cards or ID listing their current addresses. University students are just one obvious example. This simply isn't uncommon. If you want to target that, you might as well target retirees or snowbirds. Of course, you wouldn't, since you profile based on demographics, ethnicity, etc, in addition to merely not having a current piece of ID or a work phone number.

Explosive detector results, sure. So determine it was a false positive and let them go. It doesn't take 3.5 hours to verify a person and their bag don't have any actual explosives on them. The amount of questioning was not warranted.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#956

Post by BrandonMarc »

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…

That's quite a laundry list. Links with each would give it more effect, though.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#957

Post by fayyazkl »

things like these and also those similar to having googled words such as "pressure cooker" and "bomb" at some point on my machine in the US and being thwarted by a SWAT team at some point, really scares some one to even be in the US because he would have all the convincing signs like a beard, being a Muslim and might actually have to fast.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#958

Post by belorn »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #956
belorn wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's quite a laundry list. Links with each would give it more effect, though.

I considered it, but it would mostly distract from the otherwise very interesting discussion surrounding the definition of an an authoritarian police state.

For example, when ever someone say the word torture, there is always someone who would argue that simulated death and forcing up hoses into peoples noses to force-feed them is somehow not torture. By focusing on the general case rather than specific cases, the discussion in this thread has been of so much higher quality.

That said, if any of the statement sound surprising, I am more than happy to re-locate the source which inspired that sentence.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#959

Post by npcomplexity1 »

There is already an A/B experiment of sort being run on ability of the "chemical detectors". There are lots of airports outside of US that do not have these capabilities. If there is no statistical difference between the terrorist attack incidence directly from the said chemicals then it would be an interesting data point to add to the study of security theatre.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#960

Post by rdtsc »

pearjuice wrote: post #842
rdtsc wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has. They suspected he was somehow Muslim because ... wait for it .. he has brown skin. They suspected he was a terrorist ... because they wrongly suspected he was Muslim ... because they think most terrorist are Muslim. They suspected he was going to blow up a plane as a "celebration" or somehow connected with Ramadan.

By making those assumptions you are just as bad as them.

I didn't make the assumptions I am guessing what assumptions they made and what assumption he thinks they made about him.

Read the blog again and then my comment what show which one of those horrible assumptions I made. Those are guess of why he was profiled more than he should have been. If you look closely all the sentences start with "They suspected" not "I think he has brown skin and thus is a terrorist".

Post reply on HN