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Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

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Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#191

Post by weland »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #182
weland wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things you get when you have a horde of untrained, uptight civilians dressed in uniforms is an incredibly unprofessional behaviour from someone who is supposed to do law enforcement. The agents did several things that escalated the whole deal, things which a cadet would have immediately understood. To quote just a few: > These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testi…

This is brilliant. Can we clone you to restaff the TSA?

Thanks :-). Restaffing the TSA may not be necessary though -- not radically; there seems to be a problem with the culture there and with how performance is measured. That's systemic and comes from higher in the hierarchy.

Specifically, I think good directions would be:

1. Driving away the "law enforcement" culture. Are members of the TSA staff registered as policemen, assigned to a station, going through police academy and under the rules and discipline of police training? If not, they aren't law enforcement and shouldn't be treated as such, and should either a) be disallowed from conducting any kind of search without the supervision of a policeman or b) covered by the same regulation as a regular policeman. You can't have people do police stuff with non-police discipline, eschewing the checks and balances law enforcement has in order to make sure it enforces, you know, the law.

2. Providing immediate legal counseling as soon as you step into a private room. Large crowds tend to be a good protection against abuse. Once you step into a room, anything more than searching through personal items should be covered by a lawyer, and people should particularly only be questioned only in the presence of a lawyer. This is because a) the lawyer would be able to assert the rights of the person being questioned and b) the lawyer would be able to explain what's happening in layman's terms. When a particularly uptight ex-postal employee who just discovered authority exceeds gets nasty, a third-party reminding him he's stepping outside the law works much better than the person on the receiving end of his newly-discovered authority asserting his rights -- risking to be regarded as "aggressive" and "overly-assertive" by someone whose most important previous responsibility had been making sure stamps are correctly positioned on the envelope.

3. Explicitly encouraging and rewarding correct behaviour from TSA personnel, while at the same time applying serious disciplinary action. Let's be honest here, there's a large enough supply of unemployed people who can search a bag that you can afford discharging abusers, and sufficient public frustration that you can afford offering the occasional bonus to people who go out of their way to clear up misunderstandings.

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#192

Post by iopq »

arjie wrote: post #82

Very often, on social networking sites, we hear the pieces of contradictory advice "don't talk to the police", "be polite and considerate to the police", and "assert your rights". These are pair-wise contradictory: 1. Don't talk to the police: You are being impolite, and you will be unable to assert your rights. 2. Be polite: Obviously violates "don't talk..." but also if you say, even politely, that you refuse certa…

You would be surprised, but if you're going slower than 85% of the traffic on average, you are not violating the speed limit.

Even if the sign says 30 mph, if the 85th percentile is 36 mph, they cannot post a lower speed limit than 35 mph unless there are hidden hazards. Furthermore, if the survey has not been done in the last 7 years, even if they give you the ticket you can contest it because there can not be a speed limit on a road that hasn't been surveyed recently.

That's how it is here in California, anyway.

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#193

Post by smsm42 »

throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #149
etchalon wrote: post #105

I'm glad to see this posted, if only to provide another perspective. What's most interesting to me is this line: "However on any given day, the TSA and Port Authority Police at JFK interact with passengers departing on non-stop flights to and from Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Lagos, Istanbul, Jeddah, Riyadh, Casablanca, Amman, Riga and Tashkent." Mukerjee’s entire account, and virality, is predicated upon imp…

That line also interested me: why did the the author seemingly think Riga (Latvia) is in the Islamic world? (Possible answer: JFK-Riga is operated by an Uzbek airline. Which is a question of its own.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_International_...

Thought the same thing. However, assuming if it's Uzbek airline then people flying it to Riga must be Muslims sounds strange. I'm sure there are some Muslims in Riga, but so are in any other random major city.

I just assume whoever wrote this article had little idea of what Riga is and didn't care to check.

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#194

Post by smsm42 »

etchalon wrote: post #105

I'm glad to see this posted, if only to provide another perspective. What's most interesting to me is this line: "However on any given day, the TSA and Port Authority Police at JFK interact with passengers departing on non-stop flights to and from Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Lagos, Istanbul, Jeddah, Riyadh, Casablanca, Amman, Riga and Tashkent." Mukerjee’s entire account, and virality, is predicated upon imp…

The agents should be trained not only to look for something, but to handle false positives - which given how few terrorists are out there would be the vast majority of cases they will ever encounter. Moreover, for a random TSA agent false positives are probably all he'd ever encounter. Unlike the police, TSA deals in vastly overwhelming majority with innocent people who they are meant to protect, not harass. They are trained to look for very rare exceptions, but they must know these exceptions are very rare and most their suspicions will be proven unfounded.

They have completely and miserably failed at that. They wasted a lot of time on abusing clearly innocent man, whose innocence could be established much faster with much less inconvenience and much less waste of time.

>>> not because Mukerjee is even remotely worth being up in arms about

Tell me please, why abuse of a citizen is not worth being up in arms about? What makes one worth the concern about being abused?

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#195

Post by smsm42 »

etchalon wrote: post #158
vidarh wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible, likely even, but the extremely antagonistic way the article was written gives it pretty much zero credibility. Especially with nitpicking like pointing out it was Port Authority police rather than NYPD - it was an irrelevant correction, as the point is he likely saw shields, and most people would have no clue about that kind of distinction and would simply assume NYPD, given that it is one of the best…

The Port Authority vs. the NYPD is not an irrelevant correction. It's two completely different government enforcement agencies, with two completely different jobs, one of which is to actually care about what goes down at the airport. The PA's presence isn't weird. The NYPD's would have been.

It's not like law enforcement agencies ever cooperated or gave tips to each other, or participated in joint activities. It's not like we just recently learned that NSA gives tips to DEA and IRS and then the latter lie to judges about where the info came from.

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#196

Post by prawn »

etchalon wrote: post #116
prawn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't want to let his laptop out of his sight. I'd behave the same way given how important my work/data is to me.

Which is completely reasonable. But the fact their guidelines require his bag to be cleared before he could have it back does not mean he was "detained". There are some pretty goddamn good reasons why the bag of a dude who tests positive for explosives has to be cleared before he's given it and allowed to run around an airport full of people.

Wasn't he running around with his bag in that airport full of people before he got to the security check?

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#198

Post by [deleted] »

etchalon wrote: post #158
vidarh wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible, likely even, but the extremely antagonistic way the article was written gives it pretty much zero credibility. Especially with nitpicking like pointing out it was Port Authority police rather than NYPD - it was an irrelevant correction, as the point is he likely saw shields, and most people would have no clue about that kind of distinction and would simply assume NYPD, given that it is one of the best…

The Port Authority vs. the NYPD is not an irrelevant correction. It's two completely different government enforcement agencies, with two completely different jobs, one of which is to actually care about what goes down at the airport. The PA's presence isn't weird. The NYPD's would have been.

[deleted]

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#199

Post by Zigurd »

slg wrote: post #10

I know it won't happen, but I wish this blog post would go as viral as the original. Not that I accept this post as the complete truth, but because people deserve to hear two sides of the story. Often times all people will hear is the accusations of something like this and accept it as fact and the eventual acquittals (or explanations) never get as much publicity. Like Mark Twain said "A lie can travel half way aroun…

This blog entry is a example of how cheaply one can buy sycophants. Someday he will write about how lovely his bottom bunk at the reeducation camp was.

EDIT: Oh man. After a bit of searching, it looks like Steven Frischling is exactly the man to represent the TSA's position. He was born to the task.

Re: Did The TSA and JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? No

#200

Post by xtracto »

cup wrote: post #11

This reeks of the most cowardly pandering to proto fascist mission creep I've read in a long time. I mean take these key quotes for instance: >Mr. Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO) >Mr. Mukerjee became verbally aggressive >Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually…

> Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO) while in line for what appeared to be unusual behaviours. As the official Incident Report makes no mention of the BDO’s involvement it is impossible to assess what caught the Officer’s attention, but the TSA source indicates Mr. Mukerjee was already on someone’s radar before he chose to opt-out.

As a Mexican, I laughed loud after reading this:

BDO Officer thinks: "Mhmm.. that guy on the line is behaving brown, better check him out".

Every "brown" (Mexican, middle-easter, Indi or person with similar color) can confirm how they get "randomly selected" in a lot of checkpoints.

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