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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

#201

Post by xtracto »

Yver wrote: post #3

> Mr. Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO) while in line for what appeared to be unusual behaviours. Well I'm sold. Serves you right for looking suspicious in front of the Looking-suspicious Detection Officer!

As I put in another comment... I can believe that the BDO thought "That guy over there is behaving brown", which made him check him.

That's the problem with USA security, against say the one in Europe or the middle east (I think Israel has very good trained anti-terrorist immigration officers): In these other countries, there are a lot of darkish-skin people, so they really have to learn how to profile someone who is up to something. In the USA? I guess the majority of time they just use the skin color... and that's why they get a lot of false positive, and /very/ annoyed people.

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

#202

Post by maxerickson »

mintplant wrote: post #111
InclinedPlane wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extraordinarily shitty excuse.

Oh come on . > These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag. > However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it. > While false positives are not unusual for ETD, it is unusual a person and thei…

You should be careful and say that lives may be at stake. Even if we had a much improved system, the vast majority of closer examinations would be of innocent people. Actually, I guess the false positive rate goes up with the effectiveness for quite a while.

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

#203

Post by reso »

lesserknowndan wrote: post #140
reso wrote: post #29

Airport security is frequently humiliating. I myself have been nearly reduced to tears just by customs agents when crossing the border on business. However, this man set off a bomb detector. He set of the machine that detects bombs, repeatedly. After that event, nothing Mr. Mukerjee reported is particularly surprising, and I would expect to have a similar experience if I set off the same detector. I don't believe his…

Regardless of what chemical detectors he set off, and what suspicions they had, it was disgraceful that he was "detained" for such a long period without being provided with food and water. Do you really think it is appropriate that such interrogation techniques are used on travellers after they have been cleared of carrying any sort of explosive device?

No, the refusal of water is clearly inappropriate in this case.

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

#204

Post by etchalon »

smsm42 wrote: post #194
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 ar…

Because the "abuse" in this case was utterly reasonable given the circumstances and the person's behavior.

This is pretty rare for the TSA (the number of stories where they had no cause to be idiots is much MUCH higher than cases where they did).

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

#205

Post by rdtsc »

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.

Right, because your stomach and head really care if they are hurting when you are held up in a room by Port Authority vs NYPD. They looked like police officers vs TSA officers.

The point remains that dissecting the blog on that level just reveals Fish for a piece of crap he is taking money to publish whatever they gave him.

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

#206

Post by MrMan »

molecule wrote: post #23

whether it was blogged about or not, it seems like this author obtaining and reporting so much internal detail about this incident is an incident unto itself. also, his shilling herein for TSA and Jet Blue smells like a conflict of interest: Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is... airline emerging media consultant working with large global airlines...

Frischling's credibility is way below zero. He almost surely fabricated all the details about his TSA sources.

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

#207

Post by T-hawk »

mindslight wrote: post #41
tokenadult wrote: post #13

This is gripping reading for me, because "Mr. Mukerjee" is someone I know by first name, indeed nickname, even though I have never met him. (He was my son's roommate for most of the last year, and was the crucial connection for my son getting his job in New York City.) I appreciate seeing someone else's perspective on the incident that has appalled all my Facebook friends who have seen Mr. Mukerjee's own account http…

> Asserting my rights is not something the system makes easy to do, EVEN FOR A LAWYER, once the situational triggers of law-enforcement occur Since it's apparently impossible to prevent the abuse of our rights, it seems the simplest remedy is easy-to-claim compensation after the fact, right out of the department's budget. Unjustly detained for 3 hours? That's a payment of say $500 (professional hourly rate plus extra…

That's a perspicacious line of thinking, but beware of perverse incentives. You've now created a market where people can try to get themselves unjustly detained and distressed in order to collect that payout. Money always attracts parasites.

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

#208

Post by T-hawk »

smsm42 wrote: post #190
unreal37 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine 100 years ago, before terrorism, before the TSA, before the NSA snooped on our phone calls or Hacker News posts, before all of this... I imagine there was a guy who wanted to do something, got stopped by police for a couple of questions, and got agitated by the hassle and it turned into something bigger. Now 100 years ago, that guy couldn't write a blog post about it and get worldwide attention. But then ag…

He tested positive for some chemicals that produce false positive on TSA explosives test, not for explosives. As the original article admits, this is a common occurrence. However, it became very clear very soon that he actually does not have any explosives on him. What were they doing once that was clear?

They were trying to catch him for anything they could imagine. Maybe he was the next marathon bomber, coming from a laboratory session. They'd be national heroes, or at the very least they'd make damn damn sure that nobody's ass could be on the line for letting the next marathon bomber slip through TSA.

(What? TSA's job isn't to protect marathons? Silly patriot, do you want to let the terrorists win?)

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

#209

Post by ryan-c »

weland wrote: post #162
mintplant wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on . > These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag. > However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it. > While false positives are not unusual for ETD, it is unusual a person and thei…

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…

I believe that current TSA policy is to allow the traveler to be able to see their belongings at all times, and if they search it search it in front of the traveler.

From what I can tell this has even been emphasized lately, now when I opt out at SFO they have me bin my stuff and wait until they are ready to pat me down before running it through the x-ray. Once it has been x-rayed they put my belongings where I can see them (but are quite clear that I shouldn't reach for them) while they do the pat down.

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

#210

Post by glenra »

A "highly agitated demeanor" is EXTREMELY APPROPRIATE when TSA goons have denied you food and water and you're late to board a flight and these nitwits are preventing you from traveling to meet your family for no reason other than a hunch and a false-positive test reading on a test that's not worth doing. (My bags also often generate a positive result on these tests - the chance of a positive result being meaningful is so vanishingly small as to make the test pointless - it's security theater.)

Near as I can tell, this post confirms the original account. The differences between what he saw and what is being reported are trivial minutia. But if anyone actually cares to be able to find the truth in such cases, the thing to do is record all such searches. (And encourage the people being searched to do the same, and make the official tapes available to the searchee on request.)

It is REALLY HARD to defend one's rights against the morons of the TSA without getting angry at them. Any interaction with them raises blood pressure. If anything, it ought to be deemed "suspicious" if somebody doesn't get "agitated" when their trip is pointlessly interrupted by TSA agents demanding you bow and scrape before their authority.

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