Don't Fly During Ramadan • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#541

Post by notahacker » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #421

notahacker wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the pertinent detail is the fact the man set of explosive detectors. The other details, far from suggesting oppressive state apparatus, suggested an assortment of rent-a-cops and airline staff that really weren't particularly well-prepared for the guy that couldn't account for the explosives and flagged other profiling alarms without actually giving any indication of being an actual threat. If you want…

The idea that authoritarianism requires competent enforcers is false. The Gestapo, the NKVD, the Stasi, the SD were all full of losers who were the mall cops and malcontents of their day. What they did have in common were a lust for power.

You miss the point. The most obvious explanation for the author's experience is that it was unpleasant because, rather than in spite of the various parties' inability to handle the situation. They were fumbling over what to do rather than lusting for power, and if anything half the problem was down to nobody having enough authority to insist that no further questions were necessary.

Of course, that's only an interpretation, and it's possible the individuals involved gain visceral thrills from asking questions about being "somewhat religious" or "very religious" and laughing as their fellow henchmen misunderstand the concept of venture capital, and only the last vestiges of American law prevented them from responding to his request for a drink by waterboarding him. It's possible they asked ignorant questions about Hinduism and then called their crack Hindi-speaking agent as part of a cunning plan to deter non-Christians from ever flying again. It's just.... I'm sure the concept of Hanlon's razor has come up on HN a few times before?

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#542

Post by samstave » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

Am I the only person that thinks that he should have the slip of paper with the "10:40" time on it tested as the trace explosive trigger, or is that too cynical?

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#543

Post by astrobe_ » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

JshWright wrote: post #141

bayesianhorse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit, the TSA in this case didn't do racial profiling. They skipped that step, and went straight on to "rabid racism". That they apparently had no idea what a Hindu is doesn't make it one bit better.

Did you miss the fact that he triggered the explosive residue detector several times? As the article itself describes... when he skipped the pat-down (and therefore skipped the ERD), no one batted an eye at his race.

Seriously, you cannot support that level of incompetency. How many people pass airport gates everyday? How many people are caught with explosives everyday? The second pat-down should have been enough to decide that the machine was triggered by some chemical not directly related to explosives, as they were enable to find any bomb anywhere. Worse, it is very clear in the story that they know it can happen.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#544

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:12 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #460

icambron wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An FBI agent in the article: "You’ll have to understand, when a person of your… background walks into here, traveling alone, and sets off our alarms, people start to get a bit nervous. I’m sure you’ve been following what’s been going on in the news recently. You’ve got people from five different branches of government all in here - we don’t do this just for fun." That's profiling. Edit to add: in other words "The que…

What an investigator says during an investigation isn't testimonial. There isn't even any obligation that it be truthful; it's OK for investigators to lie in the hope that it'll lead the suspect to incriminate themselves. Simple example: Cop tells Joe Blow that they have a witness to the crime, and Joe Blow may as well confess. Joe Blow makes a full confession. Turns out there was no witness. Perfectly legit; what Jo…

>What an investigator says during an investigation isn't testimonial. There isn't even any obligation that it be truthful; it's OK for investigators to lie in the hope that it'll lead the suspect to incriminate themselves.

Who cares if it's legal testimony? It's still racial profiling, which is still uncool for any reason.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#545

Post by jonahx » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:14 PM UTC

dsrguru wrote: post #512

jonahx wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was detained without arrest, based on minimal suspicions. Yes, he should have shut the hell up and not answered questions. Minimal suspicions? A young male flying alone who refuses the scanner and sets of the explosives detector? Yes, he absolutely should have been cooperative and answered their questions after that. I always refuse the scanner, but I don't complain afterward that I have to answer questions and…

> And if I ever set off the explosive detector, my first reaction wouldn't be how unfair it was that "harried" employees were "rudely" explaining that my options were leaving or a private pat down. That would seem utterly reasonable to me. He was told that leaving was not one of his choices. Even after pointing out the illegality of that to the security official, he was told that if he left, he would forfeit his lugg…

> Also, having his house broken into and possibly bugged does not seem utterly reasonable to me.

Now c'mon. By treating this like fact given the evidence from the story, you are engaging in the same unjust leaps and "profiling" that people are accusing the TSA of. No one, including the author, knows what happened to his picture or if any law enforcment agency was involved in its disappearance.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#546

Post by anu_gupta » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:14 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #510

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop. Your comments here are glib, contemptuous and entirely unhelpful.

Just because I'm not hysterical about the TSA doesn't mean I can't comment here. When you travel by air, you are cramming yourself into a small metal tube with 300 other people. The other 299 people want everyone there to be checked for weapons, so the government does this. If you want to be able to travel without being screened, there are tons of options available to you. But the reality is, you have no right in the…

Genuinely hope you get hellbanned for this. If the HN moderators apply the same standards to you as they do to everyone else you should be.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#547

Post by icambron » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #460

icambron wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An FBI agent in the article: "You’ll have to understand, when a person of your… background walks into here, traveling alone, and sets off our alarms, people start to get a bit nervous. I’m sure you’ve been following what’s been going on in the news recently. You’ve got people from five different branches of government all in here - we don’t do this just for fun." That's profiling. Edit to add: in other words "The que…

What an investigator says during an investigation isn't testimonial. There isn't even any obligation that it be truthful; it's OK for investigators to lie in the hope that it'll lead the suspect to incriminate themselves. Simple example: Cop tells Joe Blow that they have a witness to the crime, and Joe Blow may as well confess. Joe Blow makes a full confession. Turns out there was no witness. Perfectly legit; what Jo…

I don't think I understand how your point applies here. The FBI agent's admission to having profiled the OP seem to be just that; I'm not sure how it could have been a ruse to get him to admit something. If we believe the story, it constitutes strong evidence that he was being profiled, and we should certainly see it that way and be outraged accordingly.

In terms of courts, I'm not sure what context we're talking about, since there are no courts involved. IANAL, but if the OP were to sue, rules about testimonial hearsay don't apply because it would be a civil case, not a criminal one. Even if it were criminal (if the OP had been arrested and was mounting a defense or the FBI agent was, I guess, arrested?), it's not obvious to me that the agent's statement qualifies, since its purpose has to be to assist the investigation. And finally, the rule that police are allowed to lie to get you to confess (as in your example) is actually separate from whether it's testimonial or not, and simply hinges on whether it's coercive. If I understand it, the testimonial hearsay rule as applied to cops lying is for when the cop says, "Oh, it's no problem; I make bombs at home too" in that it doesn't allow the defense to say, "see that cop makes bombs!" So that's all to say I don't understand what all that has to do with whether the OP was being profiled or not. Possibly I misunderstood something or have my legal facts wrong, though; can you clarify?

Edit to add: but regardless, it shouldn't change how much we're outraged at home, assuming we believe the OP's story, which I certainly do.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#548

Post by will_ » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:15 PM UTC

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.

The racist overtones are also scary.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#549

Post by timbuktwelve » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:16 PM UTC

makerops wrote: post #482

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…

I saw some random headline today, that said something along the lines of "The US is in that awkward position, where we can't fix things within the system anymore, and yet aren't far enough along to start hanging the bastards"

This is a fantastic quote...made me laugh and then sigh.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#550

Post by corresation » Thu, Aug 22, 2013, 9:16 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #499

corresation wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extended explosion swabbing -- and improved and more discrete equipment -- came about after the failed attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit in 2009 (an almost tragedy that many quickly forget). In earlier iterations of spam filters, it would simply prefix the subject with [SPAM], just as explosion detectors caught lots of things and they quickly dismissed them. As it got better it started movin…

> Of course the same thing happens with explosion detectors, where initially it picked up many similar compounds, and eventually started getting much more discrete, and the probability that it actually caught something of significance went from "not really" to "might actually be something real". Unless you've got some hard data on false positives, I don't believe it for a minute. As far as I can tell the equipment's…

I don't have hard data (the actual details are often considered confidential), but for the marketing claims of the various makers who all trumpet greater selectivity and the rejection of false positives. Which makes sense, as security is a huge, incredibly competitive industry, and these people are all competing for the world's paranoia dollars.

Because the TSA gained nothing wasting their time on this. There are the normal conspiratorial claims among the comments that someone triggered the "brown guy" button just to harass him (again, only someone who has never been near a large North American city could say such a thing), for what? What did the TSA, NYPD, FBI, and whoever else gain from this giant waste of time?

Something triggered on a molecule or taggant that they couldn't easily exclude, so they tried to help him assist them in excluding it. He couldn't, so they had to exhaust all avenues.

Unless they have countless agents and countless rooms, this isn't something they do with any regularity at all.