The fact that there are even people in this thread defending this procedure is incomprehensibly disgusting.
Don't Fly During Ramadan
711–720 of 986 posts
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#712Can anyone point to a good reference explaining what your rights are and what to do if questioned and/or detained by the TSA?
I linked to Flex Your Rights[0] in the blog post. They have two great videos (both available for free on Youtube) about dealing with police encounters. Unfortunately, the TSA are not police officers, and so you don't have the same rights as you do when dealing with police officers. (Notice how the police officers refused to be present during the pat-down - I didn't mention this in the article, but the cops stepped ou…
Yes, that's a very helpful link. Will keep an eye out for a TSA-related version of this and speak with some lawyer friends.
Thanks for the excellent writeup of your experience, though I'm sorry you had to go through it in the first place. As someone who is also brown-skinned and from a Hindu family and who has been singled out for many "random" screenings, I've dreaded the chance of this sort of interrogation happening, every time I've flown since 9/11.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#713Do 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? Cops can ask for ID (which you do have to provide, sadly) and can briefly frisk you to look for weapons -- if they have reasonable suspicion to believe a crime has or is about to happen. One other thing of note and what makes thi…
> 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 (which won't work). There's no cops to call, no lawyers to call, absolutely nothing you can do. Unless you value your principles more than your time, or even your safety/life, you will compromise those principles to placate your captors.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're missing that there is a sequence of things that happens here: 1. he sets off the chemical detector 2. he is pulled aside for questioning 3. in that questioning, they discover he has a background that makes them nervous 4. they hold him for a great deal more questioning 1->2 is standard and would happen to anyone. As other people have pointed out in this thread, it generally takes 15 minutes and is no b…
I understand what you mean now. Your original statement was: They even admitted to subjecting him to additional security because of his "background". This is ambiguous and can be interpreted in more than one way. How I interpreted what you said: 1. He sets off the chemical detector 2. He is pulled aside for "additional security" You can see why I disagreed as anybody ought to be pulled aside for additional security i…
Ah, I see. Yeah, I meant, "additional" as in "above and beyond the standard reaction to setting off the detector". Sorry for the confusion.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#715Earlier 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…
All of those criteria, plus I think an extra criterion that they have to happen to so many people that it reaches some kind of tipping point where there's a mass consensus that things are authoritarian. Just to be clear, I'm not excusing the abuses you've listed.
The thing about rule law is that it's not about critical mass. It's the edge cases that are important. It's easy to have justice the majority of the time. If the state can arbitrarily subvert the rules just because they think it's really really important, that's not rule of law.
I know you're not arguing that it is, you're more talking about public opinion. I think you're probably right. But I wish that weren't the reality.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please point me to the source showing that we used them to manufacture munitions, or to the one showing me that we gassed and burned them.
Is there a reason I'm being downvoted? There are almost no parallels (beyond the most literal) between a concentration camp and an internment camp.
He is using the term "concentration camp" in the original sense of the term to mean "prison camp". What we call "Nazi Concentration Camps" were often "death camps" and/or "labor camps", but those are not what he means by "concentration camp".
"Internment Camp" is a euphemism for "concentration camp", which is itself a euphemism for "prison camp". "Concentration camp" has also come to be a euphemism for "extermination camp".
So:
Is a: | Can be called a [...] Camp
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Prison camp | Internment, Concentration
Prison camp with labor | Internment, Concentration, Labor
Extermination camp | Concentration, Extermination, Death
(Actually, IIRC some Japanese prison camps were in fact labor camps, though I think the work they did was almost entirely agricultural. No bomb-assembly to my knowledge.)
@dragonwriter suggests avoiding the terms "concentration" and "internment" entirely and only using "prison" and "extermination" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6260756). I think this is a reasonable suggestion.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
4 hour immigration lines at Heathrow are normal for the rest of Europe? Schiphol is about 30 minutes. I am never flying in to Heathrow again, if I can avoid it.
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 annoying like London was.
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#718How often does this happen and not get blogged about? If you want to help stop this from happening again, I suggest donating to the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/donate/join-renew-give
This post was unbelievably painful to write. I didn't want to relive the experience - I wanted to forget about it, but a friend of mine convinced me that I needed to let people know that these things happen, for that exact reason. That's why I wrote it.
Just wanted to let you know that as a fellow Indian, I find your experiences extremely traumatic. However, you did the right thing to raise awareness about the issue. I've written strongly worded mails to JetBlue (CEO and their CS Director). Commercial airlines cannot continue being dicks and ignore tons of complaints without affecting their profitability. I'm sure a personal apology from them will be forthcoming (with perhaps a refund for the extra payment).
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#719Earlier 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 how things worked in the Cold War. Country after country was swallowed up by the "Evil Empire." "Unpatriotic" intellectuals began declaring that something needed to be done to stop the totalitarianism. Unfortunately, by the time the masses were ready to listen to these intellectuals, it was too late. Everyone was frozen in fear and the only thing left to do was assimilate.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Doing something now is the only way to prevent things from getting worse. I just wish there was a clearly defined, nonpartisan plan to fight back (peacefully). The sooner someone can create this step-by-step plan, the sooner the masses will know what to do. It must be spelled out for them and packaged right, and maybe advertised on the Discovery channel (little joke).
Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan
#720He reliably set off the chemical detectors. We can assume that earns anyone additional scrutiny.
So the claim here seems to be that he received too much additional scrutiny because of his background. This certainly seems plausible, but he's not the first person to miss their plane due to the TSA either.
But unless we know how people of other backgrounds are scrutinized after they set off the chemical detectors are traveling alone, we can't conclude that he was racially or religiously profiled.
Even still, this is a substantially reduced claim and none of it really supports the conclusion "Don't fly during Ramadan".