81–90 of 262 posts
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That's excellent advice to those who live elsewhere, but there are hundreds of millions of people who cannot possibly follow your advice.
Luckily it's only ~4.5% of the world's population.
What percentage of flights actually have the US as part of their journey would be a better measurement.
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It's also important to note that you consent to the search by choosing to travel by air in the United States.
If someone feels that they can tell me what I consent to, they do not understand the meaning of the word consent.
Tangentially - the thing that most surprised me about this article was reading that over 150,000 Americans have been murdered in less than a decade. I find that number utterly staggering. Wikipedia says that the homicide rate in the US is 4.2 per 100,000, which is more than 2.5 times the rate in Canada and 3.5 times the rate in the UK.
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No they're not. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld an exemption for searches in the context of airport security under the doctrine of administrative searches, where the state's legitimate interest overrides the cost (to individuals) of the search, and where no one person is singled out by the searches. Your argument doesn't even follow logically, as all the 4th Amendment requires is that searches be "reasonable"…
I'm very specifically talking about custody searches, not pat-downs or "enhanced pat-downs" (an imaginary term created by the TSA's marketing team). Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no Supreme court ruling on the constitutionality of any of these techniques in the context of airport security. I'm glad to be proven wrong. The most relevant ruling I know of was from a half century ago and it wasn't t…
The fact of the matter is that it's SCOTUS that sets the standards here, not the Constitution.
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The United States is very large, and the homicide rate varies wildly between states and cities. Where I live, Oregon, the homicide rate is 2.1 per 100,000 people, a little bit better than Finland as a whole. Hawaii is at 1.2, New Hampshire and Vermont are at 1.3, and Minnesota is at 1.4. Contrast those with Louisiana at 11.2 per 100,000 people (!), Mississippi at 8.0, New Mexico at 7.5, and South Carolina at 6.8. It'…
I find it interesting when Americans don't want America as a whole to be compared to other countries as a whole, because inevitably it makes for an unfavorable comparison. Of course looking at a country-wide statistic is an average across the whole country - that's the entire point. I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could find a part of Oregon where the homicide rate is 0.1, but that doesn't tell us much about th…
Norway is 5 million people.
Sweden is 9.5 million people.
Michigan is 9.8 million people.
California is 37.6 million people.
New York is 19.4 million people
Germany is 81.7 million people.
Please keep scale in mind.
Hear. Hear. I want to be able to walk into an airport with my shoes on and walk calmly to an arrival gate to greet arriving passengers there. And I want to be able to carry a Swiss Army knife in an airline carry-on bag. And I want the terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live, so that they have to hide in caves and ride on goats, while Americans and other people in developed countries get to lead civiliz…
This implies enthusiastic support of constant US intervention in foreign lands. Maybe that's not what you meant, but I'm guessing it's what people are reacting to.
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What's the point of a right if it can be violated where you most need it?
Then don't fucking fly. Seriously, you guys make it sound the TSA breaks into your homes and strips you. Yes, I disagree with a lot of their policies but this "Ron Paul" attitude of "the federal government actually has no power if you listen to my absurd interpretation of the constitution" isn't helping either. Its making my legitimate grievances sound lumped in with your extremist interpretations. You can have sane…
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The United States is very large, and the homicide rate varies wildly between states and cities. Where I live, Oregon, the homicide rate is 2.1 per 100,000 people, a little bit better than Finland as a whole. Hawaii is at 1.2, New Hampshire and Vermont are at 1.3, and Minnesota is at 1.4. Contrast those with Louisiana at 11.2 per 100,000 people (!), Mississippi at 8.0, New Mexico at 7.5, and South Carolina at 6.8. It'…
I find it interesting when Americans don't want America as a whole to be compared to other countries as a whole, because inevitably it makes for an unfavorable comparison. Of course looking at a country-wide statistic is an average across the whole country - that's the entire point. I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could find a part of Oregon where the homicide rate is 0.1, but that doesn't tell us much about th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also important to note that you consent to the search by choosing to travel by air in the United States.
I remember that consent/voluntarism being important to the lawfulness of airport searches, but I thought the big two elements of administrative search were (1) searches not being intended to collect evidence for criminal investigations and (2) officers not having discretion as to who to search.
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> I understand the situation is different if you really want your carry-on bag to stow above you. Or in the cabin. If you're the last to board, there's a very real possibility that they may have to gate-check your bag, which adds additional wait time at the end of your journey at best, and your bag arriving in Minnesota while you're touching down in Dallas at worst.
Which, of course, has become much more of a problem since the airlines started charging for checked bags/IRS made baggage fees tax-exempt. "...amounts paid for baggage services (such as Service G) are not subject to the tax" [ http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/1002004.pdf ]