TSA detains a student for having Arabic flash cards
articles.latimes.com
articles.latimes.com
This isn't an isolated incident. My sister-in-law has to deal with this crap every time she flies. What makes her suspicious? She's black. That's it. She's beautiful, fashionable, and extremely educated. She'd get a free pass if she was white, but instead she gets frisked. Every. Goddamned. Time.
Talk to anybody with an arabic last name, or dark skin. These kinds of abuses are absurdly common. God help you if you're a Sikh that wears a turban, you might as well write off air travel. The stress is amazing.
This is the kind of bullshit that makes us less free, and less healthy as a society. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't make us any safer. Hopefully, Mr. George's case will get enough press attention that some changes get made.
To be fair, the employees who do the searching are actually fairly efficient, and usually pleasant. But it is still annoying.
Racism, not so much.
Yeah, I see this too when travelling with a friend born in Egypt. They must be using some weird random distribution... where they get picked way more frequently than others.
Also, I heard phrases like 'you two go through you are obviously english' from a security guard at gatwick in london. (terrible airport by the way... terminal 5 all the way!)
Of course you do not want to kick up a fuss or comment, because you might miss your plane or not be let out/into a country. It's always good to just be free and easy with authority like that. No need to ruin your week/month really.
I do respect people who stand up to them, and hold them up to law. It's people like the man in the article that make it better for all of us.
The security guards are often not very well educated, so I imagine more of them would be racist. The question should be, is this part of the process or part of the individual security guards being bad?
My 90+ year old grandmother got a body cavity search in rome italy. This is a sweet, friendly old lady going to see some religious things. I don't hold much respect for air port security... I think there are a bunch of bad apples in there abusing their power. There are mostly nice ones I must say... just some really rotten ones given power spoil it I think.
Of course, most people will hand-wave all this away because everyone knows that terrorists are Arabic so everyone that is Arabic, says the word 'Arab', or just looks Arabic (e.g. an Indian person in a turban) should be under suspicion or just outright shot in the head for the greater good. Because it's physically and mentally impossible for a terrorist to be non-Arabic... and even doubly impossible for a terrorist to be Caucasian. </cynical-sarcasm>
He had a story and it checked out, so he should have been released sooner, but I don't think it was ridiculous of them to give him additional attention.
It's also notable that he is an obviously white-looking guy. If he had been a brown-ish person of some kind who fitted the above description, would there be all this outrage?
From me? Yes. From others? I can't really say. It would actually make less sense to flag someone for visiting those countries if they were dark-skinned. Wouldn't it be more likely that they had legit reasons for travelling to those countries, like visiting family?
But traveling by air is now synonymous with giving up your every right as a human being and because of that we're all willing to take it without protest, the perceived cost of raising a fuss about this seems to outweigh the cost of pretending to be sheep.
But the security situation is only very marginally improved by all these measures, long term there will be a new terrorist success, after which even more draconian rules will be enacted.
We made this bed, now we have to lie in it, until we decide collectively that we're not headed in the right direction.
Just today a dutch student protested at the court for having his finger prints put into a national database on grounds of privacy violation.
It seems some people still understand when too far is too far, how about the rest of us?
The 99.999%+ of the people that travel 'legitimately' should not have to pay to this extent for the < 0.001% of the people that intend to disrupt society by killing people, if the price of absolute safety in this sense is a totalitarian state with access to information on its citizens well in excess of what the Soviet block regimes could only have dreamed of then we're definitely on the wrong track.
The more interesting question is if we let it go too far can it be rolled back?
These systems work badly for exactly this reason.
It's always more likely the person isn't a terrorist.
IMHO The TSA personnel should have questioned him, based on the information available - was there response proper and justified? thats debatable. He had traveled to the Middle East, learning Arabic (Farsi?), He would actually fit the profile of a "convert" terrorist. It could quite easily take 4 hours to do a quick background investigation.
Remember there is always the possibility a terrorist operative being "white", and not appearing to be middle eastern.
Couldn't that describe anyone that was planning on moving, working, or doing business (as in making deals with companies there while operating in the U.S.) there? Please don't try and make this about the color of his skin.
Yes, it could.
Short of perfect intelligence, we can't know who is planning to do something bad on a plane.
Suppose that we had some markers that were more common among folks who were more likely to cause problems. What should we do?
I've often thought that there should be a statutory payment to anyone who gets searched, wiretapped, what have you, regardless of the outcome of the search or the reason for doing it. Since those searches are for "our" benefit, why shouldn't we pay the folks who are being inconvenienced?
This is the movie - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuda_Kay_Liye
That sounds similar to a movie I watched in school a long time ago about the Japanese internment situation. If they found a bunch of stuff in someone's house written in Japanese it was assumed to be communications from Japan or 'secret' instructions or something. The movie was a fictional story (though it may have been based on a real life story), but the parallels are there.
As annoying as it was for the traveler, anybody who visits an airport knows they can't even whisper the word "BOMB" - so, someone falling into the obvious profile (young male traveling through suspect countries) carrying cards with the word "BOMB" and "TERRORISM" really shouldn't be too surprised if he's held for a bit.
Seriously - can you imagine what would have happened if there had been an incident, and it was revealed that the TSA _was_ aware that he had been identified with the BOMB and TERRORISM flash cards, and had the interesting travel background on his passport? Particularly as they've been criticized for letting the underwear bomber on the plane even with his iffy background?
People can't have it both ways - either you do solid background check on suspect individuals, or you let a few slip through.
Economics enters into everything, including law enforcement. Every dollar and hour we squander on idiotic checks like this is one less spent going after the real bad guys in a productive manner. There are much more informative signals than passport stamps and flash card contents that we should be investigating.
Still, pretty ridiculous.
Either way, the TSA does not (or should not) have the authority to detain you in handcuffs. They are not a police agency, they are mall cops that check to make sure you don't bring lotion on a plane.
2 days
however, if you're not formally arrested, you're not allowed to be kept unwillingly. if you ask to leave, they must either let you go, or formally arrest you. or, if they ask you to stay and you say yes, they can do whatever, up to the max time period.
So, here is a student with cards that teach him how to say "bomb," in an airport, in a language that is spoken by most people who have bombed our planes. I am pretty strongly against TSA abuses and they obviously shouldn't have done this to him (and I mean it should be illegal to do this to him), but is it okay to say this kid could have been a little more prudent?
Anything passengers say should be 100% ignored because it doesn't add any factual information unless you're being approached by someone alerting you to a possible situation.
People in line for a security check will naturally tend to discuss topics related to security.
Did he have just 2 cards, with the words 'bomb' and 'terrorism', held where security and other passengers couldn't help but see them? (That is, was he trying to provoke a reaction, a sort of performance-art-in-the-security-line?)
Or, did he have a deck of dozens, packed away out of sight?
The threshold where I'll excuse security for giving him extra scrutiny -- possibly even temporary detention -- is somewhere between those two possibilities.
For a country that allows people to say that they support the Holocaust in the name of free speech, this seems COMPLETELY misguided. Not just a little, but completely. I'd bet that there is zero correlation between being able to say bomb in Arabic, or between wanting to learn to say bomb in Arabic, and wanting to set one off.
Similarly, what if he ostentatiously dropped just the terror-related cards while in the security line?
If the truth is close to those scenarios, then Nicholas George wanted attention, and he got it. It's harder for me to get worked up about TSA if that's the case.
It did not give any indication of how 'common' the cards were, or whether there was a 'stack' or just a few. You are sympathetically imagining those details.
Did you read what I wrote carefully? I said the interpretation depends on details not available in the story, and my scenarios were hypotheticals to reflect how much was left out of the LATimes account.
We don't know how the cards were noticed. I've gone through security often, and sometimes had 'extra attention', but they've never lingered over the contents of my pockets or carry-on enough to read the titles of my books, or writing on my note cards. Yet, for Mr. George, 2 flashcards (of an unknown number, perhaps just 2) that were "in his pocket" were (a) touchy words for the TSA; (b) somehow observed by them.
It makes a difference whether they were in the middle of a deep deck in his carry-on, or he fished exactly those two out of his pocket and dropped them into the x-ray tray. One is perfectly innocent; the other suggests he was trying to test the limits or provoke a reaction.
I don't know what actually happened and unless you've read a more detailed source than the LATimes article, neither do you.
Also, god forbid that someone disagrees with the US's asinine foreign policy over the past decade or so — the last thing we need is a country of critical thinkers.
If however I have any reason to believe this was a powertrip by a TSA employee, or I was not treated with common courtesy , including an apology for the time wasted, then I do complain. And don't feel the least bit bad about it.
Exactly what the flags were matters less, as long as the professionalism of the TSA employee is not seriously questioned.
How is this about arabic then? He would have been detained if he were muttering those words in any language.
As to trying to memorize the words, yes that is the point of Arabic-English flashcards, but how does one become dangerous (or a terrorist) because they are trying to memorize the words "bomb" or "terrorist?" Am I now dangerous because I've just admitting to knowing both of those words (by virtue of using them in this comment)?
In the current political climate: Yes.
You're not allowed to scream fire in a crowded building but you're certainly allowed to have a book in which one happens to be described.