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Comment by megaduck | Hacker News Reader

This is outrageous. The TSA has had a blank check for far too long, and they've become abusive. It's time to put a leash on them.

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.

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I'm as white as they come, and my bag gets emptied and searched every time I fly. I also get "randomly" inspected by US customs on a fairly regular basis.

To be fair, the employees who do the searching are actually fairly efficient, and usually pleasant. But it is still annoying.

That's because "jrockway" matches "jafar al mkaway" in the no-fly list.

Levenshtein distance: 9 TSA distance: 0.

She might be getting 'frisked' often because she's beautiful. Don't always assume racism when good ol' horniness (sp?) can explain it.

Not likely. They have female TSA employees frisk females, for exactly that reason. We've got plenty of safeguards in place to protect against sexism.

Racism, not so much.

Women pick on better looking women as much as men drool at them. (And vice versa, sexwise.) So it can still be about her good looks. Especially her good black looks.

In the article the subject was a man.

Outrageous! shakes fist

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.

Reminds me of an erstwhile Egyptian colleague of mine who said that he was "randomly selected" for screening every single time that he passed through the check-in gates at an airport.

Well, I guess I want to use a different random number generator than the TSA does.

Also, hopefully govt uses a better random number generator when encrypting their classified data ;-)

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