Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on AA flt | Hacker News Reader

Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on AA flt

washingtonpost.com

94 pointsdankohn145 comments

Open articleView on HN

Also covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648758

Off topic but the title in that link was so ambiguous:

"Economist Removed from Plane for Algebra"

could be 1) An economist was removed from "Plane for Algebra" (a book, maybe?)

2) The magazine "Economist" was removed from "Plane" (maybe a group or an app or sth. and replaced with "Algebra"

3) The economist was removed from an airplane going to "Algebra" (but that can't be a city; even if it is, i know enough cities already)

4) "Economist Removed" (a poem maybe) from "Plane for Algebra" (a book, maybe). It's the capitalization

I didn't click.

It's clear from the story that neither the stewardess, the pilot, nor the law enforcement agent thought he was an actual threat.

I'm guessing that there is a rule that if a passenger reports a suspicious person, then the plane must be held and law enforcement must be notified. Fortunately, at that point common sense was allowed to take over, rather than spiraling into multiple agencies mindlessly following bad procedures.

My question is why did the entire affair take over two hours.

Apparently the woman only said that she was sick until the airplane had returned to the gate and she exited the airplane.

At that point, probably thirty or fourty minutes had already gone by.

Then five minutes to get in touch with an the right law enforcement agent. Fifteen minutes to get to the plane. Five minutes talking to the woman. Five minutes for the pilot to get the man off the plane. Five minutes of conversation. Five minutes to reboard. Twenty minutes of checklists. Fourty minutes of taxing/waiting.

Since that adds up to more than two hours, it means that the actual process must have been faster.

It's also the case--and I've seen this first hand--that if a passenger feels unsafe for some reason and doesn't want to continue on a flight that's still on the ground, airlines are probably a lot more likely to allow that person to deplane as opposed to telling them they're an idiot and should just shut up. I've been on a flight that ended up going back to the gate to let someone off because the passenger was convinced she had heard some electronic noises in the overhead even though no one had and the flight attendants couldn't find anything.

We are long past a point where there needs to be some regulatory intervention regarding the authority of pilots to deplane people at the whims of bigoted passengers.

There's more than just bigotry at play here. We're constantly told now, "If you see something, say something" (the article even pokes a little at this), then our fear factor is raised as high as possible with notions that any of our fellow passengers could be evil terrorists about to bomb the plane. To top it all off, air travel is stressful and if you have even a little bit of fear of flying it gets amplified by the whole experience. It's like the perfect cocktail for these sorts of situations. I'm always surprised this doesn't happen more often.

It's interesting to contrast the response of American leaders to the Great Depression and run-up to WW2 ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself") vs. that of 9/11 ("See something, say something").

Also, as people have been pointing out, "Keep calm and carry on" (on the other side of the Atlantic).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On

(On the other hand, there were a lot of wartime counterintelligence efforts in the U.S. and U.K. which I think must have included public calls for people to turn in suspected Axis spies.)

As a counterpoint: internment of Japanese Americans.

Air travel is very stressful, so stressful that I am scared of the security more than any threats they supposedly protect us from. I fly regularly for my job and about 6 months ago I was "randomely selected" for extra screening -- even with TSA pre check. The person swabing my hands asked why I was shaking, I just told him flying makes me nervous. Truth be told, he makes me nervous with unlimited power over my ability to get back home and see my son. Flying itself is statically very safe from point A to B, the security isnt.

Why do you assume this woman was bigoted and not just ignorant but acting in good faith?

She got weird vibes from him but at least tried to make conversation with the guy to get a better read on him.

The men who did 9/11 were Arab Muslims. Arab Muslims commit terrorist attacks somewhere in the world every day (though most of their victims are other Muslims). This is actually real, even though it's uncomfortable to acknowledge.

The woman was ignorant and that's on her but also a failure of public education to some extent. See something say something is an extremely valuable tool in preventing terrorist attacks so we should be more careful in considering the motivations of people who see something and say something.

The men who bombed Hiroshima were white dudes. Ergo: I shouldn't get on the plane with any white dudes, because they could be plotting to blow up a whole city with nuclear weapons.

The probability of you getting on a nuclear weapons equipped bomber on a mission to drop a nuclear bomb is infinitesimal though I suppose it's something you may want to watch out for and report if it ever seems likely that you have stepped aboard such a plane.

Ok, you're almost there. Just keep thinking along those lines. You'll get there!

See something say something is an extremely valuable tool in preventing terrorist attacks

Is it? How many attacks has it prevented?

Is it? How many attacks has it prevented?

This. So now I'm curious and I found this posting by Bruce Schneier at https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/how_well_see_... which is relevant. He points to some data that really indicates that it just doesn't actually lead to preventing terrorist attacks at all.

White men frequently commit mass shootings in schooled and movies. Should we report suspicious activity every time we see a white man around school?

You think weird behaving white men hanging around schools don't get reported?

A professor doing maths is weird?

Thanks for conceding the argument.

It's entirely a problem of decision making and incentives.

You stop the plane, terrorist is arrested, you're a hero.

You stop the plane, guy turns out to be economist, idiot who thinks Arabs look like Italians and Arabic looks like equations does not even get named.

You don't stop the plane, guy's DSGE model explodes causing the plane to fall out of the sky, and you have lawsuits.

Your pun is perhaps in poor taste, but still really funny, since DSGE models have in fact been known to explode. E.g.: http://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/issue-with-dsge-model

So wait, if the guy was an Arab writing something in Arabic, it was less of a problem?

If the guy was an Arab writing out his suicide note in Arabic, with specific references to what he was about to do ("I'm about to bomb this plane because virgins"), it would be less of a problem, yes. It's a question of what "reasonable" means.

Umm it's the government and the media egging people on and creating a continuous atmosphere of suspicion, fear and mental illness. Honestly, the paranoia is a mental illness and it's caused by government and media propaganda. If you say that 10,000 people have died because of this, well we have spent $700,000 on the deaths of each of those individuals, 7.6 billion on TSA, to prop up the paranoia security apparatchiks. Not to mention billions of tourism dollars lost. It's already insane.

> If you say that 10,000 people have died because of this, well we have spent $700,000 on the deaths of each of those individuals, 7.6 billion on TSA, to prop up the paranoia security apparatchiks.

That's not $700,000 per person, it's $700,000 per person per year.

And that's just the TSA, to say nothing of the rest of the War on Terror.

Not surprised by this at all. I'm American, but my family background is southern Italian and I get crap like this ALL the time in the past few years and it's been getting worse. Of course I've never had a flight stopped, or anything close to that severe, it's just a general questioning of what my background is or being "randomly" selected for getting swabbed/questioned/whatever nearly every flight.

"He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math."

Is there a more dominant numerical system than Arabic?

"Perhaps she couldn’t differentiate between differential equations and Arabic."

A math class could've avoided all this, though obviously wouldn't fix the root cause.

...if it was Arabic script, and not math, would have it been a legitimate complaint? Scary.

Solving a differential equation on his notepad? I expect Stephen Wolfram to spin this into a sales pitch: "Use Mathematica, avoid being profiled as a terrorist!".

using a computer could make it worse. I can imagine what would go through some people head seeing someone use an electronic device full of weird symbols.

"in America today, the only thing more terrifying than foreigners is…math."

Kind of a disppointing story. The tl;dr:

The woman had indeed initially told the crew she was sick, but when she deplaned she disclosed that the reason she was feeling ill was her concern about the behavior of her seatmate. At that time, she requested to be rebooked on another flight. The crew then called for security personnel, who interviewed Menzio and determined him not to be a “credible threat.”

On a somewhat related note, a few years ago I was flying to a mobile phone conference in Barcelona. I thought it would be fun to bring my Port-O-Rotary cell phone along (available from Sparkfun Electronics).

I enjoyed hours of fun and merriment going through security with it. Frankfurt in particular was a real bitch, as they called in the bomb squad to dismantle and inspect the phone. After they finally cleared me, one of the guards asked me "What is the purpose of this?" I responded "Because it's fun".

At least security in Newark had a sense of humor about it. They took photos of it for a book of all the weird shit that's gone through security there (I really hope they publish that someday).

He even looks italian.

And is called Guido!

In this day and age, I feel lucky to be a blondish Italian.

Except in most places of Italy you don't, do you?

Mamma mia!

Consider:

1) Both Arabs and Italians are considered "white" on the US census. Therefore, there is no distinction between "ethnic" or "racial" profiling in this case. Since "racial profiling" is what the paper would use for Arabs, the same term should be used in this case.

2) One of the following is true:

A) Profiling was involved in this case, and Italians are no longer considered "white". Should be pretty useful for any Italians applying for positions in the US.

B) Profiling was not involved in this case. In fact, it would have nipped the issue in the bud: check the passenger's info, see he's not an Arab, move on. This took two hours because the authorities did not use profiling, but instead had to interrogate the guy.

Why is Penn always referred to as generically 'Ivy League' in articles like this? You don't really see that with Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia...

"She decided to try out some small talk.

Is Syracuse home? She asked.

No, he replied curtly."

Hoax

Reply on news.ycombinator.com