The TSA has a watch list of people who present “challenges” to screening
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There always seems to be a need for the bullies of society to have there say. The TSA in this case. You disagree and they will beat you. You agree and they will beat you for mockery.
But a doctrine is not sentient, nor sapient.
Bear in mind that I personally reject those things as abhorent, but "no fear of reprisal"?
Mind you, I do agree that you know you're in a free society when you can react to stuff and have no fear of reprisal.
I don't know why people keep going around thinking they're being repressed if their decisions have consequences. The only way that will happen is if you're a brain in a vat. Or being treated like one by your society; where nothing you do matters but you keep being fed an illusion of response in order to make you think such actions are still worth taking.
For me, it’s because I fear both the government putting me in jail and private business putting me in poverty.
Today, private enterprise fills many roles previously by government. So while getting put in jail for “slandering” the government is bad, so is losing your ability to use the internet or be gainfully employed.
“Decisions have consequences” is such a weird statement as no one argues they don’t. The argument is that the consequences are inappropriate and don’t have the rule of law to protect people. By this I mean, going to jail means a trial and jury and judge and due process. Private enterprise making arbitrary decisions that have similar impact (losing hosting, delisting from Google, removed from Facebook, blackballed by industry) has no rule of law.
So for me, it seems odd that people don’t understand this aspect.
If you don't want to (for example) not lose your job for saying racist things, then you've got to find and sell the value of that. If you can't, that's on you.
America in the 1910s: "If you want to (for example) not lose your job for supporting women's suffrage, then you've got to find and sell the value of that. If you can't, that's on you."
America in the 1950s: "If you want to (for example) not lose your job for supporting leftists, then you've got to find and sell the value of that. If you can't, that's on you."
See a problem with your viewpoint here?
The willful disingenuousness of that argument becomes apparent when applied to other acts most people would abhor:
"That anti-X graffiti sprayed on your house is perfectly okay since it isn't the government that's persecuting you. I don't know why people keep going around thinking they're being repressed if their decision to worship X/be an X/etc. has consequences."
The "free of reprisal from the government" isn't a principled stance; it's a tacit admission that the the speaker is ethically okay with mob justice as long as the mob is on their side.
Some pages that discuss negative freedom in a book I'm reading: https://imgur.com/a/xXN4ivm
Unfortunately, the TSA's track-record with pretty much everything is terrible. So, I don't see anything good coming from it.
*edit: example in the first paragraph
However, that doesn't happen. So, we're stuck with an ineffective bureaucracy that is a waste of time, money and resources that labels itself "security".
I'm saying that you keeping a notebook with information on people who have offended you is much different than Amazon or the government keeping a list of people who have offended them.
I have never sworn, threatened, etc a TSO, but I still fear I could be put on such a list one day for my "difficult" behavior.
Personally, I think if they think behavior is egregious enough to need to be documented they should have the airport police cite the person for disorderly conduct. Police officers have a fairly wide latitude for issuing this charge, and we have an established court system to deal with appealing the matter.
Much more democratic than a secret list.
Ie, the first metal detector arch beeped for her (I think it was a hair clip she had on) and they said she had no choice but to go through the body scanner.
I was not comfortable with that at all, but they lied and told me I had no choice. Immediately afterwards I looked it up online and saw that you can opt-out with a pat down.
I was pretty pissed they didn’t let me know this option, told me I had no choice. I think they were being lazy and didn’t want to deal with extra work. I submitted a formal complaint to Heathrow within an hour and they didn’t admit wrongdoing. They said there’s always an option to pay down. But refused to acknowledge their own security people didn’t present me with that option.
Anyway, just my rant from what happened a few days ago, somewhat on topic to this. (It’s the UK version of the TFA).
Maybe we should think of getting rid of ineffective state-sanctioned sexual assault instead of more lists.
How strange that I have the opposite experience.
I do this too, dozens of flights per year in some years, opting for a pat-down and holding my items with me until they have someone ready, every time, and I've never once experienced rudeness or hostility from a TSA employee.
To be fair, I had good experiences flying out of IAD and DCA. I think they're either better trained, mindful that the person they're abusing may have some power, or a combination of the two.
Other airports though, the TSOs seem to take it personally if you opt out, and then everything else (asking not to re-use gloves, insisting on keeping baggage in your sightline etc)is you being "difficult".
No choice of words / tone can overcome the fact that these people find someone "challenging" them in any way shape or form as an affront.
(I don't come at it like some sort of sovereign citizen and try to smile/be polite. This works ~60% of the time)
>use disorderly conduct The police would just automatically agree with the agent, if you're not in a filmed area then you could get to go to court, be essentially forced to plead guilty, pay fines, and write an apology letter to the person who may have groped you inappropriately. Then you're on a public list, where anyone can use this possibly incorrect information against you.
The secret list actually sounds more democratic than (ab)using the court system to me since it's basically just a private account of someones opinion and everyones entitled to free speech.
I probably should have made this assumption explicit, but I would assume that police summoned to a checkpoint and told things like "he rudely opted out" would be told that no crime has occurred.
This is the case currently, and the whole reason they're creating a list: to punish legal behavior.
It's different when it's a government. If they are going to sanction you and deny you rights and impose other costs, they must do it after public due process.
The original title & article of this submission (while probably not as informative as currently) made it more clear that the TSA is being accused here of targeting people who have made complaints against the TSA.
Attorneys: if you think that there is a case to be made about civil rights here, and you are looking for a star plaintive, I can imagine no greater joy than ruining the TSA and I would be happy to help.
What makes you say that?
A TSA employee who was never given my drivers license looked over one of the cops’ shoulder and jotted my info down. I went on my way but 45 days later I got a fine and a three-year pre-check ban.
I fought the case directly with TSA, inc submitting a letter from LAX PD stating there were no weapons incidences whatsoever on the day in question. They dropped the Notice of Violation immediately.
The pre-check ban, however, is unchallengeable. It should expire this winter but my hopes are not high that I’ll ever get it again.
Does it get flagged when you scan your ticket and then coded into the otherwise meaningless scribble they write on it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_Security_Screening_S...
Flights not to the US, even if outside the EU don’t have these checks.
Honestly, If I would have something to hide, the SSSS on my pass would give me ample warning to just leave the airport again.
Wondering if I can ask ‘why’ using a GDPR request now
Here’s the evolution of TSA uniforms over time. You the transition to being faux-cops: https://i0.wp.com/loweringthebar.net/wp-content/uploads/2012...
There was even proposed legislation to stop calling them “officers” but this didn’t happen. More details here: https://loweringthebar.net/2012/01/junior-tsa-officer-badge-...
When I came back in France during Christmas, the whole downtown access to a city was restricted, with checkpoints at every bridges. It slowed normal people for control multiple times a day. But because this "security" wasn't present 24/7 any islamist could import weapons at night and make a carnage during the day, with the additional effect of the checkpoint slowing people from escaping the area under attack. Hopefully, there wasn't the budget to employ national police for all the checkpoints, so technically you could cross them without any security people having the right to stop you, which I did one time.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-perce...
There is a term for what you described, security theater. I'm not saying it's worthless, but it's only not worthless because terrorists might believe it's not.
You can never have too many watch lists. For your safety.
We now need a watch list of people who do not like watch lists.
For people who do not like being put on watch lists.
For people outside TSA who create watch lists of watch lists.
A watch list for journalists who write about watch lists.
Basically, there is no problem so great it cannot be solved by creating another watch list.
Then you could sell consumers products the help them lower their WATCO score.
I can take the Clay Institute money I’m sure to win and blow it all on hats.
That's a watchlisting.
Yes, you are being watched.
I think you just broke the system with a loop...
For example, does the person scanning my boarding pass see it? IIRC the ID checkers often don't have radios or full blown computers.
Likewise, the screeners themselves don't look at your BP or a computer.
Do they just... warn the entire staff a known soveriegn citizen will be coming through?
(I'm not endorsing such a list, but others have commented how it's problematic... reservations aside I'm curious about the logistics of how they would even make use of such a list)
But I guess there are people who cannot even do those jobs. Even McDonalds has standards.
What would effectively change?
Yep. And in many cases, all of those "ineffective" security people were fired when TSA was created after 9/11. Then, in order to fill all of the openings, TSA hired them (with little to no training) and gave them raises. Source: I know a few who went through this process in a regional airport (Toledo Express, in Ohio).
TSA does not follow a single set of rules. They make it all up as they go along, and the rules change day-to-day.
An airport security consortium of nominally independent security departments may end up being little better than the TSA. (I'd speculate that it could even be worse, but that seems dangerously close to defending the TSA and that makes me feel ill.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_attempts_and_victims_of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_inner_German_bord...
But we can use it as inspiration to think: How many have died at the U.S. - Mexican border? How many have been killed by border agents? How many died in the desert or due to other causes - of omission or commission by the government, and of first order, second order or further consequences of those (in)actions?
I am not a lawyer, so it may be that there are legal reasons why the TSA (specifically) cannot maintain a list of people, but ...
The majority of large organization dealing with customers keep customer service records, including notes on negative interactions. Keeping a list of people that have assaulted your employees, if the intent is to avoid creating a similar situation in the future, is completely rational and better for all parties.
If there was evidence of the TSA denying transit rights based on that list, that would be newsworthy, but it sounds like there is no evidence of that.
That being said, the government keeping a secret list of a certain subset of its citizens certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth even if I can't perfectly express why. I'd just as soon not have department of the federal government tracking who is good and who is bad outside of law enforcement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
Some possible reasons:
* Because the government is of the people, for the people, and by the people, it may not discriminate against a subset of the people for any reason that isn't a direct result of due process procedures
* Because lists and tools like this have historically been really good at facilitating discrimination against the people on it, and that it doesn't take terribly much to imagine a politically motivated party loosening the criteria for inclusion on these lists such that people from a certain country are easy adds, furthering discrimination against them
* Because a government under the American constitution only has authority by the consent of the governed, and we clearly cannot consent to secret lists that we cannot see or verify our membership / non-membership in
* Because often, the government uses inclusion on these secret lists to justify restriction of rights or privileges to those on it, as we have done in the past to restrict gun rights based on one's membership on the no-fly list
* Because oft as not, the government is really bad at keeping these lists free of false positives, such that senators, children, dead people and others have been mistakenly added, and
* Because the government is loath to remove people's names from the list, even where the names can be proven to have been mistakenly added, causing weird scenarios in which Muslim people who were fraudulently placed on the list have to sue for the right to sue to be removed from it
* Because these lists have been, and can in the future be easily turned against one's political opponents with a handful of keystrokes
Except...it does. How else do you explain affirmative action? Or, for that matter, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare?
Not that I disagree with your points in general, though.
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/14/documents-that-cha...
No part of the US Constitution outlines individual rights or freedoms. It outlines powers of the states, powers of the federation, and limitations on those powers. Sometimes certain "unalienable rights" are referenced, but there is no list of rights in the Bill of Rights.
It's also not an "important distinction" here.
I wish more HN commenters would just come out and say "No, this is wrong and here's why."
Government is prohibited from doing a lot of things that WalMart is free to do all day long, and not just because WalMart has good lobbyists (though that certainly helps).
Kind of wish the quality responses could somehow be taken into account in the algorithm deciding what gets auto-collapsed and grayed-out to unreadability.
It represents what I'd guess to be a pretty common sentiment among many Americans who are motivated by fears of terrorists.