TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists in secret surveillance program
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It seems likely he was just trying to scare me, but it was still was quite jarring. I'm a fairly normal US citizen (I don't associate with political people, no criminal record, never been to a country not known for tourism). I believe I was flagged just from traveling between Turkey and Russia.
Since then when I fly I cant use online check-in, my boarding pass is marked SSSS and I am taken into the backroom for questioning at border control.
Maybe these extra precautions keep the USA safe, but it certainly seemed excessively paranoid.
I’m also an expat US citizen traveling regularly to the US.
I’ve even travelled to a couple of conflict countries a number of times for work in recent years.
Never had a problem re-entering/visiting over 50 times.
I always thought that if you're a US citizen you cannot be denied entry into the United States, though you might be delayed.
However, they can place me on the no flylist, but I believe that this is run by a different branch of the government.
Interestingly, I would argue that it should be perfectly fine for these two, especially the first one. Harassing the friends of political people would not be odd behaviour for a totalitarian state.
I recently flew from Zurich home to San Francisco and prior to boarding the plane in Zurich I was interviewed by a state department employee. She was very nice and at no time indicated that I was special or "of interest", etc.
She did, however, drill pretty deeply into where I had been and what I was doing.
I have traveled to Switzerland relatively frequently over the past ten years and this was the first time I had seen this.
See:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-bey...
and
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-is-...
They are basically an entrenched part of the security-industrial complex at this point. It seems to be a vicious circle of "expand the mission to justify a bigger budget and ask for a bigger budget in order to meet the self-directed increase in scope." There seems to be very little practical oversight of this agency.
Nothing they do provides any meaningful security. They fail 90% of tests run by their own agency. They are useless and ever expanding.
By a medical definition, they are cancerous.
https://www.cnn.com/2012/02/06/opinion/don-phillips-tsa-vipr...
"You might just lose a leg" and "some of our employees carry guns" is a pretty bold way to turn down the TSA...
In communist states, you get degrees of citizenship. For example, are you a party member or not?
If I criticize Agile, does that mean I propose Waterfall?
Criticism of a system has nothing to do with original causality and everything to do with "the system is not accomplishing the goals well enough". It can be done on any system in vacuum, and should be done in vacuum, because dealing with deep rooted causes is part of the package and is one of the reasons we devise systems in the first place.
Surely it is ridiculous to say that we can't criticize the US government structure because human corruption is older than the Constitution? Yet this is basically what your argument path is implying. There's nowhere to go from here but doing nothing because, news flash, the deep rooted problems are here to stay, and if we're going to excuse every system from those problems we can as well pack our bags and go back to Feudalism.
points like this read like pure lickspittle to me when considering the many varied forms of communal life that had to be exterminated through massive amounts of violence in order to establish a basis of capital.
What mattered much more, was: are you related to a high-ranking party member or not?
But you're correct that family relations played a big role, the nepotism was rampant.
* Bored in flight - sleep.
* Bored at airport - do people watching, good place is look at how people board, watch airplanes take off and land, what is the ground crew doing.
* Travel comfortably and lightly - go in shorts and at the destination airport change to formals.
* Don't like queue - board last
* Want to travel cheap internationally - you would go through cheap airlines like Turkish, Ethihad (or) some unknown airline.
* In business trip - do prep work in laptop while in flight.
I'm getting more and more annoyed with these baseline establishing stuff and ML models.
edit: typo
This is worse than criteria to pull you over when driving.
It makes a kind of perverse sense once you realize the stated point is/was to target extremists.
But if fidgeting or some other innocent thing, puts you in that list, you're f---d. You will be groped every single flight. No one is going to take the risk to remove you from that list.
Right, but profiling using these specific patterns will lead to a lot of false positives, which might make this entire exercise a waste of resources, and there is no guarantee that a "terrorist" might exhibit these patterns.
I believe this isn't the first time the TSA has tried to do some sort of behavioral profiling and such. Previously it proved to be BS and did not show any ability to identify threats.
Considering TSA agents are leaking this to the press makes me think someone(s) at TSA think you can just spot a terrorist and the agents think it is ballony ....
Perfect for power hungry organizations. Only solution to combat this is full transparency, or to join the game and make it to the “elite” and help suppress everyone else. It’s a pretty good setup, you use the bottom 20% to help keep the 20% to 80% in line, and then pluck out a few of the smarter 20% to 80% and drop those in leadership positions in military or police and pay them a nice pension and keep suctioining up a bigger and bigger share of resources.
First it was electronics. Then water/liquids. Then shoes. Lately, they've been asking people to get snacks/food items out. For what reason? We aren't given one. Just do as you're told, or else.
The closest analogy I could come up with was the Stasi.
Okay, I'll concede, it's not really analogy, it's more like a 1:1 mapping: "One of its main tasks was spying on the population, mainly through a vast network of citizens turned informants"[1]
What a beautiful qualification. Put one person on Quiet Skies, for any reason, legit or not. Now every known contact or associate of that one person becomes of interest to the Quiet Skies program. Every neighbor, even if they don't know the neighbor. Every work colleague, even if the colleague doesn't know that they work with the person. Every vendor. Every vendee. The air marshal assigned to watch them.
TSA seems to have taken a page from NSA. They aren't even "hop-limited;" they can continually go as far out on a person's network as they want, merely by including a hop in Quiet Skies. https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/28/ns...
Back to the topic at hand: I agree wholeheartedly with you and I hope that you and everyone else here votes in their primary and general elections. Headcount is a good, nonpartisan resource for finding out more about this: https://www.headcount.org
I doubt that either major party plans to reform the TSA or the Department of Homeland Security.
Wow... reminds me of good old East Germany
I think 30 per plane would be really bad. 30 per 2 million is probably just a normal rate
Mind you, it's hard to see it as security theater (they won't admit it's happening!). It sounds like they have a power envy thing going on vis a vis the FBI, but even the actual marshals doing it seem to think it's dumb. If it were the FBI just tasking FBI Surveillance Vans onto random people without a predicate, there'd potentially be hell to pay as they generally have regulations on what is a valid reason for opening an investigation.
What makes you say that? I didn't see it in the article, but maybe I missed something.
> mostly harmless (insofar as tailing random innocent people could be)
Hmmm ... I hate to start from scratch this very common discussion (i.e., the harm in surveillance). Is there anything new to add?
> What makes you say that? I didn't see it in the article, but maybe I missed something.
The article mentions that they first got into the business of tracking people through airports and in the sky after the FBI asked them to help on existing investigations, so I wonder if they are just trying to show that they can do investigations on their own like big boys.
So, it's not just this. Consider where it's going -- what would induce this level of effort and expenditure?
P.S. It will also be "interesting" when parallel construction enters the picture -- if it hasn't, already.
and...
>> surveillance of travelers without any suspicion of actual wrongdoing
Those seem to play off each other in a weird way. The program is legal because the selection criteria are so broad that no one under surveillance is suspected of any evildoery? It would be really interesting to find out what kind of records on these surveillance activities are kept.
Having been the subject of covert surveillance at multiple points in my past (and future probably) there is a certain amount of shrugging it off that is necessary. The real concern for TSA, or Neighborhood Watch, is whether they are sharing records with any other agencies. Congress would potentially have a Pinata party if that came to light.
So their opinion of "foreigners" is skewed by their anti-terrorist training to think that people from outside the USA are mostly bad and wish us harm.
TSA employees should be required to visit a foreign country at least once a year--paid for by their employer--so they have direct experience with the vast majority of non-US citizens who are simply normal people living their normal lives.
I presume they are OK with taking the chance that a TSA-PRE enrolled individual is not turning into a shoe-bomber in year 3 after preenrollment? Why not just abolish all the checks and selectively pull people to remove liquids, shoes and electronics. You'd lose the $99 revenue/passsenger that TSAPRE generates.
I don't know, but I assume we don't have a right to avoid extra screening that is based on a 'fair' selection?
The article did mention travel to Turkey as a trigger, which has been in my top 5 places I'd like to visit next. Would suck to get held up for extra screenings just because I went there.
It's the same argument against "I have nothing to hide."
Consider two people, both objectively innocent. One is surveilled, one is not.
The surveilled person, merely by coming to the attention of the government, is at risk of mistakes, misjudgment, quota satisfaction, resume building, budget justification, extortion by criminal government employees bad personal life and resulting sour disposition of the watcher, etc. Just because they became noticed.
The unsurveilled person is safe.
In firearms training, you learn not to point a gun at something unless you intend to destroy it. You should also not point a government at someone unless they have at least shown some reason beyond existence that it's worth potentially destroying their well being.
Isn't that the whole point of being vigilant?
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Should that even be possible?
TSA is the department of domestic fear mongering. That's it.
Who watches the watchers? Why, the watchers!
You got me, guilty as charged.
Obviously long-haired hippies pose a security threat.
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
It is basically an end-run around the constitution -- if the police were searching through your bags without your consent any evidence they found could be challenged on constitutional grounds. The courts have (afaik) found that the TSA's searches are a different category, "administrative searches," and therefore not unconstitutional; somehow, though, there is no problem with using evidence found by the TSA in a criminal case.
Also, since the TSA's mission is not limited to aircraft, it is entirely possible that "administrative searches" are coming to a public transit system near you. Presumably the same rules would apply.
To be fair, the GAO reports have shown that their fancy equipment isn't actually detecting weapons either.
If you are a young male with a beard... skin colour wouldn't matter much. You are gonna get groped.
The blades are so cheap, I could literally change my blades every single time and it would still cost me less than a Gilette razor.
With blades you should change them every other shave. Only ones that last me longer are japanese Feathers i dont get it but these are most amazing. Also pretty expensive (still much cheaper than gillette) but totaly worth it.
You are hell of a badass bear man.
The savings sound good, but I'm a quite clumsy person, so if I'm going to be cutting myself every other day I'd rather pay the Gilette tax.
I'm told it's a good time to relax and reflect, but... if I'm in a hurry I grab my quatro.
The typical technique is with grain, against grain, cross grain for whichever direction the hair is flowing, but I usually stop after the second one because it's smooth enough.
I would expect a manual sharpening process to be vastly inferior to the factory edge.
I once saw someone on reddit talk about stropping their disposable razor on their jeans. Of course they were just cleaning it a bit.
Is anyone in a TSA line in a "good mood"?
There's also a great article out there somewhere (7+ years old, around the time they started the xray backscatter scanners) about an actor who changed her behavior as she went through lots of TSA checkpoints, and eventually concluded that the TSA random checkers were mostly picking people who looked like they wouldn't make a fuss.
Whatever you're getting from the airport, it's certainly not security.
This is my theory as well. Their job KPIs probably have something like "patted down x people per shift", so they pick people that will cause the least trouble for them.
Bad luck I guess.
I know a couple of people with “John Smith” and “Kim Park” type names who have trouble with processes built on lists of names.
I'm not picked 100% of the time, but it happens a high %. Gratned I don't travel as much as I used to in the last year so i haven't been able to test recently.
When I'm not tested, then there is typically another group being tested. They seem to utilize the testing machinery/staff close to 100% of the time, so if you're the next group of people as their finishing up, you're likely to be tested.
Not to say there isn't any bias, but I've never noticed a larger proportion of dark skinned/long haired/bearded etc. individuals being tested vs the departing passenger population.
I travel often and the Australian airports certainly seem to test a much higher percentage of departing passengers than other airports.
I actually have a theory, which is that I (and yourself, and the GP) are targeted to provide deniability of racial profiling. Build up a buffer of whiter-than-white business guys and then no-one can accuse you of racism when you grab the person you really want. No idea if there's any truth to it but it's the only reason I could come up with.
First, it would be random, with no profiling. Profiling gets defeated by shaving, change of clothing, etc. Random selection can't be defeated.
I would make it resistant to implicit profiling from the operators by saying "wear a watch, every time the seconds reach 0 you select the next person for screening."
Then, I would make it hard to dodge being selected by varying pace through screening, with a rule that "at the selection time you pick the next person through the metal detector, without giving passengers any indication that you've picked, and wait for your selectee who gets screened no matter how much they dawdle or how long the X-ray search takes".
Next time you fly you'll observe that the ETD procedure at Australian airports is consistent with this theoretical design.
Fortunately they let you skip the hand-baggage inspection queue if you get inspected, so I’m usually happy to let them as it saves a good 15-20 mins.
On the other hand, I look like a young white guy and whenever I travel to Asian countries, particularly South-east Asia, I routinely get the extra drug search at customs.
I wonder if they should all just drop the whole "random" charade and optimize the system for the biased policies: it's not fair but at least that way people might be able to make their flight.
Without evidence other than anecdotal, I'm sure it's true that there's heavy and undeserved bias for the airport security, and I'm not sure which would be better; to continue in silence about the bias, or to put it out in the open.
If there's still concern over hijacking, that solution is super simple. They do it in Israel. Separate entrances for pilot and passengers. Only way to get from the passenger compartment into the pilots cabin is by exiting the airplane and entering a separate door from the outside. Boom. Hijacking impossible. The security theater of the TSA does not keep anyone safe.
Naturally eliminating it would be better, but at the moment I am not confident the US will. It was more a stab at the sad state of affairs and if at least pretending to not be biased is preferred to at least knowing it's the default state
That seems unlikely for many reasons (washroom and rest area access among others).
What is it with all the random European-Caucasian men coming in and commenting on how they're randomly selected all the time?
When someone feels like they're being selected-against for bias and when popular and well-researched evidence of such exists, you're minimizing and trivializing their suffering by making the same observation of yourself when you're the majority party. It's a form of passive and latent bigotry you might not even realize you're expressing. I'm commenting publicly and separately from HNthrow22 because plenty of you seem hideously blind to this.
Your case may be true; I'm not disputing that, but the consensus research position is that "people of color are more often mistreated" and this anecdote by the OP fits that position. Your anecdote fits the less frequent occurrences ("more often against minorities v. less often against the majority"), and so by mentioning it, you diminish and belittle the minority person who's being mistreated by suggesting your experience is of equal likelihood; it's not, and you're not being considerate of that fact.
As for me, I ambiguously appear to be of Middle Eastern or Cuban descent--Persian, for the record--and noticed that I'm consistently selected-against for screening about 50% of the time whenever I have either a beard or an extremely well-maintained fade. Of the many, many times I've been down to scruff or a clean-shaven face, it has happened only once, with that singular exception being this past Tuesday night in Tom Bradley International in LAX.
In closing: there's nothing preventing you from voicing your less-likely experience, but by doing so, you're diminishing the more-likely experience faced by minority parties because there's inherently no differentiating context in individual anecdotes.
Interestingly, I'm somewhat afraid that this isn't formulated constructively enough. It's really hard to write this without sounding like I'm attacking you. But I guess that's what discussions are.
The legal profession exists because rules/laws are subject to all sorts of interpretation. And just as is the case in the outside world, it seems that, if at all, the rules are cited quite frequently for no other reason than someone decided that they didn't/don't agree with something that someone said.
Hell, I've been downvoted a number of times for relaying facts that answer questions people here are asking or for pointing out a duplicate post. As you can imagine, such experiences detract from the experience, but perhaps that is the point?
Thus, I think the most valuable part of your post is sharing that the original anecdote is actually in line with well-researched evidence showing that that happens. It would be even more valuable, I think, if that was the main point of the post. By starting out with "What's will all the <people identified by a characteristic they can't help>", which immediately guilt-trips people and makes them less open to the information that might actually lead them to change their behaviour. More effective would be to frame it more like "if you are <characteristic you can't change>, you might not be aware that <thing>, but you might want to do <desired behaviour> because of that".
Sure, it'd be nice if people would already know that, but I think it's good to focus on what's effective. Knowing all research or exactly how people unlike you experience life is really hard, so it's nice if you can help us with that.
There's a tragedy-of-the-commons aspect in cases like this which we see a lot: a bunch of posts which individually aren't that problematic, but collectively are. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.
In this case, the individual commenters weren't making claims about which groups this happens more to; they were just saying 'hey this reminds me of me', or perhaps, 'oh yeah, I always get picked on this way'. We all feel like we get picked on more than the next person ('mosquitoes always bite me'). But of course when you get a bunch of these together, the shadow they cast looks like a claim that maybe no one was trying to make. It's easy to see how that could make someone feel unwelcome and I wish that weren't the case.
That said, there is something to address:
> In this case, the individual commenters weren't making claims about which groups this happens more to
I don't know if this assertion can be sustained (though I can appreciate why you added it to your initial comment). My experience in these debates—having been on both sides and having done this exact same thing myself—is that we tend not to like feeling as if we're on the wrong side of anything. When someone makes a claim that inherently implies a societal wrong ("I'm am Indian male and I keep a beard and [...] I was singled out for 'random' checks at every single airport.") and someone else replies with a claim that the same situation was encountered without any of the same conditions (e.g. "White dude, [...] always getting the random checks too."), there's quite possibly an internal stimulus there compelling the latter to comment on the matter, inherently aiming to suggest away the risk that s/he's possibly part of an instigating group. As I've mentioned before, I've made this exact same sort of diminishing comment in other contexts in the past and have been (hopefully) re-educated on it, hence my keen sensitivity to it.
The latter cited comment even went out of its way to attribute the OP's comment to "bad luck I guess." I don't think the latter commenter realized the harm in that statement nor intended any harm with it ("if it makes you feel any better" mid-comment), but it's a textbook example of the kind of diminishing remark that utterly decimates minority morale.
Appreciate you taking the time to read this, dang.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-ex...
I travel lots (dozen+ times a year, in/out of Mel/Syd and Int'l). I get checked 4/4 times for explosives, and 1/4 times down to boxers in the side room.
Outside AU though, it gets worse. Electronic devices are always confiscated, checked bags pulled back for extra checking, etc
I have no idea why. Even people who consider themselves pros at flying have no idea why. I'm fine with it though, it at least proves they're not JUST targeting people on race, but also are shit scared of shy middle aged nerds who get icked out killing insects ;)
Indian "Indian" or an Indian Muslim?
In no time TSA will ask Congress for billions in funding to set up their own CIA and even send paramilitary groups all over the world to catch potential bombers. Who doesn't want "quiet skies" after all?
Sounds like the TSA are nailing it.
Of course, in real-world tests of the TSA's usefulness they have been found to be quite ineffectual [0], [1]...so why even make weird justifications for them like this?
[0] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-tsa-a...
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If you make it harder for us to track you, go away"
The double standards are amusing.