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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Why should your congresscritter care? At most you represent one vote, and you aren't likely to donate money to them.

No if you want to change this, you have to go after the TSA people, not with violence (as tempting as it is, and as deserving of it as they are) but by totally ostraciseing them: if you work in a shop, you don't serve them, if you are a doctor you don't treat them, if you used to have them over for lunch you don't invite them anymore, if their children goes to your children's school you don't talk to them, invite them for birthday celebrations, etc, etc.

Then maybe the TSA will learn that they too need other people and can't go around being assholes.

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Congressmen usually assume that for every person that bothers to write in, there are ten people that feel similarly. So yes, concerted letter-writing campaigns can have an effect.

We even saw some of that in action with the bailout. Recall that the first bailout bill failed, despite heavy pressure from Wall Street, because of a mostly-Internet-organized letter writing campaign. Then they turned around and passed it with minor edits a week later, when everyone was celebrating their victory.

The problem is that legislators typically work on an out-of-sight, out-of-mind basis, so once they count up all the letters and cast their vote, they forget all about general public opinion. Professional lobbyists know this, and so they live and work in Washington and make sure to schedule regular dinners and outings with the legislators so that whatever concerns are on their minds stay on the legislators' minds too.

Ordinary citizens don't have this luxury, and the collective Internet hive mind isn't exactly known for attention span. I bet that if you got a Reddit-scale letter-writing campaign going and kept it up for a year, with every person writing in once a week or so, you'd see meaningful change in this country. I also doubt that you could convince a critical mass of people to write in once a week for a year.

Might be an interesting political hack, though, and worth trying.

Maybe a group could participate in a scheduled letter-writing or calling campaign. Once you join, you will be sent a reminder in the week it is your turn to write or call.

writing is worthless compared to actually calling.

And email is worthless compared to snail mailing.

Actually, nowadays, the email is more likely to be read in a timely fashion. Snail mail to congress gets delayed because it's subject to heavy duty security screening before it ever reaches the legislator's office. It may be useful for issues of general concern, but if you're writing about any specific piece of legislation presently under consideration your snail mail may not even reach your representative's office until after the bill has already been voted upon. You're better off phoning.

I understandthat arguing with the TSA screeners at the ceckpoint is pointless as they have no ability to change policy and you don't have time to miss your flight, but I have also wondered wht kind of person can work for the TSA and be happy getting paid to do this.

One of our interns this summer used to work in one of the London airports, where his job was basically to tell people that they were allowed strictly one bag, and yes, that little plastic bag they're carrying with a book they just bought counts as one bag, and yes, you're going to stuff your purse into your backpack because that counts as a bag too, and so on.

Very irritating stuff, particularly since it has absolutely zero bearing on security (why would the number of bags make a difference??), and so seems like a completely arbitrary imposition of force. I once chatted with someone who worked for the airlines and they said they didn't care about how many bags you carried (within reason), but the regulation is imposed by BAA (British Airports Authority).

So, our intern worked there for a month or two. Every time he let someone through with more than one bag he was told off by his supervisor after someone at the security checkpoint reported him, and eventually at one point when the guy was complaining about him once again, he had enough and he quit.

Why'd he do it? For the money. Easy money, not a tough job, not that risky. Yes, people think you're an asshole, but when you're a starving student with no money, you can cope with that.

I don't think being angry at these people would help any more than it would help to be angry at the piece of paper that a parking fine is printed on.

>Yes, people think you're an asshole, but when you're a starving student with no money, you can cope with that.

If someone is ready to be an asshole for money don't expect me to go easy on them because "they're just doing their job". You are responsible for what you do and "just doing my job" is not a legitimate excuse. If you're just trying to take the easy way out then I want to make your life a miserable living hell so you never think of taking this shortcut ever again.

I can't express how much I loath this non-excuse. People like Hitler are able to commit such atrocities because of literal armies of people "just doing their job".

I experienced this ridiculousness at Gatwick. I'm not sure what they expected families with prams and babies to do. The pressure to conform, as a crowd, to the expectations of the airport staff was intense and uncomfortable, especially around Christmas/New Years.

I have also wondered wht kind of person can work for the TSA and be happy getting paid to do this.

The rank and file TSA agent who yells "take your shoes off" when you are in the line, looks at the metal detector when you walk through and checks your bags when they see something unusual...

... that's practically a minimum wage job on par with being a shift supervisor at Starbucks. And at most airports they're all contract staff - yes, even TSA is outsourced.

The people who are groping you for not taking the back-scatter scan work for a boss who owns the a company that contracts them to the TSA - they're so removed from any policy decision it's not worth venting unless you can see a senior person as they are usually staff.

In fact, you can see the pecking-order at airpots - the front-line contractor doing minimum wage tend to be black, latino etc and the senior staff are old white guys. The two-tier system has removed a great deal of diversity. Sad.

It doesn't matter who they are or what their setup is. If everyone made this the most miserable job on earth then no one would want to do it. That is the goal.

They never look happy when I see them. They usually seem like bored, apathetic minimum-wage bureaucrats.

I'm not sure that treating TSA agents like they treat Middle Easterners is a viable solution. Ressentiment is a ruling-principle of the lowest sort.

Middle Easterners are born Middle Easterners. TSA agents choose to work for the TSA. These people choose to participate in a bad system. If you make it harder on these people, they're gonna quit and it's going to be harder to hire TSA agents, putting pressure exactly where it needs to go.

What you're suggesting is idiotic. These are not dignified, middle-class jobs held by people who have much choice in life. It's work given to people whose entire lives have been defined by bad systems. Schooling, health care, criminal justice - at the low end of the scale they're all maliciously self-serving in a way that middle class people struggle to imagine.

If you think being a dick to people whose entire lives have been shaped by a series of collective 'f* yous' form society, then you deserve whatever 'secondary screening' they elect to give you. You really do.

And if you genuinely believe that every job is a matter of choice, that people are free to quit if they're at all unaligned with their employer, then you've lived your entire life in an amazingly sheltered and privileged bubble. This makes the image of you (essentially) spitting on the much less fortunate even more appalling. All you're doing is making them even meaner and more defensive - something that's likely to make life harder for everyone else having to deal with them as screeners.

I'm not defending what the TSA is doing. It's clearly stupid and awful, and I strongly suspect it's a product of corrupt back-scatter purchasing deals made by craven congressmen in exchange for campaign money and mindless votes. But taking out your anger on the luckless human fodder that these people have insulated themselves with is galacticly uninformed. If this is honestly your approach, just stop.

All you're doing is making them even meaner and more defensive - something that's likely to make life harder for everyone else having to deal with them as screeners.

That's exactly how nonviolent resistance is supposed to work. You have to amplify conflicts to the breaking point before they get resolved. That means making things uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Of course, I don't think it's going to be effective, for reasons similar to what you mention--most people who are affluent enough to care about this issue are pretty unlikely to socialize with the class of people the TSA recruits from anyway.

All of that having been said, your moral defense of these people is pretty questionable. "I'm just following orders and trying to make a living" isn't a moral defense for the actual human beings who are out there violating people's bodily privacy. I'm sympathetic to your argument, but quite frankly it leads in a pretty terrifying direction that's directly counter to what the Western world collectively agreed on after the Second World War. More worryingly, it gives governments an incentive to use these people for their dirty work, secure in the knowledge that the actual decision makers are remote enough, and the people doing the dirty work are poor enough, that neither group will face any resistance.

They can go and get an honest job at McDonalds or Wallmart, and I will respect them.

Or they can work for the TSA and get access to health care. If your 'respect' for them as humans is conditional on them acquiescing to life at the absolute lowest (legal) tier, I suspect they can live without it.

What I'm really saying here is that a decent sense of situational awareness would indicate that being a jerk at the airport is too little too late. As in individual, you've already been socially isolated, so the effort is going to be exceedingly counterproductive, in that you're only going to prompt further hardening.

If you're one of the many many people for whom air travel is essential, you're going to find more effective routes to common cause long before you get to the departure gate.

I can't honestly say where they are. I suspect something will need to be created before any real leverage exists. I just know that if I were looking for a place to develop this, the least viable option would be by myself, at the gate, doing something that's far more likely to harm me and the people who are depending on me to get somewhere that the people who are practically looking for a fight.

So what is your non-idiotic proposed solution? Do nothing? At this point stirring the pot is exactly what's called for. Make this awful process even worse for everyone involved until it finally blows. And the sooner the better.

People like you get to sit on the high horse and point out how you're morally superior to everyone. Meanwhile it's the unreasonable who keep on changing the world.

EDIT: Further, these jobs didn't exist at all not so long ago. You can't claim the people doing them now are somehow "trapped" there. What the hell were they doing before?

I am afraid you misunderstand me, I didn't intend for them to be treated as they treated middle-easterns, but as the blacks where treated in the south during the Jim Crow era, minus the lynchings (since this would put those who do this at the risk of prosecution).

The idea is that the agents will grow to hate their jobs and then quit, and to make it harder, much, much harder for the TSA to hire people.

Since being a TSA employee is job which you choose to get, and one from which you can quit at anytime, this seems fair.

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