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Comment by thisduck | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason this article could only be written by a Jeffery Goldberg and not an Ahmed Jalaluddin.

That's a good point, but not entirely true. I'm half Lebanese. Despite being "randomly selected" often, my Beirut-born brother has taken a box cutter on every flight he's been on since 9/11 just because he can.

TSA is quite uneffective.

I have heard about a lot of people who have inadvertently carried things on flights, including a 12 inch knife on two separate flights.

Regardless, if someone is doing this on purpose, but without malicious intent, you may want to avoid naming them on a public forum.

"Shhh, we can't talk about it" is the root of most social problems.

I am all for talking about it if it involves you. Go public and say: Here's what happened. Here is why security sucks. This ensures that you get attention and reduces the chances that the govt. will stupidly punish you (aka punish the messenger) for having broken the law.

But given that the govt. is gung ho about prosecuting anyone who so much as mentions something about attacks on the Internet (see recent GPS tracking of Redditor by FBI), I don't recommend making 3rd parties with innocent intentions public without their permission and subjecting them to trouble.

Agreed that this is sad.

What about a Jeffery Jalaluddin?

As an adult white American-born male who's subjected to the same "security theater" idiocy, I have to discount this sort of racialist argument.

You in Al Q tee at airport checkpoint: a harmless, if idiotic, expression of irony.

Dark-skinned Jeffery in the same shirt: a worldview or political statement of potential jihadist.

Racialist generalization.

There is a "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" aspect here, and frankly the TSA's, and the average anxious air traveler, have an appreciation of irony I could only describe as absent. I wouldn't be surprised at being asked to turn it inside out. Or surprised at a Middle Eastern college student raising a cry of profiling/discrimination.

In ideal world there would be no racial profiling at security checkpoints. In reality there is, even if it's not institutionalized. The whole security escalation from 9/11 is related to hostilities from people of Middle-Eastern origin, and deep down every TSA guard knows that. TSA might have policies in place to avoid profiling, but everyone knows that it's planes from Saudi Arabia that trigger bomb scarces, it's Yemeni flights that are checked extra good, and it's overwhelmingly Arabic names on the no-fly list.

Nope. In an ideal world people would honor each other as individuals and prosper in civility, not fight murderous, destructive ideological vendettas.

You can consider profiling to be the collateral damage from the aberrant behavior of unchecked few.

Please elaborate

My guess is that he meant that the TSA typically treats certain people differently because they're threats, and adult white guys somewhat more deferentially than everybody else.

Goldberg has continued to blog and write about this topic. here's his most recent: "The War on Terror Meets the War on Pedophilia; Terror Wins" http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/the-war-...

I think he's referring to TSA officials not being trained very well, and that their biggest indicator of a potential threat is the name and race of the passenger.

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