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Comment by param | Hacker News Reader

What? I wasn't aware you needed to be irradiated just to enter into the US, even without planning to take any more flights. What is the rationale behind that?

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This is exactly the question that they should have to answer before a judge. Laws at minimum must have a rational basis, there must exist some scenario in which the law makes sense. Irradiation before a flight may protect against terrorist attack. Irradiation after the time of danger has past makes no sense at all.

I'm not sure that laws in general really need a rational basis[1], but invasive exceptions to your Fourth Amendment right require a rational basis (i.e., a reasonable suspicion).

[1] What seems rational to some might seem irrational to others.

There are three "levels of scrutiny" used to determine if a law is valid. The lowest level, the level which every law must meet is rational basis. Government may not enforce a law which makes absolutely no sense. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review.

>There are three "levels of scrutiny" used to determine if a law is valid. The lowest level, the level which every law must meet is rational basis. Government may not enforce a law which makes absolutely no sense.

The article that you linked to indicates that "rational basis review" applies to laws which may be related to the 5th or 14th Amendments, which is substantially narrower than what you've appeared to say. I'm not a lawyer, so can you clarify?

Well, it's a pretty low bar to have a rational basis. Such ought to be apparent. When it is not apparent -- and called into question -- it must be defended, for to acknowledge no rational basis is policy suicide.

The problem is not that this law has no rational basis, it's that it is tenuous.

I can imagine a few: we don't want terrorists to be able to smuggle (dangerous) materiel past our borders when detecting such is relatively trivial (i.e. airport checks are easy). Or we want to condition the general public to accepting invasive behavioral controls.

Clearly some rational bases cannot be acknowledged. And so that is the test. The proponent of the law must acknowledge a rational basis for its existence. Should he fail, it would be devastatingly easy to lobby for its removal.

So the real problem is: let's identify precisely the rational basis here. What is the motivation?

Both the fifth amendment and the fourteenth mention "due process" as in: no person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The fifth fifth applies to the federal government, and the fourteenth to the state governments. When the government passes a law that infringes on a person's right, one way a person can challenge it is to claim that the law violates (substantive) due process. The idea is that government has to have a reason for depriving a person of his right.

How important the government's reason has to be depends on the importance of the right being infringed. If the right is "fundamental" (1st amendment, voting, interstate travel, or privacy,) then the government must have a very good reason for infringing the right and it must not infringe more than necessary. This is "strict scrutiny". If the right involved is not very important, the government need only show that it had some acceptable reason (the law must be rationally related to a legitimate government purpose.) This is rational basis. Every law that fails rational basis must also fail strict scrutiny. But not every law that fails strict scrutiny must also fail rational basis. The vast majority of the laws pass rational basis.

It's true that the law being challenged has to relate to the fifth or fourteenth amendments, but that's not a very hard test to meet. Almost anytime a person would legitimately want to challenge a law, it would be because the law is depriving him of some right. And in every such case, the law must at least have a rational basis.

This is case here. The traveler has a right to travel, the government was going to deprive the traveler of this right. The government must have a rational basis at least.

The amount of radiation you receive from the backscatter machine is harmless. Take note that you also receive a substantial amount of radiation from simply flying.

Is this a law, though?

I haven't been through a TSA checkpoint when landing in the US, but it might depend where you fly from. The airport I usually enter the US from, Schipol (Amsterdam), has the backscatter machines installed at the gates (not the terminal checkpoints)... it is clear that they are only used to meet USA conditions. It might be that flying from a country that is not bowing to pressure from the TSA requires a security scan to be sure it meets their ludicrous requirements.

I think he means on arrival in the US, not before you get on the plane.

I think his point is that some other countries don't take the latest TSA requirements seriously, and if you come from one of those countries, the TSA will screen you because of that.

I don't understand the point of that point. If the reason for the X-ray machines is to stop people from smuggling dangerous materials onto planes and using them to cause harm, scanning people after they get off the plane is the most literal analogue I've ever seen for shutting the barn door after the horses have fled.

Imagine a daycare center that had a policy of running background checks on its employees only once they quit. Would you feel like they were taking the children's safety very seriously?

I'm guessing the issue is that the physical layout of the terminal is designed under the assumption that everyone arriving on an international flight is connecting to a domestic flight, and CVG was not their final airport. In that case, they want people screened by US personnel against US policies before boarding those domestic flights.

It still seems like a waste of time and money for the TSA to screen people who are just going to go out to the bag claim though and not board another flight.

I don't do much (hardly any) international travel, but in my experience, in US airports the international arrivals and domestic departures are physically separate security zones. You can't get off an international flight and hop on a domestic flight without going through security again.

At PDX you need to clear the international arrival zone and go through TSA screening even to depart from an internation gate. Departing from an international gate requires the same screening for domestic flights. Arriving at international gates looks like the following:

Gate -> Corridor -> Customs -> International Baggage Claim (Explicitly so you can get your bags re-screened by US personnel) -> TSA screening -> airport concourse -> onward travel via domestic gates / onward travel via international gates / exit

The last time I went through this was from a flight from AMS. So coming from Schipol does not free you from the requirement to reclear security on the way out of the airport.

The International and Domestic security zones are not distinct, all international arrivals are required to be re-screened by US personnel before rejoining the regular security zone, no matter which onward destination.

It would be a waste of time - but if the airport layout would give those people access to the secured area of the airport, and there was no way to channel the connecting passengers separately from the exiting passengers, then you'd pretty much have no choice but to screen every arrival to your security standards. That would just be poor architectural decisions.

Perhaps the point of scanning the people flying is to justify spending money on the machines? The machines are being pushed in part by people who used to run the TSA, after all.

Back in '02, when people were still at high-paranoia following the initial terrorist attacks, my wife and I were flying to Bali via Japan and the Hong Kong. The plane landed in Japan only for refueling, but they pulled everyone off the place, ran us through metal detectors, and back onto the plane, making our departure an hour late.

I can't imagine what they were trying to do. Were they afraid we had fabricated weapons of our own in the 14+/- hours we'd been on the plane? What if we'd just left those weapons at our seats?

I know they will if you land at your first destination in the US and are catching a connecting flight - they will run you through security a second time before letting you into the secure area of the airport where you might board another aircraft - but that's only if you are connecting.

Then again - my experience travelling says this has a lot more to do with airport layout dictating security procedure more than anything else - some airports seem to change policies every time I fly - one time I have to collect my bags, the next I don't, the next I can actually just catch an international connection, the next time I can't without getting my bags, etc (all through the same airport through the past few years)

I'm theorizing here - maybe someone can answer - would the flight & airport in question be laid out such that, once passing through immigration, you were still in the secure area of the airport and able to board another aircraft, or was there a choice between "connecting flights" and "exit".

The only rational explanation I can come up with would be if the airport layout demanded this - but it seems unlikely.

This also seems like something that the author or someone with authority would have mentioned, as it's a deal-breaker that would likely have diffused the situation immediately.

You would still be in the secure area. The problem is that coming from an international flight you wouldn't necessarily be groped for explosives.

It's a good assumption that if they have explosives on a plane flying over the US, they are going to use it before they land.

The problem then is that the TSA is tasked with protecting an area that also contains people who do not intend to board aircraft - the airport design is faulty - there is no way for people who just need to pass customs and leave the airport to do so without exposing them to the secure departure area. (That shouldn't be an international airport in my book)

Plenty of airports were built before the need (perceived or real) for a security zone was discovered, Cincinnati being one of those. In some cases, airports have managed to come up with a reasonable design to cover all needs, but in some there are some not-very-ideal solutions in use. Cincinnati, again, apparently being one of these.

I recently (in the past month) flew back into the US from a couple of places:

Guadalajara --> Houston: no security besides customs & immigration São Paulo --> Houston: no security besides customs & immigration Brussels --> JFK: no security besides customs & immigration

(sort of off topic, but the thing that's been really annoying me lately is when you are forced -- due to the airport's layout -- to leave the secure area when transferring between terminals. This, coupled with gate areas that don't have arrival/departure boards, is freaking annoying.)

I flew Mexico City-SLC this month and there was no security beyond customs and immigration. My memory of IAH last year from Mexico City is that full TSA screening was required, but that was before backscatter machines.

One more data point. These may be useful for someone looking to enter the USA on a direct flight.

I flew Sydney-LAX last month and no extra security at the SYD gate. In past years doing the same flight there has been extra security, liquid checks, and random pat downs at the gate, and only for US bound flights.

It seems as though the other countries/airlines/airports are either ignoring the TSA requests or there has been a change in policy, given the amount of people who have been saying the same thing.

What's happening here is that Customs is an unsecured area, because everyone has just picked up their luggage. He's proceeding through a secured area to get out of the airport. Thus, the re-screening, and probable re-checking of bags and all that.

"I wasn't aware you needed to be irradiated just to enter into the US ... What is the rationale behind that?"

It's the end-run around the forthcoming tidal wave of baby-boomer retirees that stand to eviscerate Social Security. Throw some radiation & cancer into the mix, and you maybe they can shave off enough years of longevity to keep things solvent.

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