Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkqwzsoo | Hacker News Reader

At one point, I was travelling with my dad when the "shoes off" policy was relaxed (I think the shoes-off policy was relaxed a couple of weeks/months after the shoe bomber plot, but I can't recall exactly when -- and then it was put back permanently).

"Agent": Sir, I recommend you take your shoes off.

Dad: That's okay. I don't need to take my shoes off.

"Agent": Sir, I'm going to need you to take your shoes off NOW!

In addition to challenging the authority of the Memphis TSA agent, my dad is half Japanese and looks quite a bit less white than I do.

View on HN

My father has stopped flying entirely. He's got a pacemaker and sometimes needs a cane and has a small list of medications that he legitimately needs to have with him at all times. He's diabetic, as well. Though he's not very overweight, he just doesn't move as well as he once did.

TSA has made flying for him and people like him so incredibly difficult. He's just opted out. I don't blame him, either, though it does make visits more challenging now.

I mean honestly.... Why do people like this have to take their shoes off and manage all of their carry-ons and personals into bins and onto belts and ... The entire farce of the TSA is all so callous and genuinely stupid.

I'd really like to see an analysis of the total number of passenger-minutes that are spent waiting in TSA lines. Divide that by the avg human lifespan and compare it to the number of people killed or injured by a terrorist attack.

When looked at like that, TSA costs more total lifetimes than have ever been taken through terrorist attacks.

By multiple orders of magnitude proabably. I'm going to go ahead and call 5000 people who have been killed by aviation terrorism events. Assuming they all live to 90 years old, that's 450,000 man years tragically lost.

The FAA website stats that 630,000,000 people fly per year. If each of them takes 10 minutes to cross the line, that's 105,000,000 man-years lost per year...

You’re mixing man years and man hours. But it’s still over 11,000 man years spent in lines at the airport.

Wow, you're absolutely right. Screwed the math hard there. 10 minutes was a very low estimate though, especially in bigger airports like Seattle, SF, NYC.

That 630m figure is for US domestic flights.

Otherwise, thanks for doing the math on how much of our lives is killed by security screening.

Check Bruce Schneier's blog, I seem to recall he did some kind of breakdown like that a few years back.

I've seen this sort of things in videos of police encounters, too. "I suggest you do X" or "would you mind doing X" is some officers' way of being polite, but it leads to dangerous misunderstandings. When people say no, taking the statement literally, cops see them as trying to start a fight.

I'd love to see law enforcement trained in using basic, declarative sentences: "Sir, regulation X.Y.Z says you have to take your shoes off. Please step aside, do so, and rejoin the line."

That would require them to know what regulation backs up their request. Which in turn would require such a regulation to exist. TSA has a particularly bad track record on this (to be fair, the regulations did change absurdly rapidly for the first decade or so of their existence), but I’ve even encountered this problem with police officers.

Don't say "no," don't be confrontational, don't say anything. They'll be obvious about it if it's not optional.

It should not be the responsibility of individual members of the public not be threatened or assaulted by the authorities! Such rapid escalation from friendly to threatening should be a retraining issue.

> They'll be obvious about it if it's not optional.

I don't believe this is required (or even typical) in the US. Law enforcement is generally allowed to make non-mandatory requests and hope that you comply with them. A prime example is needing to explicitly invoke your right to remain silent (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127352...). You might also look up videos of people refusing to cooperate with the immigration checkpoints in various states along the Mexican border.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com