Airport Security Is Killing Us
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
If everyone opted out, the program would be scrapped. You can tell me about how the scanners give harmless amounts of radiation, but I don't really care. You have to stand for your principles. In this situation, a government contractor forced more security theater upon a country, with the only benefit of the entire charade going to their bottom line. Nobody is safer, an entire mode of transport has a new bottleneck, a government agency has expanded and is emboldened and now wants even broader jurisdiction, and as the article states, people are driving more and dying.
If we don't stand up and push back now, things will only get worse. More invasive, more annoying, more useless, more dangerous. And not an inch gained against the stated purpose of deterring terrorist attacks.
Or in the cabin. If you're the last to board, there's a very real possibility that they may have to gate-check your bag, which adds additional wait time at the end of your journey at best, and your bag arriving in Minnesota while you're touching down in Dallas at worst.
"...amounts paid for baggage services (such as Service G) are not subject to the tax" [http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/1002004.pdf]
Is this even possible when gate checking? They literally walk your bag down the stairs at the end of the gate and place it into the plane cargo hold. EDIT: At the end of the flight, your bag is walked up the stairs back into the jetway.
I personally love the gate check loophole. If you intentionally wait to board last, you get a free bag check.
Which meant that I didn't have it with me when my flight to London was cancelled and I had to stay overnight in Chicago (too bad since it had my washkit and a change of clothes in it) and that when the replacement flight was also cancelled and I ended up going to London with a different carrier, my bag didn't get home until a couple of days after I did.
I will not be flying with United Airlines again in a hurry.
On a direct flight, your bag is safe. If you have connections, may god have mercy on your pants.
YMMV with respect to the additional time. I also opt out and have had to wait as long as 15 minutes for the pat down (and to make matters worse in that instance, there was an elderly passenger behind me who had a medical exemption from the scanner and they waved him through while I had to stand and wait).
My advice is that if you do plan to opt out, allow for more than 3 minutes.
The entire procedure is completely bogus of course- everyt time I fly in the US now it's a question of: "How do I want to be violated today?"
It's highly variable. Sometimes you get the pat-down right away and then it only takes about 3 minutes, but most of the time you have to wait for the agent to come get you, and that can take up to 10 minutes in my experience.
But in any case, it's worth it (for the reasons you mentioned). I wish there were more of us that always opted-out.
What's more, these days I always choose to fly in a kilt, commando style, to make the whole process as awkward as possible for the screeners.
What about a t-shirt, perhaps? Printed on the shirt would be a calm and clear explanation of the problems with the scanners/groping. Everyone standing in line around you would see it, the TSA officers would see it, and it could get some conversations started.
TSA agents do not perform 'pat-downs'. Pat-downs are very quick checks to see if any obvious weapons are being concealed on someone's body. Police will do these before putting a suspect into a police vehicle, for instance.
TSA employees do what are called 'custody searches', designed to find contraband material on detainees. These are only performed under specific scenarios, such as being incarcerated.
Custody searches in this context are forbidden by the fourth amendment, by the way, regardless of what the TSA's legal team may claim.
As is x-raying baggage and body-scans.
Fourth amendment rights don't apply to the same extent when you are on private property, when there are balancing security concerns, when you enter a courthouse, when you enter a school, etc. You know the deal when you enter these places and you have a choice whether to enter them.
The idea that you have the same fourth amendment rights boarding a plan as you do in your house or car is ridiculous.
I'm not saying I agree with TSA searches, only that your normal forth amendment standard does not apply.
> when you enter a courthouse
> you have a choice whether to enter them
I also agree that, in practical terms, security at a courthouse faces many more real-world challenges than air travel.
That should tell us something about appropriate levels of security.
Yes, I disagree with a lot of their policies but this "Ron Paul" attitude of "the federal government actually has no power if you listen to my absurd interpretation of the constitution" isn't helping either. Its making my legitimate grievances sound lumped in with your extremist interpretations.
You can have sane security if you want it. The Europeans and others do it just fine. Its not illegal to search people or xray their luggage when they're coming on a plane. Deal with it. I'm getting sick of the weekly TSA hatefests. If site just a smaller reddit now? TSA has nothing to do with ycombinator or startups.
It strikes me that many of our problems stem from people holding on to and trying to propagate the fairy tale explanations they were indoctrinated with, instead of moving on and simply acknowledging how the present day government operates and sustains itself.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty...
Your argument doesn't even follow logically, as all the 4th Amendment requires is that searches be "reasonable", and "reasonable" is obviously subjective. It's a right practically tailor made for adjudication by the Supreme Court.
Given that bags have been subject to search for decades prior to "pat-down" or "custody" searches, and that it's hard to think of a more invasive search than one that allows officers to rifle through your personal luggage, I don't think Constitutionality is the issue here. We should simply pass a federal law restricting the TSA's ability to electronically strip search or invasively grope passengers.
I'm just as disgusted by airport electronic strip searches as you are, but we shouldn't using sure-loser arguments against them.
I generally have a greater need to fly than to avoid being felt up. This does not mean I consent to being felt up. The fact that the Supreme Court mistakes this for consent bothers me greatly.
Anyone who wants to know what I consent to has to ask me.
That's another example of where the US fails on human rights.
Furthermore, with the sandwich, there are alternatives available to me. I can choose to go somewhere else that serves cheaper sandwiches, or make my own. There are some places that I just cannot get to without flying; and some for which getting there would take so long as to be completely impractical, thereby cutting me off from a large swath of possible activity if I do not "consent" to being touched in the nether bits.
Their argument is like saying that by walking into a fraternity, a woman consents to being groped. Hey, maybe they even put up a sign saying "we grope women who enter here." That argument does not make it consent.
Furthermore, you are not able to remove your consent once you reach the head of the line. At may airports, they subject only some passengers to having nude photos taken of them by x-ray (or groping if you don't consent to the backscatter). But at the point when you get to the head of the line and find out if you're lucky, you are not able to leave in order to avoid the search; they have arrested people for trying to do so.
There are certain ways to coerce people to create an illusion of consent; but that shouldn't be confused with actual consent.
Nor do you have a constitutionally protected right to air travel.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/40103
"A citizen of the United States has a public right of transit through the navigable airspace."
I choose to exercise that right by paying an airline to transport me by air.
"Oh, sure, you may have a constitutionally protected right to free speech. But upon accepting employment or payment for anything, you waive that right." Hey, the government has the right to regulate interstate commerce, and has ruled that even commerce within a state counts because it impacts prices on an interstate level. So let's just do away with the whole bill of rights by saying "you give implied consent to no longer have these rights by engaging in commerce." Done and done.
That's not consent, that's coercion.
You consent to lots of things by driving on public roads, yet many people's livelihoods depend on driving on public roads. It doesn't mean that the consent for driving wasn't given.
No it's not. You can quit and get a new job. If you can't immediately find a new job, you will be on unemployment and food stamps. You will literally still have food on the table.
Edit: by quit I meant don't get on the plane, resulting in being fired
Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no Supreme court ruling on the constitutionality of any of these techniques in the context of airport security. I'm glad to be proven wrong.
The most relevant ruling I know of was from a half century ago and it wasn't the Supreme Court talking. United States v. Edwards, 498 F.2d 496, 500 (2d Cir.1974)
The fact of the matter is that it's SCOTUS that sets the standards here, not the Constitution.
"Constitutionally reasonable administrative searches" in the context of an airport are legal, per SCOTUS. Consent has nothing to do with it, that concept does not apply here.
But, critically, SCOTUS has never ruled on whether the current TSA techniques are constitutionally reasonable. The only thing for sure is that the 3rd says that they must be 'minimally intrusive' and 'escalat[e] in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search'.
For further reading: United States Vs. Aukui from the 9th http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1265662.html
The case you've cited here is one where the 9th circuit held TSA's searches to be reasonable.
Or in other words - NYC passed a law prohibiting the sale of sugary drinks over 16 ounces in size. To the best of my knowledge, the Supreme Court has never made a decision on if that action is Constitutional. And I strongly doubt that it ever will. Does that mean the legality of the new law is under doubt? Absolutely not.
My beef is with mandatory -custody- searches, which are implemented as either electronic/radioactivity scans of the entire flesh and/or full physical inspections of the body. These were not in use prior to the TSA's inception and nobody has ruled on whether they are constitutionally reasonable or not.
Well duh. Because the Constitution is inanimate, due to actually just being paper and ink. Meanwhile, SCOTUS consists of living people with free will and the ability to walk around.
However, nothing about these facts implies that what the Sovereign Council of Nine says is consistent with the ideals that led to the creation of said document.
"""As other circuits have held, and as the Supreme Court has strongly suggested, screening passengers at an airport is an "administrative search" because the primary goal is not to determine whether any passenger has committed a crime but rather to protect the public from a terrorist attack. See United States v. Aukai, 497 F.3d 955, 958–63 (9th Cir. 2007) (en banc) (passenger search at airport checkpoint); United States v. Hartwell, 436 F.3d 174, 178–81 (3d Cir. 2006) (Alito, J.) (same); United States v. Edwards, 498 F.2d 496, 499–501 (2d Cir. 1974) (Friendly, J.) (carry-on baggage search at airport); see also Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U.S. 419 (2004) (police set up checkpoint to obtain information about earlier crash); Mich. Dep’t of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990) (sobriety checkpoint). An administrative search does not require individualized suspicion. City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 41, 47–48 (2000) (individualized suspicion required when police checkpoint is “primarily [for] general crime control,” that is, “to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing” unlike “searches at places like airports ... where the need for such measures to ensure public safety can be particularly acute”). Instead, whether an administrative search is “unreasonable” within the condemnation of the Fourth Amendment “is determined by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.” United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112, 118-19 (2001) (internal quotation marks omitted)."""
The Edwards reference you mentioned is in there, but so are others. In "United States v. Aukai" (2007) the 9th Circuit said "We have held that airport screening searches, like the one at issue here, are constitutionally reasonable administrative searches because they are "conducted as part of a general regulatory scheme in furtherance of an administrative purpose, namely, to prevent the carrying of weapons or explosives aboard aircraft, and thereby to prevent hijackings."
In United States v. Hartwell (3d Cir. 2006), para. 8 "We hold that the search was permissible under the administrative search doctrine. Cf. United States v. Marquez, 410 F.3d 612, 616 (9th Cir.2005) ("Airport screenings of passengers and their baggage constitute administrative searches and are subject to the limitations of the Fourth Amendment.").
These were all easy to find.
Administrative search at airports is legal, yes. Consent is not required or relevant, yes. Bag checks and scans are mandated by law, yes. Magnetometer searches are protected by law, yes. Weapons searches are protected by law, yes. Carrying a meth pipe in your pocket is probably a bad idea, yes.
I am very specifically arguing that modern physical custody searches (aka "pat-downs") as performed by the TSA do not qualify under any Fourth Amendment exemptions. They have not been ruled as constitutionally reasonable upon by the SCOTUS, and that until they are, they are forbidden by the fourth amendment.
Administrative searches must be 'minimally intrusive' and 'escalat[e] in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search'. Custody searches, in my personal opinion, do not qualify as minimally intrusive. Prior to the TSA's inception they were only used in very restricted settings. Now they're considered commonplace.
Were it true then every single new law or administrative action (of the federal government) would need to be reviewed by the Supreme Court before it could be applied. Instead, we have the court system to address these problems after the fact. We assume that laws and policies are constitutional when put into place and use the court system to correct instances where they are not.
For the sake of discussion, let's switch to something similar. The shoe scans are a nuisance and are not effective. People dislike it even worse than the scanners and pat-downs. It takes time, which slows down the number of people who can be processed. Some people have balance or other problems, so it means there needs to be a chair during the line before screening. Others have religious or cultural aversion to putting socks or bare feet on a dirty ground, so many airports provide booties or paper slippers. This makes everything more complex.
The requirement that people must take their shoes off has not "been ruled as constitutionally reasonable upon by the SCOTUS." Therefore, under your viewpoint is it forbidden by the 4th amendment?
The view of the circuit courts, and implied view of the Supreme Court, seems to be that the pat-downs which you mention are reasonable under the 4th amendment, given the "degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests" and that it occurs in a place where "the need for such measures to ensure public safety can be particularly acute."
I do admit that declaring the TSA's current behavior as 'forbidden' is overzealous and legally inaccurate. I'm just an angry textbox and not a lawyer. :)
What "threat" are we defending ourselves against?
I also stipulate that removal of the security protocols would NOT lead to more hijackings or random murders on aircraft. It's specifically because of the fact that certain places are "weapon free" zones that they are targeted by criminal malfeasance. Knowing that most if not all of your opponents are unarmed is a HUGE tactical advantage.
The problem is that everyone believes they have a right to be defended by someone else. You of course don't have to defend yourself, but your defense is truly your own business.
This is not to say that acts of offense or even attempts at offense shouldn't be punished. We do have a right to justice, and simply put, that is all.
Odds of dying from lightning strike: 1 in 134,906
Odds of being legally executed: 1 in 111,179
Odds of dying from contact with bees/wasps: 1 in 79,842
Odds of being shot: 1 in 6,609
Odds of dying from a fall 1 in 163
Odds of dying in a terrorist attack: 1 in 3,500,000
Maybe we should switch the TSA to bee patrol.
(Source: http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Picture%20Library/News/web_graphics...)
Lets convert it to a cancer awareness foundation; where they touch you for actually important reasons.
Source: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/lifetime-probabili...
Maybe the TSA should enforce traffic laws or build commuter rail lines.
Also, odds of dying from bees, etc. probably depend a lot on if specific person is allergic to the particular toxin or not, which is not random for this person.
Why? Picture this. Someone (likely a politician) crusades hard to have the TSA dismantled, and is successful. No matter how much better the system that replaces it is, there is always a chance that someone slips through and takes down a plane, and 300+ people are killed.
In the throng of people screaming that "something needs to be done to stop this from happening again", who wants to be "that guy" who lobbied to have the TSA dismantled/replaced? Former TSA proponents will jump up and down and scream "See! This is why we can't have nice things!"
I don't think anyone will touch it...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/cya_security_1...
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise -- you're using flawed logic. What would you think of an oncologist whose patients never contract serious, life-threatening cancer? Is he ordering unnecessary tests and procedures on people who aren't really sick, or is he catching all the cancers so early that they're never life-threatening?
See the point? I'm certainly not arguing one way or another about the TSA, just that your argument contains a very serious logical flaw. Maybe terrorists, knowing about the TSA, won't take the risk of going near an airport.
> ... so there's no reason to believe it would have handled this incident.
Flawed argument, flawed conclusion.
Since the science tells us that his methods reduce the rate of cancer (all metrics we can test to a degree), I'd think he's doing good work.
TSA, on the other hand, has been been called out by many actual security professionals for having shit practices that don't actually work. They're basically pulling a rain man scam and people like you are buying into it because you think there's no way to prove it hasn't magically stopped something we didn't even hear about. Actual professionals who don't have money invested in one conclusion or the other are saying it isn't helping anything.
Yes, that's true, but (a) those "professionals" have no better logical basis than you do, and (b) this doesn't change the fact that you were using flawed logic, my only reason for posting. The fact that there haven't been any terrorist arrests at airports doesn't mean what you seem to think.
> They're basically pulling a rain man scam ...
This is counterproductive. It might be true, it might be false, but it doesn't follow from the evidence. Again, I'm not taking a position on the TSA, only the logic.
> Actual professionals who don't have money invested in one conclusion or the other are saying it isn't helping anything.
Name one who is using an argument more scientific than "they haven't caught any terrorists!" And again, this is not about whether the claim is true, this is about the basis for deciding whether it's true.
Also, there are other ways terrorists could hurt us that would be much easier to exploit than getting on a plane. Why has this never been tried? There is just no reason to believe TSA is doing anything useful. The burden of proof lies with them and their extraordinary claims that they're somehow keeping us safe with their bullshit ineffective procedures.
I agree 100%! The formation of this organization was reactionary policy making at its worst. The TSA is nothing more then a works program for people who are barely qualified to do anything.
There's no proof that TSA is making things any safer either. No one will ever pull another fast one on the passengers of a plane again. We all know that the planes themselves are weapons, so I'm pretty sure most passengers will go down fighting if terrorists try to take control of the cockpit.
This is precisely why it's called security theater.
Which is why I don't understand why pilots have to be screened. They are flying a huge flying bomb. What will screening them for nail-clippers solve? (Side note: I did, in fact, have my nail clippers taken by the TSA once)
A person could be supportive of the cause without being willing to sacrifice his life. If pilots could get into restricted areas un-screened they could bring in bombs or weapons which they hand off to third parties. This would also be a more efficient use of a limited resource (the hypothetical Taliban sympathizer flying for a commercial airline).
They can't even repeal the comically silly shoe removal procedure (unless you're under 12 or over 75, because no terr'ist would ever foot kerplode those demographic stereotypes).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230381540457733...
Obama won't do it, because he's shown himself to keep whatever things from Bush are convenient if unsavory, like Guantanamo (saying you're going to close it and actually closing it are two different things).
I find that number utterly staggering. Wikipedia says that the homicide rate in the US is 4.2 per 100,000, which is more than 2.5 times the rate in Canada and 3.5 times the rate in the UK.
Japan is 0.4 per 100,000.
Japan has had the strictest gun control in the world for the longest time, and has a homicide rate to match.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Also, Japan's murder stats are rigged -- if the police don't know who the killer is it isn't a murder, it's an "abandoned body". See Freakonomics for more on this.
But it's an interesting data point.
This article tries to dissuade that control gun is responsible for the low homicide rate in it's summary.
http://www.guncite.com/journals/dkjgc.html
"The idea that Japanese gun laws should serve as model for other nations is not uncommon. Some Americans propose laws even more severe than Japan's.[124] Often, the suggestion comes as an offhand remark in an newspaper editorial, but even when the suggestion is advanced by scholars, the reasoning is often superficial and unpersuasive.
L Craig Parker, an American expert on the Japanese police, proposes that the United States adopt Japanese gun control and also other Japanese strategies, such as a National Police Agency. Parker's brief discussion of guns, however, simply recites statistics showing that Japan has less guns and less gun crime. His only evidence that gun control would actually reduce crime in America is a study by Dr Leonard Berkowitz arguing that guns cause aggression. Actually, what the studies by Berkowitz and others showed was that people acted more aggressively towards other people if the other person was associated with weapons; for example, motorists reacted more aggressively to other vehicles slow to accelerate when a red light turned green if the slow car had a rude bumper sticker and a rifle in a gun rack.[125]
Summing up the perspective of many gun prohibitionists, one Japanese newspaper reporter writes, 'It strikes me as clear that there is a distinct correlation between gun control laws and the rate of violent crime. The fewer the guns, the less the violence'.[126] But the claim that fewer guns correlates with less violence is plainly wrong. America experienced falling crime and homicide rates in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1980s, all periods during which per capita gun (p.40)ownership, especially handgun ownership, rose.[127] And Japan, with its severe gun control, suffers no less murder than Switzerland, one of the most gun-intensive societies on earth.[128]
Japan's gun control does play an important role in the low Japanese crime rate, but not because of some simple relation between gun density and crime. Japan's gun control is one inseparable part of a vast mosaic of social control. Gun control underscores the pervasive cultural theme that the individual is subordinate to society and to the Government. The same theme is reflected in the absence of protection against Government searches and prosecutions. The police are the most powerful on earth, partly because of the lack of legal constraints and particularly because of their social authority."
I found that article from this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-l...
This website gives a walk through of the process required to legally obtain a gun in Canada:
In 35 years of urban living in Canada, I've never seen a firearm that was not being carried by a law enforcement official. I do not know anyone who owns a fire arm.
This seems very different compared to some of the slogans I saw in the recent U.S. election where you could "vote and win a free gun". http://www.inquisitr.com/376318/vote-in-georgia-win-a-free-g...
You have to pass a safety test (common sense, plus some regulations) and get few references to slightly increase the chance that you are not criminally insane to get PAL, but it is really less than a weekend worth of effort (and some waiting for papers).
[1] If you're at the bottom rung and statistics say that you're about as likely to win the lottery as to get out, the system will almost certainly seem rigged to you even if it isn't.
My quick glace showed America at 4.2, the next developed country is Finland at 2.2, so living in America you're 1.9 times more likely to be murdered than any other developed country.
Of course, the vast majority of Developed countries have a murder rate less than 1.0 per 100,000 people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
And furthermore, having a tangible number like 150,000 people murdered drives home the stark reality of the situation.
Where I live, Oregon, the homicide rate is 2.1 per 100,000 people, a little bit better than Finland as a whole. Hawaii is at 1.2, New Hampshire and Vermont are at 1.3, and Minnesota is at 1.4.
Contrast those with Louisiana at 11.2 per 100,000 people (!), Mississippi at 8.0, New Mexico at 7.5, and South Carolina at 6.8.
It's clear that the homicide rates in the US are aligned mostly along socio-economic and racial lines, so it doesn't make sense to compare the whole country against the more homogeneous states such as Finland, Norway, Germany, and Japan.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...
Of course looking at a country-wide statistic is an average across the whole country - that's the entire point. I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could find a part of Oregon where the homicide rate is 0.1, but that doesn't tell us much about the bigger picture.
Is America one united country, or isn't it?
Norway is 5 million people.
Sweden is 9.5 million people.
Michigan is 9.8 million people.
California is 37.6 million people.
New York is 19.4 million people
Germany is 81.7 million people.
Please keep scale in mind.
Clearly Western Europe is a horrible, brutal, violent place against which the inhabitants of these countries should be clicking their tongues.
However, America is ridiculously diverse culturally, and just using the national average is useless for understanding anything about America.
Perhaps the Americans in the thread aren't trying to avoid an unfavorable comparison - it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own country. Perhaps they're actually trying to teach you something about their country and point out that relying on averages can be misleading.
I agree. We're talking about understanding America compared to other countries, not things about America internally.
>it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own country
I completely disagree with that statement. How many times have you heard someone say "Best country in the world" with no understanding of the outside world? I'm continually shocked when meeting Americans that have absolutely no idea their infrastructure, education, health care, leave entitlements and general quality of life sucks compared to the developed world. They genuinely think they are the best in the world because that has been driven into them from day 1.
> relying on averages can be misleading.
Obviously looking at an average is exactly that. An average across the entire population, not a deep dive into where is the highest and where is the lowest, etc.
For example, we are taught about slavery and the genocide of Native Americans in primary school. We dedicate an entire month to Black History because we are acutely aware of our status as one of the most institutionally racist countries on the planet. We have impasses at the highest levels of government over dealing with our failure to control healthcare costs, and that is something that many Americans are cognizant of. We are repeatedly informed of our failure to create a stable market economy. I can go on.
Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious discussion.
An opinion, it seems, that is not uncommon.
http://blogs.reuters.com/bernddebusmann/2011/10/28/america-w...
> Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious discussion.
Upon arriving in America in 2003, I had no preconceptions. I'm speaking from my experiences living and working in the country.
Your supporting evidence cited a Fox News poll, which is probably the most biased and self-selecting demographic I can think of. That's one of our well-publicized failings, actually--the inherent biases of corporate media and the echo chamber of politics.
I'm not sure how this makes the US different from the countries it's being compared to. They all have more and less dangerous regions. There are more and less dangerous regions within a block's walk from me, but the average over that area gives me a general basis of comparison with other areas.
I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health outcomes.) It is, basically, that the parts of the US that the average Scandinavian or Japanese citizen would ever be in have comparable rates of terribleness to their own countries - just ignore the massive portion of the US behind the curtain.
e.g. I am more likely to be killed when moving to an average Chicago from an average Finland. Since Chicago is segregated, however, very few white people would ever see an average Chicago - so an average Chicago can't be a meaningful comparison.
There is, and that is a characteristic of the United States in general of which most who live there are keenly aware. This is why they speak quickly against comparisons of the United States as a whole against Scandinavian countries or Japan. Those countries do not have the ethnic heterogeneity or deep-seated institutional racism that the United States has experienced and still experiences.
For example, my state sterilized violent criminals and the mentally disabled until the 1980s, most of them being ethnic minorities. This would be unthinkable in Sweden, for example.
We also have easy access to guns and a destabilized internal culture in ethnically-heterogeneous areas, where community respect is a factor of how much crime you have committed or how many people you have killed.
You are exactly right, however, in that living in an upper-class neighborhood in Chicago would skew your perspective of crime in America.
America is not unique in that it faces challenges and obstacles to being successful. Japan had two nuclear weapons used on it's citizens, half of Western Europe has been invaded and occupied in the last 70 years, and Australia has had the worst drought ever recorded. Those examples barely scratch the surface.
Your line of reasoning that America is "unique" or somehow "different" because of the challenges it continues to face is a perfect example of American exceptionalism.
Facing challenges and obstacles is all part of the challenge of building a successful country where the average person on the street has a high quality of life. When compared against other first world countries, which have also faced very large challenges to their success, America does not rank well. Stop making excuses and finding reasons to excuse yourself from greater comparisons.
I don't appreciate your belligerent discourse, putting words in my mouth, or typecasting me as a brainwashed patriot. I am well aware of America's problems and I recognize that the United States as a whole is falling well behind in many important metrics. You are not buying my argument that these metrics are skewed greatly by historical and regional concerns that are outside the control of the federal government, and that is your prerogative. But please do not belittle me and accuse me of being ignorant of the world's problems.
There is nothing unique about that. That is the case of all countries in the world.
I wonder what you would like to see happen? Rather than compare Japan to America, should I compare Japan to Oregon, and Japan to Louisiana like they are separate places? I wonder what the attitude would be then? Everyone in Oregon sits pretty because they are ranked with the world's best, and people in Louisiana are condemned to life of poverty and suffering?
I wonder what would happen if violence and poverty broke out in a corner of Oregon, vastly changing it's position - would you then further break-down Oregon into counties, so once again you can sit pretty in the knowledge your county ranks well and can ignore the others?
You sound like a baseball team manager who's team constantly finishes towards the bottom of the ladder- then you say "yeah, but we have unique challenges because our team is made up of different races, etc. If we had a better pitcher and short stop, we'd be so much better". The reality is you have the team you have. You can choose to work with it as a team to improve things, or you can segregate yourself and say "well, I'm a great first baseman, so screw everyone else". How is that productive?
A country is made up of the sum of it's parts - every country has areas that are way above average, and areas that are way below average for an enormous number of reasons - that, of course, is the definition of average
Apologies for offending you, that was not my intention, though reading back through my comments I see I have not expressed myself well.
>these metrics are skewed greatly by historical and regional concerns that are outside the control of the federal government
These metrics aren't "skewed" by, they are determined by. That your concerns (if I translate "ethnic heterogeneity" as "racism") are the reason for the bad numbers is clear. The reason that they should be excluded is unclear.
Racism and easy access to guns are written into our constitution.
I'm not excusing this perspective on US statistics, I'm saying that it's racist. It's the view that if compared properly, the US isn't so bad. Proper comparison involves excluding groups who are discriminated against from the comparison.
The truth is that there are some very nice places in America, and some not very nice places. In the nice places, statistics is good or better than a developed country, in the not nice places, statistics is worth - because these places are nothing like developed country. While they are inside the borders of the USA, their life is very different from the life of the nice places. Smaller countries frequently do not have such diversity, and averages can be deceptive (when Bill Gates walks into a bar, average wealth of the bar patron raises significantly, even though nobody really got any richer).
Classifying America as one solid country all across is, to be honest, quite inappropriate. It's more of a slightly more put-together European Union, with a federal government existing just to make sure everyone plays fairly.
The parent had asked if the US in particular was one country. In actually, it's not quite that simple. Similar reason why people refer to Canadian provinces by their provincial title in some circumstances. British Columbia is only incidentally related to Nunavut. At the same time, Washington state is only incidentally similar to Alabama.
It's still far less prevalent than in the US.
Factor in easy access to modern weaponry, an actively-discriminating and mostly white police force, and the war on drugs, and you have a mixing pot of racial tension, poverty, and crime.
Oregon is mostly white, so is Minnesota, Vermont, and New Hampshire. A city like New Orleans is 67% black, is mostly poor, and has one of the highest homicide rates in the country. I haven't come across a city like that in the UK.
My home town, Portland, is extremely segregated. The black population here is concentrated in an area smaller than a square mile in the Northeast quarter, and both crime rates and gang activity there outrank the rest of the city by a factor of five. This is a consequence of Oregon's racist policies (our state constitution actually banned African-American residency) that were in force until World War II, when a large black population migrated here to work at a shipbuilding yard in Northeast. After the war, a flood took out the shipbuilding yard and put most of those families out of work; their descendants are still in the same area, subject to socioeconomic pressures that keep them there.
So while Portland might sound like a great place to live, it is only because the crime is segregated into a small section of the city while white people enjoy kitchy neighborhoods and craft fairs.
But you cannot deny that some regions of the US are developed, are great places to live, and are comparable in terms of geographic area, population, and economic output with the European countries mentioned in this thread. Basically, to anyone who has spent time here, Louisiana is as different from Oregon as Lithuania is from Denmark. To lump all the states together and draw meaning from the statistical average is to fundamentally misunderstand what America is: a coalition of independent states, with different agendas and demographics.
Are you saying the agenda of Louisiana is to have murder rates, poverty, health and education comparable to undeveloped countries?
Despite policy, DC also had the highest rate of homicide by firearm: 35.4 per 100,000 in 2005.
If remove Eastern Europe, then the homicide rates for the rest of Europe are:
Northern Europe 1.5
Southern Europe 1.4
Western Europe 1.0
Conversely, including other parts of the Americas (ie Canada and Central America) massively increases the average homicide rate - Central America's rate is a truly shocking 28.5
I usually travel 2-4 times a year by myself as a single male. I plan for security (eg. I don't try to bring along liquids and wear shoes that are easily removed) and haven't had to wait in a security line longer than 15 minutes in the US in 6+ years.
I have been pulled aside twice to be patted down by the TSA, neither of which invasive nor did they get near my genitals. In contrast I have also been patted down by airport security in Belgium (much more invasive, didn't touch crotch) and been frisked twice by police in the USA (very invasive, definitely did touch crotch). [I have no knowledge of the female experience of being frisked - unfortunately I suspect a much higher level of both discomfort and inappropriate groping]
I don't like that our security is based stupid rules instead of smart security analysis, but the level of vitriol I see in the internet is totally disproportionate to my experience. The worst part of flying for me is getting stuck in the security line behind some person who still doesn't know full bottles of water aren't allowed through security and then try to argue with the TSA agents in an attempt to save $4 - and given that I still get through the line often under 10 minutes, that is more of pet peeve than a real issue worth complaining about.
It's always a delightful start to a journey to hold your struggling infant in your bare socks while some college dropout pretending to be a lab tech tests your formula for explosive residue and your wife figures out how to cram the stroller through the X-ray machine. Definitely try to avoid flying now.
If it doesn't make you feel like shit given how airport security works right now, I respectfully submit your shit-meter is calibrated wrong.
But also, two points:
1) Your flying experience would be quite different with kids.
2) The flying experience varies very widely by airport. Often by terminal within airport. Flying Virgin America out of BOS is a very different proposition from flying Virgin America out of SFO, and also quite different from flying United out of BOS.
But part of what I'm trying to understand is why any of the current rules "should" make me feel like shit to go through - taking a few things out of my bag and removing my shoes are easy and quick. [Of course I sympathize with people who have horror stories, but I don't think everyone posting on HN, Slashdot and Reddit have personally been treated egregiously].
What is it I am missing? Is there a moral principle people of having to go through security people are upset about? Or frustration that the TSA is a large part security theatre? Or is it that so many people traveling do so in configurations that get much more hassle than I do - traveling with children, unavoidable liquids, medical devices, etc. ?
> taking a few things out of my bag and removing my shoes are easy and quick
There's also taking off your belt or suspenders (and then trying to keep your pants from falling off, or risking arrest if they do), taking off your watch, putting your wallet on a belt where random people can make off with it, and having to choose between a pat-down search or standing in a machine with your arms over your head for a while, all for no particularly good reason.
Even the shoes thing is pretty ridiculous, especially given the state of cleanliness of the floors in airports, speaking as someone who distinctly recalls a time when you just wore your shoes through the metal detector, just like you still do in most countries. (Oh, and I should note that at Reagan National there are booties available at the security checkpoint so all the Congress-folk won't have to deal with the dirty floors like people at other airports.)
Back to your questions, in order:
The frustration _is_ in large part about the security theater aspect. Little things like having to throw out the water bottle that Israeli security already cleared through, the completely arbitrary and nonsensical rules about liquids, the perfunctory pat-downs whose only purpose is to be annoying so as to force people into the scanners, the ineffective scanners, and the general disproportionality of the response to the problem being solved. Basically, I would be a lot more OK with more stringent security if I felt there were a point to it, not just official ass-covering.
The other part of the frustration is that even the rules that are in place are enforced pretty arbitrarily. At some airports, in some security lanes, walking through a metal detector with a sleeping baby in a sling is OK; at others they will force you to take the baby out (waking him up) and hold in arms through the metal detector. You don't know which until you show up at the metal detector: it seems to be the TSA agent's call. Same thing for whether the 3-month-old's booties have to come off and go through the X-ray, just in case you stuck 3-4 grams of explosive in the soles or something.
And a last, most important, problem I have with all this is that I _do_ travel with kids a good bit. And my concern is that my children are learning that having to take off your clothes and be searched because someone randomly decides so is OK. The basic fact that government power is, and should be, limited and that there is such a thing as human dignity is that much harder to teach to kids who're dealing with airports on a regular basis. And _that_, of all the TSA activities, is what I despise them most: that they're in the business of making people be used to being treated like criminals.
Is there a disparity or is it that Slashdot and HN post articles about TSA abuses but not non-technical police abuses? Most people don't even seem to think frisking is an abuse of power, (though it seems like you may disagree with that), so why the outrage at the TSA but not the police?
AFTER EDIT: I wonder what aspect of this people disagree with. Do you still want to have to take your shoes off in airports?
Further edit, to reply to the first kind reply:
I still don't think attacking terrorists relentlessly is ever beneficial.
I guess that's an empirical question of history and current events. What does help people lead tolerant, civilized lives and be at peace with other people who may have differing opinions? I read a biography of Joseph Stalin back in the 1990s, after the Soviet archives became available to independent researchers, and the striking thing about how Joseph Stalin developed his influence in the Bolshevik movement was that he was a very active terrorist, frequently directly involved in random bomb attacks. We should consider the facts about Sri Lanka and Rwanda and other places to get a reality check on the power of terrorism.
I think communism mostly collapsed (as it mostly has by now) with the help of information flow into countries living under communist dictatorships that were established in some cases by domestic terrorism and in some cases by armed invasion from another country. The case of eastern and western Germany is especially illustrative: it's just where the tanks stopped after the armistice that ended the European phase of World War II that determined which parts of Germany became the postwar Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) and which became the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Several of the communist governments of eastern Europe were turned out of power largely peacefully when Western mass media made it all too apparent how different life was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But it took an entire human lifetime for communism to decline in its influence on Europe.
So, yeah, if a peaceful process of information flow could bring Afghanistan into the Twenty-First Century, I'm all for that. I don't see how any rational person who knows well how other people live could want a whole country to be living under Taliban rule. But the Taliban's method is not to let most people in Afghanistan or Pakistan decide the issue freely. Their method is to give girls and women no voice, all non-Muslims little or no voice, and any Muslim who thinks that Islam is consistent with science and progress little or no voice. They use violence and thuggery to get their way in the areas they control. So, yes, if they are willing to send people onto airplanes to fly from Europe to the United States with bombs in their shoes (as they have been), I say let loose the drones, and let's keep the Taliban leaders hiding in caves and unable to travel more rapidly than at goat speed until peaceful news and education campaigns have enough time to win over so many of the common people of the world that the Taliban can no longer gain influence even through threats. Taliban delenda est. Peacefully or violently, the Taliban must be destroyed.
Assuming the big risk of terrorism is Islamic extremism (and originating from the Middle East) is a naïve, American-centric view: plenty of us live our lives more threatened by local separatist groups than by Islamic extremism. The big risk in the UK today is still Irish separatist groups, likewise in the Basque country.
Ignoring all that: I still don't think attacking terrorists relentlessly is ever beneficial. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, as the saying goes: they are driven not to destroy, but to get their aims. The IRA were never going to be defeated by force: by killing the nationalist freedom fighters you inherently radicalized more, and the same is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq to an even bigger degree. To many, it's not a case of evil infidels attacking, but rather the evil foreign aggressor killing their friends and family — if a foreign country attacked yours, claiming to rid you of evil and imposing their morals on you, would you stand by as they killed people you knew, under the promise of a better land? This is how the coalition forces are seen by many, especially in Iraq.
Defeating terrorism by force is like defeating the Hydra by force: everyone you kill radicalizes two more.
Pull out a map of the region. The main reason the taliban got to be so powerful is that Pakistan's ISI (intelligence agency) considered a Taliban-run Afghanistan strategically useful in the ongoing struggle between Pakistan and India over the territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
PS don't assume that because I'm Irish I supported the IRA's objective - quite the opposite, in fact.
The Taliban have a clear military objective too: remove the infidels and their supporters from the country that was formerly theirs.
quite how this is any different from the IRA, semantically or morally, I'm really not sure.
The Taliban have a clear military objective too: remove the infidels and their supporters from the country that was formerly theirs.
They were stoning and beheading people and generally running Afghanistan as a medieval hellhole when they were in charge of the place without any miitary opposition, back in the 1990s.
My grand-uncle was an IRA man starting in the 1920's, and probably supported them in some way into the 1980's. It is difficult to convey the depth of feeling that folks like my uncle felt. His father was imprisoned for writing things unfavorable to the British. His uncle was deported for sedition. His entire community was impoverished by onerous taxation and discrimination.
The Taliban want to embrace a fundamentalist vision of Islamic law and institute a theocratic government. Removing foreign influences is a rallying cry, but not the core objective -- they dominated the country well after the Soviet withdrawal, and were themselves a product of foreign intervention. (Ie. Pakistan)
This implies enthusiastic support of constant US intervention in foreign lands. Maybe that's not what you meant, but I'm guessing it's what people are reacting to.
He's acting like the Taliban is a personal threat to him when traveling by air. They are not, and citing things like Richard Reid (who was British), do not support the argument.
There are repressive regimes all over the world, many that commit atrocities much worse than the Taliban, yet I still feel that I should be able to board a flight without someone putting their hands on my penis.
The whole Taliban argument seems misplaced as well considering nearly all of the terrorists that attacked on 9/11 (the cause of the increased airport security) were nearly all from Saudi Arabia.
So while we do nothing to Saudi Arabia, this person wants to feel safer flying by dropping bombs on Pakistanis.
Stupid on many levels.
I'm constantly surprised that when it comes to regime change that there isn't an effort to set up some satellites and air-drop some mobile smartphones with data plans designed with the same principals as one-laptop-per-child.
Look at what Facebook and Twitter did for the Arab Spring.
The reason why airdropping mobile phones would not work is very simple - first, they would not work (no electricity, no coverage in most of the territory), second, the ruling powers would execute everybody that uses it. And they are quite good at executing people for ... well, anything they like. Limiting flow of information to majority of people is quite easy, if the regime is ruthless enough to enforce it.
OLPC is possible only with local authorities' cooperation. Without it, it could achieve nothing.
It is, in fact, terrorism itself.
If you think your life as a Western consumer is somehow non-violent and unrelated to the global situation, I pity your naïveté.
I haven't the time to expound further.
There are lots and lots of things wrong with Western policy towards Central Asia, but the causal argument boils down to 'you made me do it', which is almost never true.
It's the same as saying putting a murderer into prison is the same as kidnapping an innocent child. Both limit freedom, but if you think for a minute, you'll find the difference. Try it.
Are you honestly too callous and/or imbecilic to think that calling this "collateral damage" changes the situation for someone who's life has been destroyed by a foreign entity?
Again, I'm speechless at how deeply some have imbibed the propaganda of the war machine. Please, please recognize the terrible mistake in your logic.
[...] I pity your naïveté
Are you honestly deluded [...]
Are you honestly too callous and/or imbecilic [...]
First and foremost, there is simply no recourse for smsm42's argument, no recourse that that holds reason to a higher degree than nationalism.
Particularly,
nobody cares how they behave once they fulfill that one simple
condition - they don't murder anybody, don't blow up stuff and don't
kidnap and behead people they consider infidels.
Now, let's move to the matter at hand.
The crux of tokenadult's argument is that, above all:
Americans and other people in developed countries get to lead
civilized, advanced lives in the Twenty-First Century.
How, I ask, can we lead civilized lives while actively participating in war?
There is a disconnect between the technologically and socially liberated, wonderfully progressive population of Americans imagined in tokenadult's words and the utter chaos and violence unleashed in the reality of ground invasions and air strikes. The problem with tokenadult's argument is that this break in the chain of causality is a complete illusion.
Now, you may argue, how can a "civilian" be participating in a war they did not decide to enter, and was in fact prompted by a major attack?
To which I would reply, I'm not talking about the conflict in Afghanistan.
I'm talking about the drug war, and all its brutal ramifications from the international to the local. I'm talking about the return of slavery manifested in our prison economy. I'm talking about trade agreements both national and private designed to create entire populations of debtors. I'm talking about the very concept of health care that hinges on salary. There are many more.
These are all wars we fight daily, contribute to endlessly, and support in our very existence. Not only our tax dollars, but our attitudes and opinions are weapons in these wars.
tokenadult looks around and sees a peaceful utopia. I look around and see a society rampaged by violence, racism, sexism, and class warfare. This is not a future I wish for Afghanistan, or anyone at all.
And I certainly don't think we can get anyone anywhere by force.
Time's up. Now let's go write some code and get on with our lives.
You do realise that what the drone attacks are doing is to further radicalise people in Pakistan, don't you? A bit like what's happening in Gaza, what these attacks do is remove a few visible figureheads, kill people who aren't necessarily connected, and turn a good number of previously neutral or inactive people into sympathisers or more active combatants.
The idea of a relentless attack strategy is, with respect, utterly absurd and has about as much chance of real success as the War on Drugs. The rest of what you say makes much more sense. Communication is the key. Relentlessly communicate instead of relentlessly attack.
Same way the pharmaceutical industry, for profit prison industry, and lumber industry (last one is debated plenty) will continue to shove money into politics to keep drugs illegal and prisons nicely packed full of pot smokers. It is all about the money, not the morality. That went out the window decades ago.
The lumber industry? You're seriously comparing Big Pharma and for-profit prison companies with the timber industry?
I'm not sure if you are talking about America in the 2010s, but the timber industry is tanking. Maybe if you were talking about the 1970s I might peripherally agree.
The timber industry is so bad right now that it is cheaper to buy 2x4s to burn in your fireplace than firewood harvested from logging scraps.
But yes, they were the original reason for the widespread propaganda spree against pot, but today it is due to big pharma. And people on the internet always argue about it!
1. Strikes in Gaza are not removing figurehead, they strike known military commanders, whose direct involvement in the acts of terror and war is beyond any reasonable doubt. They also strike infrastructure used for such activities and for other purposes by military organisations. Of course, Israel army is not ideal and sometimes it is impossible to strike military targets without hurting civilians, and sometimes the intelligence is mistaken or the execution is flawed and civilians suffer. However representing it as "removing figureheads" and "killing people who aren't connected" only is to pervert the whole reality of what is happening. 2. As for further radicalizing - I'm not sure how you see further radicalizations of Hamas. Instead of destroying Israel and killing or expelling all Jews living there they'd want what? Instead of shooting rockets into the midst of Israeli cities and sending human bombs into the midst of Israel streets, restaurants malls they would do what? How you imaging further radicalized Hamas and Islamic Jihad that is worse than they are now? 3. The whole premise that people become terrorists because somebody hurt them is a red herring. Of course, some individual people do, but there are numerous example of terrorist organisations - both Islamic and non-Islamic - composed of people who were never hurt by anybody, they just decided that's the right thing to do. The facts show that stopping fighting terrorists does not make them disband for lack of recruits - this makes them bolder. Leaving Afghanistan to Taliban did not make Taliban unpopular. Leaving Gaza to Hamas did not make Hamas unpopular. Quite the contrary - they grew stronger and gathered more resources. 4. There is much difference with War on Drugs, and it can be easily seen. Terrorists are criminals that hurt people in order to advance their political agenda, and count on population being afraid and thus caving in to their demands. Drug users do not hurt anybody but themselves, have no demands from anybody and are pursued by the state for the only reason of spending their time and money in a fashion not approved by the state. If you leave drug users alone, nothing would happen. If you leave terrorists alone, you get 9/11. Notice the difference?
I might be alone in this, but I really prefer replies to replies instead of piling edits on top of edits. Much easier to follow that way.
http://cryptome.org/tim-osman.htm
The US armed the Taliban when they were fighting the Soviet invasion.
If you're comfortable killing people indiscriminantly then others will be comfortable killing you indiscriminantly. As long as you offer them that bargain they will continue to take it.
Personally, I really don't care what happens in Afghanistan. It's not my problem, I've never been there, and I don't believe I have the right to decide their future. But I find your belief that drone attacks are actually destroying the Taliban fanciful.
Most of the people drone attacks kill are not the intended targets. How would you react if a foreign power killed someone you loved? Would you go away, never to be heard from again? Or would you take up arms against that foreign power? Given your bombast and chest beating I'm assuming you wouldn't stay silent. So what makes you think that the relatives of the people being killed in drone attacks are somehow going to just go away?
Indeed. But the problem is how to get the votes in Congress to support a significant downsizing of the TSA. Were the President to do so unilaterally (which he may well have the ability to do), he'd be accused of disregarding Americans' safety and chances are that a good number of those accusations would come from inside Congress since there's still plenty of political capital to be made from opposing him.
As I've said before, there are three factors that support reducing the TSA's budget (and powers) in the coming yeas: the withdrawal from Aghanistan, budget cutting due to deficit management, and economic growth meaning that there will be jobs available for the laid-off TSA employees. These point to a downsizing of the TSA during 2015-16, after the 2014 midterm elections.
According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion.
This, on the other hand, is extremely disingenuous. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been major, major expenses (and major drivers of our national debt, since we didn't raise any new revenue to pay for them). Mentioning them last, as if they were some minor component of the TSA budget, reverses the order of significance.
It doesn't help that people don't internalize risk well so its hard for folks to see the merits of the argument but I applaud whomever came up with it.
Can anyone find a citation for the "200 to 400 deaths" claim? The NCTC report (http://www.nctc.gov/docs/2011_NCTC_Annual_Report_Final.pdf) seems to give much higher numbers, unless I'm missing something.
High speed rail has a lot of land acquisition problems for the most part, air flight doesn't.
High-speed rail in the Boston-DC corridor would be pretty pricey, too. Amtrak tries it, but their idea of "high speed" is sad compared to what the rest of the world thinks it means. While the Acela is somewhat similar to the TGV, it peaks at only 150MPH, and the average speed is far lower because the track doesn't support high speeds in a lot of places, and because it makes about three times more stops than it should.
Proper high-speed trains in that corridor would require new tracks built for much of it, and with level crossings pretty much impossible for high-speed trains, it would need a ton of bridges or tunnels and a huge expense. A lot of politicians will only support such a thing if they can bring service to their hometown, or where their constituents live, or whatever, so you end up spending way too much time stopped at irrelevant stations instead of going fast. The Acela makes seven stops between DC and New York alone, not even counting DC or New York themselves. It makes six more stops after NYC before getting to Boston. Covering a similar distance in a rational high speed system would involve maybe one intermediate stop. As it stands, when I take the train from DC to NYC, I don't even bother trying to get a place on the Acela unless it's the cheapest option, because it only saves about half an hour out of a four-hour journey.
I think it's ultimately a self-fulfilling prophesy. People don't think it can work, which allows politicians to screw it up, which means that it either never happens or happens poorly. So it doesn't work, and people don't think it can work, so....
I say let the high speed rails come naturally (because they will eventually): don't try to force it.
The airline industry is dear to the hearts of congressmen, who fly back to their districts on the taxpayer dime, and subsidize the industry in all sorts of unique ways. The US Postal Service, for example, is compelled to subsidize air service in Alaska -- random towns of 250 people get 3 flights a day in many cases.
The rail business was put out of business by bitter labor disputes, subsidized highways and air travel in the 1960's. The direct Federal takeover of the industry (ie Amtrak) makes it difficult to function in a rational way, as it is subject to the whims of Congress. Amtrak is compelled, for example, to serve food on trains -- a service that loses millions of dollars annually.
He also mentioned it was downsizing through attrition rather than layoffs, which is probably an easier strategy for elected and appointed officials to get behind.
Not sure what you're talking about here. The reason 911 actually happened was because no one on the plane expected anymore more than a bit of inconvenience (flying to a different destination).
I'd say do nothing. There aren't enough people trying to do this sort of thing to make it worth the effort or expense. Especially since they have to die every time they do it.
Many security experts think it is trivial to get weaponry past them. They aren't extensively trained, you know, they are cheap rental guards following a procedure.
So in fact I would say the TSA has stopped nothing, the only prevention has come from the FBI and CIA, locking the cockpit door, and putting air marshals on the plane.
That's the point, right, that you aren't in a position to guess, and it's slimy position to be put in. It's the same way ADT can sell millions of home alarms every year - there's just no way to prove how many events a reactive system stops.
I always got selected for "randomized" searches when flying (in the UK). At UK airports everyone goes through a metal detector. It would always beep when I went through even if I took off my shoes and belt.
W O W. My jaw completely dropped when I read this sentence.
Considering we've averted 40 terrorist plots since 2001 this is pretty scary somebody would actually print such a statement. Keep in mind, those 40 are the ones we actually know about as well.
I'll continue to put up with the minor headaches as long as we continue to stop these plots before airplanes crash into skyscrapers or car bombs start exploding in times square.
And the TSA doesn't have anything to do with car bombs in Times Square.
I hate TSA as much as the next guy, but their presence and efforts could have deterred and foiled thousands of plots you and I would never hear about because they don't even know about them.
Denying the reality of the potential danger airplanes can cause to major population centers, like we saw on 9/11 is foolish. Airport Security May Suck. But, It May Be Saving More Lives Than It's Killing Indirectly.
*Edit
What percentage of flights actually have the US as part of their journey would be a better measurement.
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