Cross Country Freedom Therapy
ryan.boren.me
ryan.boren.me
His form of protest is to miss a flight he already paid for and hike/bum rides back to Texas? And asking for donations? This guy is a software engineer at Automattic. He's a WordPress developer. His blog is mostly pictures of vegan meals and unboxings: http://ryan.boren.me/. Considering his lifestyle and likely income, asking for donations seems to be rather poor taste.
Again I agree with his opinions, but his protest is not accomplishing anything useful. The net effect will be to transfer some money and resources from sympathetic people.
Several people have already offered places to stay and donated money for travel costs. Thank you so much and be assured that any extra money will be passed on to civil liberties organizations trying to claw back our freedom of movement. I intend to at least double my usual contributions this year.
If you mean the donations link at the top of the page, that's clearly for people who want to send a small something in thanks for Wordpress, and I wouldn't call it distasteful. The world would be a sad place if gift giving were relegated to being soley for charitable causes.
I think a refusal to fly due to security policies is a pretty strong message. If it has come to that, it shows how serious the problem has become and maybe his example will make people do something about it rather than quietly subdue.
I didn't notice it at first, but a line of individuals (mostly adults) started to form behind me very far away from the scanner. It grew to over a dozen people and it was as if they were just trying to find a place to belong while waiting for their turn.
After getting over my initial shock of the lemming behavior, I noticed the TSA worker frantically waving at me to lead the line through the metal detector.
It was a nice moment to 1) escape a pat down AND a scanner, and 2) in a figurative sense, lead these individuals through a less privacy-invasive screening. But, I was just saddened by how outnumbered I am by people readily willing to give up their rights to privacy.
SFO doesn't actually have a TSA presence. They use a contractor instead.
Even if you don't fly, drones are coming soon to watch you every minute of the day that you are outside.
Maybe one-day inside too with technology developed ironically from TSA scanners.
And people will argue to defend that too, and warrant-less is the new norm.
My sympathies to Ryan.
This isn't a matter of whether you give up freedom for safety. It's about how you balance the competing concerns of freedom and security, both of which are important. I certainly agree TSA doesn't strike the right balance, but it's not because its a trade of freedom for security but because it gives you very little security in return for the onerous and invasive process it creates.
It was written in 1755 by a then-loyal subject of George II. It's uncertain --- maybe even a little unlikely --- that Franklin was even its author. The quote is taken from a letter from the whole of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor of Pennsylvania. Franklin denied authorship of the compilation from which it's taken.
The quote itself is: "Thofe who would give up essential liberty to purchafe a little temporary safety deferve neither liberty nor safety".
Note the words "essential" and "a little temporary". The letter to the governor isn't an extended treatise on the rights of man; it concerns the utility of a bill funding the protection of far-flung frontier settlements in the context of the French & Indian War. The words mean what they say: it's bad to trade essential freedoms for small amounts of temporary security. The PA assembly wasn't interested in helping us with situations involving ephemeral freedoms or large amounts of transient security or small amounts of important security.
It doesn't help that this quote started a centuries-long game of telephone almost immediately.
You are of course right in the broader sense. The quote as it's usually deployed on message boards is borderline nonsensical. Benjamin Franklin signed the US Constitution, which is the world's oldest enforced contract regarding the exchange of liberties for security.
I don't begrudge you your choice of guaranteed safety, hopefully you will not begrudge me mine of privacy and freedom.
My point is that the TSA is bad not because "zOMG any impingement on freedom is bad!" but because it's just bad. They are too invasive for the imagined security benefits they provide against improbable threats.
But going from that to "those who trade freedom for safety deserve neither" is silly. I purposefully choose to live in a city (New York) that has a massive police presence. Why? Because I think its a reasonable trade-off of a little freedom for substantial security. Manhattan is like Disneyland now, and it's great, and I don't care if I would theoretically be more free if there weren't a cop on every corner. We trade freedom for security all the time--it's called organized civilization, and it's a good thing.
I hate to quote John Ashcroft, but see his response to this Ben Franklin quote: http://www.justice.gov/archive/ag/speeches/2002/080702eighth... (first 9 paragraphs)
Thank you for trying to skew the Overton Window in such an obvious fashion. Let's try something else:
For you, there are Liberty Planes™, with no metal detectors, no bomb detectors, and no sky marshals. In addition, alcohol is served on every flight. For the rest of us, air security is scaled back to what it was September 10, 2001. Fair?
I hadn't been to heathrow in years. Liquids, a kid going loose, and a few other incidents started there. They still use metal detectors and you only need to remove your shoes under some cases. They do require that most devices the size of a kindle or larger be out on its own.
Contrast that with SFO which uses private contractors and used to be less inane than the typical TSA. Now, they are in someways worse. Serious attitudes when opting out. TSA, generally consistent in that it is the exception path in the policy.
In order to change things like TSA in the US, it will need to start with voters and electing candidates that have a clue. Unfortunately, in the US, we have two minority voting blocks - the informed voter that votes what they feel; and the idiot voter that votes what they are whipped up by some emotion into doing so -- this category typically caters to the Bush is an idiot, Obama is a Muslim, or Obama wants our guns crowd. The silent, non-voting crowd could help out here.
Deciding to drive or train may work for you, but it changes very little.
I think the adjectives make all the difference.
1) Why risk is handled so badly by governments.
2) Why people are unable to change something so obviously sub-optimal.
3) How unpopular extra screening really is in the general population, rather than how unpopular I think it is from reading all the blogs about it.