Don't Fly During Ramadan

Hell, casual racism is basically an (awful) American tradition. Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't.

1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim?

2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.

To say that we're the only species to engage in murder and genocide is flat wrong: chimps will happily murder other chimps, even infants [1]. Maybe we're not as civilized as we think we are, and all the narratives and uniforms and laws are just theater to subsume and rationalize our animal savagery.

Nothing is ever simple, so I can't imagine this tells the whole story, but it's a big big factor, and it doesn't help anyone to ignore it.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-c...

I suspect that they only bother to do the random searches if they've gotten some specific alert or warning.

Many, many trips between Chicago and SF, Portland, and Texas, or rather, California Zephyr, Empire Builder, Texas Eagle, and Spirit of New Orleans etc. Haven't had any need to go through Bloombergville, though so ymmv.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/10/vipr-a10.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyo...

(Side note, who the hell comes up with these names, and why hasn't somebody with some experience with marketing and PR talked to them?)

----

Rail's handling of TSA should be a model

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/06/opinion/don-phillips-tsa-vipr-...

> The operation resulted in several arrests by the local transit police, mostly for passengers with warrants for prostitution and minor drug possession.

Not really meeting the criteria you're talking about.

I know you're not arguing that it is, you're more talking about public opinion. I think you're probably right. But I wish that weren't the reality.

In the USA, it'll be when discussion becomes moot. The ruling elite need not prohibit free speech when no one is listening.

Please, tell me one "first-world" country that has kill lists??

> When it becomes illegal to oppose the current government?

DDR on paper was a multi-party democracy. It was legal to oppose the current government. Even take part in parties other than the socialist party. Just if you did, Stasi might invent other ways of making you shut up, or you'd run afoul of other laws.

Of course the other parties all took part in a single electoral block with the SED (except for in the DDR's last ever election which was also the first where people could actually vote for more than one party), which somehow always totally dominated the parliament, and the other parties representatives also always voted the SED line, but it was of course all "voluntary".

Setting up the electoral system so that real opposition is near impossible is a gentler approach than actually outlawing opposition. Or make actual opposition start from an extreme financial handicap.

Mao, which we'll get back to, also provides plenty of demonstrations of how to do this without making it explicitly illegal: A central element of the Cultural Revolution was to build up a "social movement" that would fight supposed capitalists and counter-revolutionaries, but implicitly also anyone opposing Mao, and let a bunch of misled youth do the dirty work (not unlike Hitlerjugend). A lot of their work then later led to trumped up charges or various people recanting or "voluntarily" relinquishing their power.

If you want to make it look like you have popular support, it's much better to let "social movements" harass the opposition than to do it yourself, but not any less authoritarian.

> When there is any political ideology it is illegal to espouse that does not involve directly inciting people to commit crimes?

Most Soviet-era dictatorships would argue that they did just fine on this. You could espouse anything that wouldn't incite people to commit crime, they'd say. Of course espousing capitalism or actual democratic rights would be interpreted as inciting people to commit crimes.

> When it becomes illegal to stage mass protests about anything?

Even most Western democracies require permits for mass protests, and this is easy to exploit. A typical authoritarian government response to this is to make it legal, but only give permission when the protests are not seen as a threat, or to copy approaches also used by democratic states: Kettling, "Free speech zones", or simply refusing permits on security groups, or approving it for a time/date that kills its impact.

But a smart authoritarian government will welcome demonstrations that are not seen as a threat, or that are aligned with their interests. Mao's Cultural Revolution is a good example of mass demonstrations being used in support of an authoritarian government.

> When the media is directly owned by the state, as it is in many places?

What about when the media are owned by companies that know full well they exist only at the grace of government and "behave" and/or are owned by people beholden to the government? The effect is entirely the same.

> When journalists and activists are jailed, as they are in many places?

Inventing other crimes is easy. So is intimidating them instead of jailing them. Jailing them is the unsophisticated approach.

> When the media feels in any way uncomfortable roundly criticizing the government?

There's a sliding scale here that is incredibly hard to judge, because a lot of the time the media is "uncomfortable" criticising the government because they care about access, or because they don't think their audience or their advertisers will want to read/hear/watch it. Arguably the US is already in a situation where it takes extreme situations before the major media outlets wants to rock the boat.

> When the media feels too uncomfortable to openly publish government secrets which were previously leaked?

I'll grant you this is probably a good indicator - I can't think of any examples of obviously authoritarian governments that'd tolerate this other than for documents obviously "leaked" with permission.

> When most people think the government is authoritarian and needs to be reined in? > When enough people think the government is authoritarian that, under a democratic system, they would be a powerful voting bloc?

This doesn't make sense to me as it's incredibly hard to judge, and a government can be authoritarian but still be roughly aligned with the interests of a majority in a way that makes it seem relatively open on the surface. By the time a government is authoritarian, you won't be able to get good data on this.

> When at least enough people think the government is authoritarian for the idea to be given serious consideration in mainstream debates? (Debate about specific programs that need to be curtailed, without a general sense that the government is comparable to a police state, do not count.)

> When we don't see things happening like > a rightwing antigovernment political movement becoming very popular and taking over a significant portion of the legislature;

You mean like the NSDAP? (Yes, I know what you're actually referring to, and no, I'm not trying to compare them to the NSDAP other than the fact the NSDAP also campaigned massively on how bad the establishment were doing, and got substantial public support, as have many other movements that have had both good and bad intentions).

This is making assumptions about the power structure of an authoritarian government that are too simple. There's been plenty of authoritarian government where "mass movements" were built promising massive change and an opposition to current government practices, but where they were used simply for internal power struggles and getting a "clean slate".

Again, Mao is a good example - the Cultural Revolution was used as a means to imprison or disgrace a long list of high powered opponents of Mao, some, like Deng Xiaoping, who later eventually managed to run China despite never taking the posts that would have given him official leadership (making him another good example of how looking at formalities of who are officially in charge doesn't work very well).

> a leftwing anticapitalist political movement staging provocative long-term demonstrations around the country with, at the end of the day, mostly pretty reasonable interactions with various municipal police departments, and managing at least to significantly influence the debate;

Occupy was never a threat to anyone - it was horribly disorganised, had no understanding of actual left wing politics or the history of these kind of struggles in the US to the point where they were largely a joke. If anything "occupy" was a useful outlet to let people take out their frustrations without achieving much. A smart authoritarian government should "encourage" demonstrations like that - if nothing else they'd be greatly useful in charting "persons of interest".

Mao is again a perfect example of why "influencing the debate" in itself is meaningless: His "Hundred flowers campaign" is a textbook example of how to encourage debate, give the debaters room to get their frustrations out, and then shut the door (option extra for advanced authoritarians: carefully observe the debates and take note of who might be a continued threat, and find ways of making sure they aren't - up to and including arrest, or simply ensure they are ridiculed).

> a judge placing harsh limits on a practice by a city's police department that was found to be unconstitutional?

What about high level officials being arrested for corruption and abuse of powers? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23776348 China prosecutes or persecutes even high level party officials on a semi-regular basis, and has since Mao's time (e.g. again Deng Xiaoping is a good example) - it's a great way of getting rid of people that have lost internal power struggles while giving an aura of accountability. It's also just good practice to apply harsh limits on parts of governments that does not impact your ability to rule - the more people are led to believe that the government does actually abide by the rules the less impetus there is to rebellion even if everyone realises that they live in an authoritarian state.

As long as you're in a "free speech zone".

> When the media is directly owned by the state, as it is in many places?

Since the US is basically a corporatocracy, we're already there.

> When journalists and activists are jailed, as they are in many places?

Already happening. Assange abroad, Barrett Brown here in the US.

> When the media feels in any way uncomfortable roundly criticizing the government?

That's been happening here for years. Why does the US not have it's Jeremy Paxman?

> (3) Political mobilization is fine. No repression.

You're joking, right? The Occupy protests in Texas? Infiltration of protest groups and false flag events? Tch.

For example, when ever someone say the word torture, there is always someone who would argue that simulated death and forcing up hoses into peoples noses to force-feed them is somehow not torture. By focusing on the general case rather than specific cases, the discussion in this thread has been of so much higher quality.

That said, if any of the statement sound surprising, I am more than happy to re-locate the source which inspired that sentence.

I think that she may have mistaken overt police corruption for a police state. The two are not synonymous.

Mexicans, Americans, Ecuadorians, what's the difference?

Put it this way - at the border between Kaz and Uzbek, we...

Stole the border guard's hat.

Wore it.

In front of him.

Stole his gun.

Wore it.

In front of him.

Then all sat around together laughing and joking eating pot noodles.

Had we done the same in the US, I would not be writing this, as I would likely have been shot dead on the spot.

The word 'Homeland' actually creeps me out more than 'Heimat'.

Those words echo through my head every time I click open one of these threads on HN. It's like suddenly the rich white guy is getting oppressed, so we're obviously in a police state! Never mind for the years leading up to this point, the US was doing much worse shit; they just happened to be doing it to minorities.

And you can see it in this thread. Everyone concentrating on the fact he was detained, not the reasons, when the whole damn article is about how the US treats people who look like they're from certain countries like default terrorists.

If the effectiveness of a justice system is seen in terms of rate of incarceration, then the society that takes that view does not sound particularly as though it believes in freedom as a fundamental value, but rather prefers values like retribution and security through deferment to authority.

"US inhabitants are that much more disobedient to the same laws than those of other countries"

This doesn't hold any water either. For one thing disobedience is an aspect of freedom itself, so that a free society would presumably have a reasonable tolerance to simple disobedience and wouldn't use disobedience in and of itself to justify incarceration and would need to establish harm and public interest. Also, the rate of incarceration in the US is so massively higher than other countries that it becomes patently ridiculous to try and justify it by claiming people in the US are that much less moral than other people and so need locking up more.

I know you don't subscribe to these stances and say that they are just other possible explanations, however I do not think they qualify as possible explanations, as they have some incompatibilities with the general concept of freedom, and the actual situation in the US.

Minimal security theatre isn't oppression, and neither is bungling for five hours.

Let's put things into perspective here. The Syrian government gasses its people largely indiscriminately. The Egyptian government shoots those guilty of the crime of public protest. This guy was, based on reasonable suspicion... asked more questions than competent interrogators would have bothered with and left rather thirsty and ticketless at the end.

Of course, that's only an interpretation, and it's possible the individuals involved gain visceral thrills from asking questions about being "somewhat religious" or "very religious" and laughing as their fellow henchmen misunderstand the concept of venture capital, and only the last vestiges of American law prevented them from responding to his request for a drink by waterboarding him. It's possible they asked ignorant questions about Hinduism and then called their crack Hindi-speaking agent as part of a cunning plan to deter non-Christians from ever flying again. It's just.... I'm sure the concept of Hanlon's razor has come up on HN a few times before?

Seems like the screening is working, then.

> Missed loaded guns:

This statistic is meaningless without the number of times where they caught loaded guns.

And once we have these numbers, make a suggestion to improve that percentage.

Regardless, contrarian anecdotal evidence does nothing to diminish the questionable approach to how airport security is, and in the author's case was, handled.

Basically you should aim to keep terrorism the least of the risks for the society but to accept it as a non zero.

But the moment less people are dying from terrorism than lets say random obscure health condition then the money and resources are better invested elsewhere.

Because people who handle explosives and cover it up when questioned, and aren't involved in handling explosives in their day job, are completely to be trusted?

Surely once they've determined he isn't carrying explosives they need to be sure as possible, if he claims not to have been around any explosives, that he's telling the truth; in order to reduce the risk that he's going to use explosives in an illegal way and/or manner dangerous to life. Don't people who're manufacturing explosives in secret deserve at least a passing glance to see what they're doing with them.

It looks here like they checked his apartment to corroborate his statements.

Now if they've established there are no traces of explosive present - for example they confirm the cause of a false-positive - that's different.

False positives are possible, I've had it happen to me. When "the machine beeped", I got a thorough pat-down and re-swabbed, and the next time "the machine did not beep" and I was on my way.

It's my understanding that TSA agents will not allow someone to pass who is consistently setting off the explosives alarm. What would be the purpose of checking for trace explosives residue if the agents simply disregard it when it triggers?

Of all the 'sigint' they collect on each passenger, I would bet a "repeated trace analysis fail" ranks up there with carrying box cutters as one of the more alarming indicators an agent has to deal with.

It sounds like the agents did everything they could to try to get a green light from trace analysis. Failing that, the passenger is obviously red flagged and it's "all systems go" to determine if they are really a threat. I can't imagine how else they would handle it.

Just because you exercise the 5th doesn't mean the police or Feds have to suddenly make you comfortable.

He asked for water and probably could've gotten some if he had pushed the issue, it didn't seem as though he was being very vocal about being hungry and thirsty.

That's a pretty nuanced decision for the inspector to make. Polygraph machines and their operators routinely mess that one up.

I doubt that they themselves claim they can make that differentiation, and if they do so make that claim, I'd bet cash on it that it has been untested as far as accuracy regarding false positives.

Generally speaking, teaching 'technique' to a layman and expecting them to all be of equal caliber is just simply wrong.

The important bits are whether the difference is detectable in a manner that is convenient (putting each passenger through an MRI machine is out of the question), reliable (minimize false positives and false negatives), and so on. Just saying "there's a difference" adds no new information to the conversation unless you're able to expand on the quantifiable aspects of those differences.

Now c'mon. By treating this like fact given the evidence from the story, you are engaging in the same unjust leaps and "profiling" that people are accusing the TSA of. No one, including the author, knows what happened to his picture or if any law enforcment agency was involved in its disappearance.

1) It requires agents turn away from their normal tasks and clogs up the works to some degree. I disagree with the program and opting for the pat-down is a legal action I can take that will, ever so briefly, disrupt it.

2) I do it in the hope that the agents doing the pat-down will be uncomfortable while doing so. Any legal action I can take that makes their job ever-so-slightly more unpleasant is something that I will do. If it were done en-masse and people in their personal lives ostracized them for their job, then maybe (just maaaybe) the TSA would experience higher turnover.

3) To add one more data-point to the agents' awareness that a portion of the population does not approve of them or their job.

4) So that other people waiting in the line can see me skip the full body scan and learn that they can as well.

5) So that I get to tell other people what I just told you.

Care to elaborate?

You're surprised by this guy because it's hard to voice certain opinions on certain topics (like the incessant and almost always redundant TSA / NSA / Manning / Snowden coverage) without having someone condescend to you, which gets tiresome quickly. So all the people who agree with him usually don't bother to comment, and often avoid these threads entirely.

In other words, we've just the illusion of conformity around here, and the surprising thing isn't that someone disagrees, it's that they were masochistic enough to start arguing in the first place.

I think they already do, except they're only showing that one early episode where Cartman goes all RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAYH

Then you have a very low bar for terrorism.

the difference in worldview is whether words should mean things or just be a way to stay excited

If you support the US allowing Iranian nuclear scientists to return to Iran, you are supporting that policy.

As a side note, an advanced Iranian nuclear state would likely entail a massive war in the Middle East to stop them, so there's also that.

I think it's more than a little hyperbolic to describe their actions as 'rabid racism'

They had a legitimate reason for suspicion. That reason wasn't the color of his skin, it was the color of a computer screen (a screen that flashes green hundreds of times a day flashed red in this case).

It's quite obvious that much ignorance and xenophobia followed, but I don't think it crossed (laughably subjective) line of 'rabid.'

A friend of mine who is about as 'all American' looking as you can get (white, tall, former marine...) tripped the same alarms after he had been firing a gun at a range the day before. He had an obvious and clear explanation for the alarm, so his experience wasn't as invasive, but they certainly gave him a hard time about it.

Concentration camps are where you send people to die.

That said, 'internment camp' sounds far too weak. From what I've read, every piece of property they couldn't carry was taken, and they were rounded up and forced to live in horse-stalls for the duration of the war. Every single family, as far as I know, had to not only suffer the indignity of being held without cause, but then had to rebuild from zero after the war. I can't think of a better term, but it needs one.

I'm not sure what the distinction is you're trying to make. That calling them 'interment camps' is somehow better than 'concentration camps'? Both words refer to holding a designated group of people, perceived to be a threat against their will without evidence or trial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment#Concentration_camp

"Concentration camp" implies something else entirely, to them.

First, it's not likely that the wording of Article II truly grants state legislatures unlimited discretion in the selection of electors. A state law that required electors to be men or Methodists would surely be unconstitutional today. And as a result, there's almost certainly an equal protection argument to be made against NPVIC: Sure, each individual voter is participating equally in a larger process to choose the President, but that's not the process prescribed by the Constitution. The process demanded by the Constitution is a state-by-state selection of electors, and if a state legislature wants to have an election, it better be an election in which every voter of that state is participating equally. A thought experiment: Could the state of California pass a law that counted every vote for the electoral slate of the Democratic party twice? Surely not. So how can they pass a law which discounts the vote of every voter except those that voted for the nationwide popular winner?

Second, if this agreement doesn't trigger the Congressional approval requirement of the Compact clause of Article I, I can't imagine what would.

For most elections (including most changes to election rules for federal offices), the correct answer is "the legislature (and sometimes the people directly, by initiative, to the extent that they have reserved legislative power) of the state in which the election occurs." This includes, incidentally, most of the procedures surrounding elections for the state's slate of Presidential electors in Presidential elections, as well as most of the rules for elections for most other offices.

There are some mandated aspects of the setup of elections for federal office (e.g., single member districts for Congress) that are set through federal law and require Congressional action to permit changes.

There are a few non-mandated-guidelines aspects of the setup of some elections for federal office (e.g., the safe harbor rules for the conduct of Presidential elections) that likewise involve Congressional action, but, as these are not mandates, states can change them without federal action, but there might be greater risk of Congress disqualifying the electoral votes of those states (but since the safe harbor rules are rules governing purely discretionary Congressional acts, its not clear that Congress would actually be barred from discounting electoral votes based on elections which complied with the safe harbor rules, and in any case its not clear that they actually would bar votes based on elections which didn't.)

There are very few aspects of federal elections that are governed by the Federal Constitution (e.g., that elections to the Presidency are by way of the electoral college and how electors are apportioned among the states, etc.)

> You might think the only answer is a constitutional amendment, which requires a supermajority of Congress

You might, if you have absolutely no idea about election law in the US, and have compounded that ignorance by only paying attention to one of the two methods of amending the Constitution specified in Article V, and, on top of all that, only considered Presidential elections.

> but in fact there's a backdoor

Or, rather, a whole lot of obvious, clearly marked, wide-open front, back, and side doors, windows, cat-and-dog doors, etc., as described above.

Perhaps take into account authenticated activity, or lack thereof? Activate this special functionality when you anticipate possible issues (e.g. going through airport security) and you've got a timer waiting on some element from Action Set Y to occur every X minutes before notifying emergency contact(s) Z, specified previously.

Sounds like an idea...