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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

IANAL, and I would love to know this.

But at the time, what else could I do, besides wait for the police to show up?

For the lawyers out there, this sounds like an excellent business opportunity. 20-minute legal emergency response to people in trouble at the security checkpoint. Could assist directly with regards to asserting rights, filing suits if the passengers' rights have been violated and extracting every dime that can legally be extracted from airlines that involuntarily re-book passengers.

Sorry that you had to go through this, and thank you for the very well-written account of how this ordeal looked first-hand.

It would be nice if there were some sort of dead man's switch functionality in-case phone access was denied. I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but I think it's an interesting idea.

Use GPS and cell tower tracking to determine if you are inside an airport. If you are inside for longer than X minutes, send a message to selected people stating that.

People sometimes spend much more time in airports than they'd like to for legitimate, non-interrogative reasons.

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...

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