Take the bus? Drive?
It's not that simple. It's very very hard to travel if the government doesn't want you to.
There's a permanent roadblock across northbound lanes of interstates in New Mexico (and, I think, Arizona), and across many of the smaller roads in southern Arizona (and, presumably, New Mexico).
> if I'm a US citizen. Then I was free to go.
It also helps to be white, fwiw.
Logic like this means you essentially hide from the problem until there's nowhere left. What happens then?
The point is, I think we still have travel alternatives and legal protections from abuse.
The federal government only has the authority to affect travel between states, not within a single state. If the TSA starts interfering with movement in a single state (like on the NYC subway system), we'll see pushback from the state and local governments.
Nope, in fact NYC welcomed the Terrorists' Surrogate Army invasion of the subway.
You mean, if the TSA starts screening (and, thus, assuming the power to reject) passengers for intrastate air travel, like they have been since day one of TSA operations?
When you travel by air, you are cramming yourself into a small metal tube with 300 other people. The other 299 people want everyone there to be checked for weapons, so the government does this.
If you want to be able to travel without being screened, there are tons of options available to you. But the reality is, you have no right in the US to travel, and the government can set whatever standards they want for public spaces. There are plenty of options available for traveling without being screened. They cost more than the mainstream ones. (Buy your own plane and see how many TSA checkpoints you go through.) But just because something is expensive doesn't mean that you are being deprived by the government of some right.
If you want to fight the TSA, shouting "police state" just makes you look stupid. You should figure out how to examine the effectiveness of the TSA numerically, and explain that to your elected representatives. Has the TSA slowed the growth of the air travel industry? Are there racist patterns in the TSA's profiling? If you can prove something with data, people will listen. But whining about the end of the world on a website nobody reads isn't going to solve any problems. It just makes you look like an out-of-touch anti-authoritarian teenager.
Look: I really believe that you can get around the TSA and that it isn't a police state. This is not the Holocaust. This is not the end of the world. It's just an inconvenience you have to pay to get a $200 round-the-world flight.
And like jrockway said, he is somehow on the leader board. That probably ought to mean something.
By analogy - should someone automatically be pardoned for a crime they commit today (let's go extreme and say murder), because they had displayed good behavior in the past?
All of this said, I am a bit surprised by some of jrockway's comments in this thread, given his posting history. Almost enough to wonder if someone else has taken control of his account.
Plenty of other people have been banned for saying "Fuck you" on here, and it's interesting that jrockway silently edited his comment to remove his swearing at someone else on here, as well as removing his invitation to check that he's a huge karma accumulator - which he seems to think actually means something.
Anyway, I"m not a mod, just someone who's a bit tired of one set of people being treated differently.
losethos is a talented programmer with schizophrenia. The reason his posts deserve to be killed is because they are 98% content free and occasionally disturbed, paranoid, and racist, hallmarks of schizophrenia. But losethos the person, as a human being in distress, doesn't deserve any of that.
What happened? Did you have a stroke? Are you actually jrockway's brother-in-law, "borrowing" his handle?
All I can say is that the hysteria is at an amazingly-high level. I am not sure why I even read TSA-related articles anymore.
I think the reason people are incredulous because your claims are blinkered. You're a sharp dude. I like most of your posts. But you are just not aggressively shortsighted enough to be excusing this with a straight face.
And your argumentum ad leaderboardum sucked transcendentally. You are totally, totally better than that.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-is-c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Intermodal_Prevention_...
(EDIT: I misquoted you from memory)
Edit: If you think posts with lol are a good thing please say why.
But I do think that the answer to someone being mistreated at airport security shouldn't be to "take the train". It is true that the train will probably not have as onerous security requirements, but then that isn't really the point either.
If we put restrictions on a mode of transportation those restrictions should in general be in keeping with some legit governmental goal. "Airport security" does meet this, but I don't think we can say the same for all of the treatment OP actually received.
It should be at least part of the answer; a big part of the idea of the TSA (and one of the reasons the airlines got on board to help lobby for it) was that it moved the responsibility and potential liability from the airlines to the government (who, incidentally, has a whole host of immunities to deal with the "liability" aspect.)
Voting with your dollars away from industries whose services require being subjected to the TSA sends a message -- not directly to the government, but to the industries involved.
That's not to say its the only response, but voting-with-dollars ought to be part of the response.
First, it was easily three times the cost of a round-trip ticket. Okay, I'm willing to pay. Second, we're talking about four or five days worth of travel, which, again, might be okay, except that I end up at Salt Lake City (yeah, that far north) on a bus headed south to Las Vegas.
So much for a train to Las Vegas.
Okay, how about Seattle? The company I work for (in Ft. Lauderdale) is headquartered in Seattle. That was an easy $2,000 train ticket taking a week to travel one way.
If I wanted to take the train to Washington, D.C.? No problem there. Same with a train to New York, New York. Boston. In fact, if you are somewhere along the east coast of the US and want to head to the major northeast cities, you will probably have no issues taking the train. Elsewhere? Probably not.
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/, article 13.1: "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state."
"and the government can set whatever standards they want for public spaces"
So, in your opinion, a government can decree that whites can't travel first class in planes, or that women must wear a burkha on the street?
For me, all that hyperbole makes it hard to see what value your arguments have.
Show me the line that says it has to have such a line.
Article the eleventh .... The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Article the twelfth ... The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights)
Further, show me the line of the constitution that specifies the technology by which any of its rights are to be executed.
Show me the line that says it has to have such a line.
If I want to fly and apply myself fulltime, I can have my flying license in a month, being free to roam most of the national airspace (as long as I tell some people where I'm going, so they can help me prevent collisions).
I would surely expect it to be the same in the US: everyone has the right to travel by air, provided they adhere to a minimal set of guidelines to prevent them from endangering themselves or others in ways obviously directly related to the 'flying' itself (and not to e.g. the suspicion that someone might have a 1% higher change of using the plane for a terrorist attach).
Get some perspective.
People won't realize the problem until it is too late.
With AQAP's bomb-making experts (who can make bombs with no metal parts whatsoever now) I can see why they need to make super-duper sure that a hit for explosive material is absolutely a false positive.
But that doesn't explain the rude treatment, the confiscation of gear, the refusal to provide water, or having 5 different government agencies (and JetBlue) all gang up on him.
There has to be a more "public serving" way to handle the necessary task of public safety.