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Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is accountable though. Who do we yell at? We can't blame the line employees. They are just state machines with no free will [N]. Their managers aren't empowered do anything either except harass you even more.

Are there TSA "executives?" Politicians won't dare entertain the idea of defunding them.

There is literally no solution. There exists no recourse any person alive can do to stand up against the TSA.

[N]: Stop limiting liquid carry ons. Stop throwing them away in bulk containers that make no sense if you think they are potentially dangerous. I will give you $10,000 if you make my sunscreen or toothpaste explode more violently than the as-much-as-you-like-sir laptop batteries, phones, and iPads everybody carries.

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There exists no recourse any person alive can do to stand up against the TSA.

Civil disobedience is always an option. The protester at Tiananmen Square changed the world because he realized that there was recourse in doing the right thing.

Low-barrier civil disobedience people can take with the TSA: Opt-out/in to everything that will make the process take longer. Gum up the works.

Civil disobedience against the "people at the bottom of the org chart" is the height of stupidity and futility. And your childish, short term approach will do absolutely nothing other than antagonise your fellow flyers (many of whom will be in a rush).

Does this attitude only apply in airports, or do you apply the same logic to buses too?

Buuuuuuurn.

And your better suggestion would be?

Also, I think you have pretty low standards for the height of stupidity, and also for being antagonized by minor inconveniences. When I opt out, they just have me stand aside until a screener is free.

There is the off chance that while they are waiting longer and watching their fellow travelers patted down more and more they will realize what a ridiculous show of security theater TSA checkpoints are. There are significantly easier ways to get contraband on board planes then the security checkpoints, and most of them involve weak ground crew security and checks.

The protestor at Tiananmen Square changed nothing. Twenty-five years after the incident, most chinese have no idea it ever occured; If they've heard about it at all, they heard about a minor student riot. The rest of the world has seen that totalitarian tactics do work, and that false promises and imagined enemies are the best ways to control a population.

I disagree. Tiananmen Square is a source of shame for the Chinese ruling party, and many of the people there are indeed aware of it -- moreso every day with the coming of the Internet.

and that may be the biggest success of the action: that the leaders have to live with a little voice inside them, telling them that they did wrong there. Depending on the person it could either make them into a total tyrant or push them more toward a democractic view.

Nobody is accountable though.

We are. We're not allowed to lie to them, only the reverse. Isn't government awesome?

Yup, government by its very nature is about opposites and double standards. Government is pretty much an exclusive place to carry out the worst parts of humanity legally. Steal, murder, lie, kidnap, coerce--it's all good under the State. It's like the movie 'The Purge' in a sense.

Politicians won't dare entertain the idea of defunding them.

They might if they had to put up with the same crap the plebes do. But the TSA has figured out how to keep all the powerful people from having to undergo the same indignities that normal people do - they let them opt out of almost all of it for a background check and about $100.

http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-precheck

Which, I'd like to point out is ridiculous if you believe that the TSA is about actual security. They've just created a whole class of passenger that get to bypass almost all of the 'security.' Background checks don't prevent people from being conned into carrying explosives in their baggage.

Rand Paul wants to defund them and was detained by TSA for refusing a pat down. He may very well be the Republican nominee for President in 2016.

Anyone refusing a pat down will be detained.

The lowly TSA hourly employee was probably shaking at the thought of having to do that to a US Senator and possible consequences but he had to do it.

I'm sure he had no idea.

I'm powerful for having $100 and the ability to fill out paperwork? Cool!

My wife is not a citizen of the US (me neither), has almost no US record (but she has an SSN, as we're currently living in the US), holds a H4 visa, she didn't pay $100 and she's a TSA Pre. She doesn't fit a 'powerful person' profile quite.

Since there are two comments so far that have so completely misunderstood how this works, I guess I did a poor job of explaining it.

Powerful people have the option to work their connections to end the TSA, but that is a lot more effort than paying the $100, giving up their fingerprints and accepting the mostly hidden indignity of a background check (which, for $100 can't be more than a credit check, real background checks cost tens of thousands of dollars). So the TSA has basically taken the wind out of the sails of anyone who could hurt them but is not ideologically opposed to what they do, and frankly, the vast majority of Americans, rich and poor, haven't thought about it enough to have an idealogical position and will be happy to take the path of least of resistance.

As for all the "regular" people who sign up for pre-check, they don't in anyway negate pre-check's ability to co-opt the ire of powerful people. If some percentage of the plebes sign up, that doesn't make things any more annoying for the powerful. Most regular people won't be signing up, if you don't fly more than a couple of times a year, it usually isn't worth the effort - you get past the checkpoint and just try to forget about it while you go on with the rest of your trip.

I suppose you could move to a different country and never return to the USA. I don't know if that qualifies as a "solution" though.

Last year at Heathrow, I got selected for a "random screening" where they take everything out of your luggage and scan every piece individually through the x-ray machine again. It takes me half an hour to pack my luggage, so the process took a while. I was not pleased that morning.

(Amusing side anecdote: There was a group of mexican school kids passing through security at the same time. Some were also selected for random screening. The random screening lady was from Spain, but she told them the policy (law?) dictated she only speak to them in English even though everybody involved in the transaction spoke Spanish better than English.)

Every other country has these problems, the bureaucratic machinery is all powerful, even more powerful than politicians whom you can vote out.

I think America is pretty bad - certainly worse than where I happened to be born (Denmark).

An example: Like many other countries we have logging of telecommunications. The difference from the US is that it has been a transparent process. A bill was introduced into parlaiment, it was discussed both in the media and on the floor of parlaiment, then voted on and made into law. I know exactly what is logged, because the process is open. So does the media, and some of the major Danish tech-sites have criticised the way the logging works (it's basically useless for the police).

Personally I don't like the law, but it was an open process; I know exactly who voted yes and no, I know exactly what is being logged, I know from the media debates how the police uses this, etc.

Democracy at work.

> I know exactly what is logged

Wouldn't one of the reason it's "useless for the police" be because anyone who has been paying attention has the exact blueprint needed to evade this logging?

Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

I wasn't aware that was the only option. I wonder if there are any nations out there which are able to conduct investigations in accordance with the law, but without tipping off those being investigated?

I'm completely oblivious to non-US law, but I think, in general, you cannot both have your cake and eat it. As far as I can see it, there are two choices:

* Publish the standards and practices of the government. Lawbreakers know what to avoid, ala Denmark.

* Keep the S&P secret. The law-abiding populace has no say in the rule of law, ala the US.

I'd love if there was some middle ground here, but I think there is none. In direct response to your question, it could be argued that the US's actions (specifically, the interception and storage of telecommuniques by government entities) have been completely in accordance with the law, though I won't be the one to make the argument.

Well the middle ground (and what the U.S. does) is to publish the general standards and practices specifying what the government is to do in law, and then leaving the how secret.

E.g. the FBI is given authority to wiretap with a warrant, telecom providers are ordered to make it possible to comply with such warrants, but it's left up to the FBI and telecom providers to figure out the actual operational details.

This is, after all, why people were protesting against PATRIOT ACT, FISA Amendments Act, etc., was because they were worded to permit activities much like (if not exactly like) were revealed by Snowden.

For the non-foreign surveillance things (like DEA's "SOD") I'm not so sure they're fully legal, but if they are illegal they'd still be just as illegal under a general law as they would be under detailed S&P.

I agree with you in large part, but I do believe Snowden's revelations show government conduct that is far beyond a reasonable reading of Patriot, FISA, etc. Things like the "three hops rule" don't even pass the laugh test.

Man, even 'three hops rule' is one of those things where I have to say, "if you guys only knew...".

The normal judicial discovery process itself can encompass far more needless data than even '3 hops' and few people would bat an eye, because the assumption is that the investigators are sifting through the data to find the evidence instead of just capturing everything to use for nefarious deeds afterward.

Given the stated purpose of that search it even makes sense: To find connections between terrorists in cells that are directly connected you would need 1 hop, for cells directly connected through only 1 intermediary you would need 2 hops, etc.

So if you're willing to limit yourself to discovering connections between cells that directly share a connection to a given other cell then 2 hops would be fine. But somehow I don't think that's the most prudent means of uncovering connections between terrorist groups and their ongoing recruits.

The US does conduct investigations in accordance with the law without tipping off those investigated.

FISA is the law. The PATRIOT Act is the law.

The law is corrupt.

That's just it though -- they obviously don't think liquids are potentially dangerous. It's just a sort of cargo cult practice at this point, completely dissociated from the original reason & intent.

Same argument goes for anything verboten, really. If the item actually was dangerous and you actually cared about people not having it, you wouldn't just make them throw it away if and when you caught them with it -- you'd have a real disincentive, like a fine (a good example is fresh fruit & Australian quarantine laws).

"Nobody is accountable though. Who do we yell at? We can't blame the line employees. They are just state machines with no free will [N]. Their managers aren't empowered do anything either except harass you even more." Bullshit. Following orders is no excuse.

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