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Comment by sillygoose | Hacker News Reader

Anyone could be a psychopath too, and highly dangerous. I guess they should detain everyone just in case, and grill them for hours.

Of course, it's not like a psychopath could lie convincingly so that he could proceed with his evil plans, so I guess they can't actually let anyone in, ever.

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Nice strawman. Limiting your free speech by detaining you if you joke about bombs when talking to airport security is completely reasonable. It's very well defined and limited, and giving up this right causes you no harm physically or mentally. Also, there's no slippery slope involved. I dislike airport security as well, but some of the things they do are reasonable.

What strawman? You supported the idea of detaining people on any suspicion. I suggested that there's no point in going down that road because anyone could be a threat anywhere.

Sure, sometimes someone is suspicious because he's actually up to no good. But that doesn't mean detaining people on various subjective suspicions is a good idea.

Come now. If someone says "I have a bomb in my luggage" (as a joke), that's hardly "on any suspicion". The person has spoken what amounts to a possibly serious, realistic threat, and the security person has literally no other means of determining whether it was a joke or not.

You didn't refer to anything specific.

Reasonableness should really only be established by mathematically weighing the probabilities of true and false positives and negatives.

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