"With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals."
I was afraid I was going to be put on the no-fly list afterwards and would have to travel back to NYC by train (a four-day trip).
Even before this experience I used to avoid flying in favor of taking the train. I don't know what I'd do if the TSA became commonplace at train stations.
I haven't flown since shortly after you had to take off your shoes to get through security, taking Amtrak instead, and I've only ever even seen two people searched by TSA. You barely even see them, and if you do, they're usually sitting around looking bored.
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.
A terrorist would have to put a single bomb on a single train to drastically change things. The TSA would then step in and do all the heavy lifting for them, creating terror and removing freedom.
Yes, I have the bad luck of not being white also. I've gone through secondary screening a few times although luckily never anything like this and I've never setup the bomb alarms. The double clinch is that we're all paying a lot of money to keep this program going that just slows us down during our travels with out actually increasing security in any meaningful way. It's just a secret form of welfare as far as I'm compared. Making up busy work for a bunch of people to do to make people feel more secure, falsely, and boost employment numbers.
Have you driven near the border? Driving through west Texas I was met by stop and go traffic for 5 miles. Middle of the desert. I kept driving and realized border patrol had blocked the interstate and was diverting traffic through a checkpoint. Hundreds of cameras and drug dogs everywhere. I drove up and the agent asked me if I'm a US citizen. Then I was free to go.
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).
Try driving from San Diego to Los Angeles: there are permanent checkpoints a solid hour's drive from the border — and quite a few non-white residents complain about getting unpleasant levels of attention.
Doesn't this mean we shouldn't have any laws, because one day the laws could be used to imprison everyone and use their internal organs to produce email spam?
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.
> If the TSA starts interfering with movement in a single state
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?
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.
Just because I'm not hysterical about the TSA doesn't mean I can't comment here.
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.
I can't believe what I'm reading from jrockway, a Google employee whose past comments seem very level-headed, in these threads. I _REALLY HOPE_ your account has been hijacked because if a person like you really holds these opinions then I must be a very, very horrible judge of character. Makes me wonder about all the people around me that I think are on the same wave-length when it comes to the whole terrorism & FUD thing. I feel betrayed somehow. If this is really you then it shows just how far & deep the terrorism-FUD has reached. Or maybe it's just me who had no idea until now, just how fearful the american public has become. Reading these comments from you is almost like imagining Stephen Colbert saying this stuff. I'd just assume his twitter account was hacked or it was April fool's.
Show me the line of the Constitution that lets you travel by air.
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.
This! I may be an atheist European very fond of our socialist democrat government, but the bottom line is: the government should regulate what the population thinks should be regulated and not a bit more.
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).
Funnily enough, they didn't bother dealing with legal references to air travel before planes were invented. You will also notice that they made no references to space travel either, or computers.
I don't understand why everyone is so outraged that I don't think the US is a police state. "Airport security is horrible", so I say to take the train. Have you ever taken the train? The security is not that bad. But instead, I get downvoted to -4 and people accuse me of having a stroke.
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.
In many, many cases, trains are simply infeasible. Family across the country? Budget a week just to get there to visit them, with all that awesome plentiful vacation time American companies are known for? Come on. Modern life makes flying necessary for a ton of people. They have to fly or they don't go. That is de facto control of your travel: risk assault and detention if you're brown. Control of your travel is a major aspect of every modern authoritarian state, and that's why people are alarmed.
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.
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.
> But I do think that the answer to someone being mistreated at airport security shouldn't be to "take the train".
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.
Take the bus? Drive? as a suggestion to avoid the TSA is not valid, I am not sure whether you are aware of this, by the way train travel is covered too:
I no longer fly since the TSA started. I have also looked into taking the train, once from Ft. Lauderdale (where I live, close enough) to Las Vegas (where some friends of mine live). To say the results were amusing is an understatement.
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.
And before anyone asks, taking the bus. I just did a quick search for a bus trip from Ft. Lauderdale to Las Vegas. It was $430 one way, taking two days. Better than the train, but three times the price of an airplane. (http://www.rome2rio.com/s/Fort-Lauderdale/Las-Vegas)
"This is not the Holocaust." yet.
"This is not the end of the world." yet.
I'm sure many Germans and Italians (or any society on the brink of autocratic rule) felt as you do now. But the end result is strikingly similar. Small erosion of liberties leads to escalation until it becomes the status quo of not having those liberties in the first place. Funny how this world works, labor is restricted yet capital can flow freely. Smith and Ricardo must be turning in their graves.
Indeed. A lot of the dismissers should have a walk through the Holocaust Memorial ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_o... ) to "understand" how does it feel to enter an autocratic regime: When you just start walking, everything seems OK, columns all look the same height and you can easily see the other side. But suddenly you are in the middle of a huge maze with very tall walls, which does not seem to have an end in sight.
People won't realize the problem until it is too late.
What, because of the cursing? [EDIT: which has now been edited out; too bad, I always appreciate a sincere "Fuck you!"] Let's not be censorious. I can think of some hellbanned who didn't obviously deserve it, but most of the ones I've seen did obviously deserve it. Are you seriously going to argue that jrockway is as bad as the guy who posts all his personal revelations from the Lord? [EDIT: I'm talking about the richly-deserving-of-his-hellban "losethos": that guy's ramblings are always worth a drag of the trackball.]
And like jrockway said, he is somehow on the leader board. That probably ought to mean something.
I'm not going to jump on the "hellban jrockway" bandwagon, but I will say that I don't see any reason that being on the leaderboard should net anyone special treatment. The "board" shows history... what you did in the past doesn't change the effect or merit of your current behavior.
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.
The fact that he's on the leaderboard means precisely nothing except to indicate he's on the leaderboard.
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.
[EDIT: I'm talking about the richly-deserving-of-his-hellban "losethos": that guy's ramblings are always worth a drag of the trackball.]
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.
Of course, thanks for the clarification. I'm not sure what it would mean to "hellban" an actual person as such, but I should have made it more clear that I was referring to the handle "losethos" rather than the human or humans associated with it.
While I agree with the idea that there needs to be some type of security screening for aircraft, I don't think it necessarily follows that we should tell people to either accept episodes like this one or take alternate transportation.
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.
Instead of forcing others to waste their time and money to suit your irrational need for a security theatre, why don't spend your own time and money moving somewhere else with lots of security - like North Korea.
"With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyo...