Don't Fly During Ramadan 1233
An anonymous reader sends in a harrowing story from Aditya Mukerjee about his recent attempt to fly from New York to Los Angeles. After being pulled aside in the security line, he faced hours of interrogation by uncommunicative officials from several different agencies. When he was finally cleared, his airline, Jet Blue, wouldn't let him on the plane anyway. When he got home, he found evidence that it had been searched. He writes,
"It was 2:20PM by the time I was finally released from custody. My entire body was shaking uncontrollably, as if I were extremely cold, even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t identify the emotion I was feeling. Surprisingly, as far as I could tell, I was shaking out of neither fear nor anger - I felt neither of those emotions at the time. The shaking motion was entirely involuntary, and I couldn’t force my limbs to be still, no matter how hard I concentrated. In the end, JetBlue did refund my flight, but they cancelled my entire round-trip ticket. Because I had to rebook on another airline that same day, it ended up costing me about $700 more for the entire trip. .. But no matter how I’ve tried to rationalize this in the last week and a half, nothing can block out the memory of the chilling sensation I felt that first morning, lying on my air mattress, trying to forget the image of large, uniformed men invading the sanctuary of my home in my absence, wondering when they had done it, wondering why they had done it."
In the the land of he free (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't fly. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is what I don't get about people these days.
None of you are willing to sacrifice ANYTHING or inflict ANY kind of inconvenience upon yourself to deal with the issues that need to be dealt with. You just sit there and whine and complain about everything, you make up excuses from thin air and say you've got no choice. Well, news flash, you do.
You want to get rid of the TSA?
Don't fly.
It's that simple. No, don't tell me you have to. You don't. You get enough people together and you all refuse to fly until the TSA is dismantled, and you know what'll happen? The airlines will get things changed in a hurry and the TSA will evaporate in a puff of invalid logic. It's that simple!
"Oh but it isn't and I have no choice and I need to fly and-"...
Yeah, that right there, that's the reason why the TSA still exists. You're unwilling to inconvenience yourself. None of you are. So the TSA will continue to inconvenience you instead, because they've got you by the balls (sometimes literally) and they know it. They'll continue to squeeze and squeeze, they'll expand out into the rest of the world like a cancerous tumor and then, when you find yourself in a police state and the TSA controls all major forms of travel- you'll wonder why you didn't do something sooner.
The fact that you think you have no choice is precisely what they want you to think, because that is what gives them control over you.
Cue the endless stream of "I have to fly, you're wrong, if I wish really hard I'm sure the TSA will go away all the same" replies.
Explosives Residue (Score:5, Interesting)
If somebody tested positive for explosives residue going through airport security I'd be suspicious too.
The problem here is the level of expertise of the people responding to this situation. It's like these people are DMV rejects. They do not have the training or even basic knowledge needed to deal with this situation AT ALL.
The sheer level of ignorance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Muslim extremists do act violently on their extreme views.
I've actually seen a group of Phelpsies. I've interacted with them. A friend of mine had a bogus police report filed against him by them.
You, on the other hand, have never met a Muslim extremist. In fact, although I don't know you from Adam's off ox, I feel confident that you don't actually know any Muslims personally at all -- or if you do, you're unaware of their religion because there was no reason for the subject to come up, particularly when talking with a guy like you. Would you want to talk to you about religion? I'm feeling dirty right now.
And BTW, anti-abortion bombers actually are, by definition, "blowing things up". In know, I know, no true Scotsman.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
TL;DR: Old School McCarthyism
You don't know how right you are.
"Why do so many countries want to attack us?" the person asked.
The general replied that America stands in the way of them reaching their objective, which is to force everybody to comply with sharia law.
That general is Keith Alexander, head of the NSA [cnet.com]
Yes, the head of the NSA is a fox news nutbag.
McCarthy is alive and well.
SPOILERS (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did this happen?
The guy's Indian, and to your average dimwitted, racist TSA goon that's just another variety of "terr'ist sand-nigger." They're not even smart enough to be racist properly.
This led to him getting an enhanced pat-down with an explosive swab test on his pants which came back positive for some unknown reason, and everything snowballed from there like some kind of comedy skit, where everything he did and said was interpreted as matching the profile of a terrorist.
Now this raises the question, is this how they treat anyone who they think is a Muslim? Explosive swab test and then run them through the wringer if it tests positive, complete with searching their home?
This is why I don't fly in clothes that I've handled gasoline or worked on cars in, you never know what might have been absorbed into the fibers.
Re:Don't fly period. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're so cute.
I get the feeling these so-called random searches are from an NSA-built profile. Someone with a similar name or nearby location made some references online, and this guy's getting gloveloved because some computer flagged him as a "possible".
I got flagged once as a "possible" back when I was in school. Some guy robbed a bank and escaped by bike. I happened to be wearing a blue vest, same ass the suspect.
Re:Explosives Residue (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they didn't even test me because it appeared that all I was travelling with was a wallet and flip flops. Shouldn't that also be some kind of warning sign?
The advantages of being a white male I guess.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Proud? (Score:2, Interesting)
Your right, in a sense, there is nothing arbitrary about the bible. It was designed to control a population and keep them under the thumb of chosen men. There is no divine inspiration in the bible. Most of the bibles new testament fables are more than 10,000 years old.
Re:Proud? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm considering leaving the country.
Betcha won't though. Posting "I'm considering leaving" on Slashdot is the internet equivalent of a passive-aggressive note on an office fridge. You won't do anything and we all know it.
Not to mention, being a pussy and fleeing doesn't fix anything. Look at how the US and NZ governments colluded to spy on and share information about Kim Dotcom, for allegedly violating copyright. If you think that running and hiding will somehow free you from the authoritarian grip of the terrorist organization known as the US government, you're a fucking imbecile.
There's only one way to fix this, and that's to fight it, any and every way we can think of.
Re: Proud? (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on who you are and what you care about. Want to freely insult people? Germany's the wrong place. Want to have an abortion without being harassed? Germany is a good place. Want to harass, intimidate and lie to make people not have an abortion? Wrong place. Want to start a business and hire and fire people depending on your needs? Wrong place. Want to have children without being afraid of losing your job etc.? Slightly better place than the US but not comparable with e.g. Sweden. Want to have judges that care about justice and sanity, and a constitutional court with teeth that takes your freedoms seriously? Mostly a good place. Want courts that follow the letter of the law to the dot, no matter what was meant? Mostly wrong place. Want to have the freedom to own and use a gun? Really wrong place.
A lot of "freedoms" are one person's right to do one thing vs. one person's right to either do another thing or have a chance at a good life. Which counts more in which cases differs a lot between Germany and the US.
Re:Proud? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm all for the breakup of the US, and have written about it many times here, but that's absolutely the wrong answer. The 50 states are mostly too small to exist on their own as viable nations (except for California and Texas) without being part of some kind of union, the way small European countries have banded together into a union to increase their trading and economic power and reduce the frictional losses of having separate currencies and economies and having trade barriers.
The answer is to break the US up into a handful of smaller nations: maybe 5-10, not 50. The states need to all secede, and then band together into regional republics with nearby like-minded states. For instance, the southeast ("Southern") states should probably form their own country; they've been wanting to do that for 160 years now. Although these days I'm not sure they'll want Florida with them, though they might want to break it in half and keep the northern part, while giving the southern part to Cuba. The northeast states (including New England) should probably form a separate country; though if they can't all get along, surely NH, VT, and ME would want to join together, while MA, CT, and RI would want to also join together. The pacific northwest states of OR and WA should also join together, and maybe they could get northern CA (maybe including the Bay Area, maybe not) to join them; they might also want to join with part of ID and WY, and maybe they could get British Columbia to leave Canada and join them into a country called "Ecotopia". The Dakotas and parts of WY and MT could also form their own country of "Lakota" as they've been wanting to do for a while. Now of course, all these new countries can also have their own "states" or administrative regions within them, whether using today's boundaries or better yet, redrawing many of them since many of today's state boundaries were very badly chosen, frequently by just drawing an arbitrary straight line on a map (see the western states esp.) rather than taking into account regional/local cultures.
But you're absolutely right: democracy simply does not work in large countries. There's too much internal friction, too much power, and too much corruption.
Re: Proud? (Score:5, Interesting)
Either that or he thinks that the invasiveness of government is directly proportional to the tax rate. This is obviously false: If you have country A who taxes at 50%, and spends all that money on great roads and rail and health care and national parks and aid for the poor, that's less invasive than country B who taxes at 20% and spends all that money on police, surveillance of citizens, jails, propaganda, and the military.
Re:Proud? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Uneducated Citizen:
Our Founding Fathers were okay with slavery. Who really cares what they envisioned with regard to what's okay and what's not okay?
Yours,
An Educated Citizen
Re:Proud? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm proud of my daughter who has the gumption to leave the US with no intention of returning. I'm proud of my sister and her kids who walked into the consulate in Alberta Canada and renounced their American Citizenship.
Reminds me of a confused Brit who was asked when he applied for US Citizenship 50 years ago, "Do you advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or violence?" He thought for a moment then answered, "Violence I suppose."
It's time for a second American Revolution.