> For example, I believe this implies that the DoW can procure data on US citizens en masse from private companies - including, e.g., granular location and financial transaction data - and apply OpenAI's tools to that data to surveil and otherwise target US citizens at scale.
Third Party Doctrine makes trouble for us once again.
Eliminate that and MANY nightmare scenarios disappear or become exceptionally more complicated.
MOST cases don't make it to jury. They're more likely to be resolved via motions and countermotions and the decisions of a jduge.
To dumb down "operating system" for normies, they're probably going to say something along the lines of "the software that makes your computer work.. like Windows." If it stays at that level, we'll have a specific, discrete definition in play.
A broader, equally correct definition could be "the software that makes technology work.. there's an operating system on your computer, your cell phone, your Alexa, and even your car." Then yes, some people will think of their Ring doorbell, the cash register at the coffee shop, and other embedded systems, even if they've never heard the word "embedded."
The definition that shows up will depend entirely on a) the context of the case and b) the savviness of the attorneys involved.
Defendants can always opt for a judge to rule on the case.
At that point, what the law actually says matters a lot (unless the judge is corrupt, which is becoming more common in the US, but with corrupt judges, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad the laws is).
You can mitigate/speed the process using your password manager too.
I still use a filter in my email so that if something comes in under my Gmail, it gets a special tag that I can filter on and treat those as a todo list. Rarely happens beyond the occasional Google Meet connection.
It's "intelligence platform" in the sense that you can gain a ton of information on individuals, organizations, and relationships that drive it all. If you can track how people move and interact between organizations, you can determine who someone is doing business with and even make an educated guess if that's a sale or interview.
People who have difficulty on dating apps want to find a scapegoat, so they scapegoat the app.
The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.
To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.
Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).
I hate this phrase because it's a generic catch-all that says nothing but shuts down any discussion. If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want. Can we admit that social dynamics have completely changed and the value of "a relationship" dropped through the floor? 200 years ago bad relationship was better than no relationship because have fun trying to farm land on your own, but nowadays it's literally more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person.
Also, personally, I'm a minority within a minority, and I'm not going to cheat the statistics even if I shower twenty times a day.
> If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want.
I think you are describing a person who has worked on himself. Like doing sports, that's good. I think too many guys continue with their teenage hobbies like playing computer games, and that's generally not attractive to women.
Of course, there are no guarantees. There's no magic checklist that you can fulfill and be guaranteed to find a partner. But I think there's always more you can do to make yourself more attractive.
I'm gay, so I don't care about impressing women. But besides this... I don't understand what's wrong with incorporating teenage hobbies into adult lifestyle. Sure, nobody wants to marry a mental teenager, but if I do have adult self-development hobbies, then I see no problem that next to that I'd also have teenage hobbies. I find it very sad when guys completely discard their personality just to keep wife happy.
It's just that, at current point of my life I think I'm ready for a relationship. My daily life loop is satisfactory for me, the only thing I'm missing is someone to be with.
> If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want.
I know people like this, but they also are unlucky in love because they also have negative attitudes about women and life that they refuse to become more enlightened about.
> friendly, responsible, honest, not poor... keep the house clean
Even assuming I take you at your word, this describes a good roommate, not a good romantic partner.
> do sports, learn new things
Has negligible if any effect on romantic relationships. Both fat and stupid people still find romantic partners (and sometimes end up happy with them nonetheless).
> Then the fuck more you want
Somebody who is fun to be with, who makes me feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside, who at times makes me feel safe and at other times dares me to go farther. Somebody who is willing to go to new depths of vulnerability together, so that I can trust that they see me, the whole me, even the crummy parts, and I can see them, the whole them, even the crummy parts, and be loved and accepted nonetheless.
> The value of "a relationship" has dropped through the floor
This is transactional language. Strong, fulfilling romantic relationships are not transactional. Part of working on yourself is learning how to develop non-transactional relationships without getting hurt / getting exploited in your attempts to do so (i.e. by lemons on the market).
> more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person
I highly disagree, assuming that you find the right person to live with, which is the whole challenge. Living with another person who you enjoy living with, economically speaking, means splitting at least rent and electric bills (water bills are more linear with the number of people in the house), sometimes splitting a car payment (if you are a one-car household); when you split rent, you split the rent of the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and at least one bedroom, that are all shared. You eat better by cooking for two and sharing. The absolutely most economical arrangement is usually Dual-Income No Kids (DINK).
> Somebody who is fun to be with, who makes me feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside, who at times makes me feel safe and at other times dares me to go farther. Somebody who is willing to go to new depths of vulnerability together, so that I can trust that they see me, the whole me, even the crummy parts, and I can see them, the whole them, even the crummy parts, and be loved and accepted nonetheless.
Cool. If I had stated that I am like this, then someone else would've complained that this is overly romantic view and in reality a relationship is built with someone who can help with boring everyday tasks like doing the laundry or watching the kids. The point is, even if I were Jesus Christ himself, someone would find a flaw that makes me undateable in their opinion.
> This is transactional language.
Because all relationships are transactional. Welcome to adulthood. I don't really have time to argue with someone who still believes in Santa Claus.
> Living with another person who you enjoy living with, economically speaking, means splitting at least rent and electric bills (water bills are more linear with the number of people in the house), sometimes splitting a car payment (if you are a one-car household); when you split rent, you split the rent of the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and at least one bedroom, that are all shared. You eat better by cooking for two and sharing.
It's strange to me that you tell me not to be transactional, but then you point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support. Also, there's a huge difference between "without a relationship, I'll literally starve to death" and "without a relationship, I'll go on holiday once a year instead of twice a year".
Something tells me that your view of relationships is incoherent at best.
> The point is, even if I were Jesus Christ himself, someone would find a flaw that makes me undateable in their opinion.
Well yeah, Christ isn't really dateable because he would never be able to be vulnerable with you (after all, if he died for your sins, you can't really repay the favor, can you?). People want to take celebrities to bed, they don't want to date them. It's a different kind of relationship - more shallow.
But more to the point, a flaw is not what makes somebody undateable. We all have flaws. I have flaws. My partner has flaws. Some kinds of flaws make people undateable, others do not.
> Someone who still believes in Santa Claus
I mean, my partner makes me happier than Santa Claus ever did, and I don't have to wait until Christmas for her to pay me a visit, so....
> point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support
Emotional support was literally the first example I gave ("feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside"). I added the economic argument to address your framing. The emotional aspect is the #1 most important reason and I would be in my relationship for that reason alone, even without any economic benefits; the economic benefits are a silver lining and insufficient on their own to justify a relationship. But no, I'm not going to pretend that the silver lining doesn't exist.
> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.
It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.
In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.
> If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline
That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.
1 The number of people using these apps.
2. The age group using the apps
3. the type of people using the apps
4. the culture that it has replaced and infiltrated
5 It is the social norm by now to be asked if your on TiXXXr or some other app
The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.
> If you're in your 40s you aren't looking to date people in their 20s.
My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.
Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.
It's just a reinforcement loop where the more of something you have the more it accelerates. It happens in many places: bank runs (as soon as people start taking money out, more start doing so), the dead sea effect (where the best people leave and people start leaving as the median quality of coworker drops), hiring (where the more capable you are the more likely you are to get hired, so it gets harder and harder to hire the later you are to the game - most obvious with when you're interviewing interns or whatever), and so on.
This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.
My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.
Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.
But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.
If they're optimizing for engagement (the same as Netflix and everyone else), that comes from the the number of active conversations you wind up having. If you're swiping a ton but matches never message you, you'll give up and try another app -- that's not engagement. The more engagement you have from real back-and-forth messages (not spam), the more real-life dates you go on (if you're doing it right). And the more people you meet, the more likely you are to leave.
It's not "enshittified", dating is just hard. People are picky and it's difficult to get a good read on people from just their online profiles. The dating apps just want to keep you engaged and spending money. They don't need to make finding matches harder because they're worried you'll leave -- finding matches is hard enough to begin with. Trying to make it harder is the least of their concerns. They're trying to give you as good of a service as possible, while getting you to pay. So they limit numbers of matches to get you to pay. They're not limiting quality of matches.
I’ve wondered about this. Presumably they have some idea of who you will initially match with?
Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.
It's not true. OkC gave the appearance of being really good at finding compatible people, because people would fill out lengthy text profiles, and answer hundreds of survey questions, and you'd get a match score like 85% or 97%.
But if you actually used it, the reality was that a match on paper says next to nothing about chemistry. And overlapping interests or survey questions don't say anything about personality. Except for a few dealbreakers like gender, age range, religion, etc., they didn't actually tell you much.
So OkC switched to prioritizing swiping on photos shortly after Tinder exploded, simply because they're the most effective thing there is for gauging chemistry. At the end of the day, it's way better than the supposed "match score" based on survey questions, or reading lengthy profiles. Not because they were bought by Match, but because it worked better at finding matches.
I thought getting bought by the Tinder people is when OkC became more like Tinder.
And OkC was the best at finding people I'd at the very least be friends with - which is foundational to me anyway. And Hinge loves hiding those profiles behind roses.
Its switch to a swiping interface didn't happen until a couple years after Match bought it. And everything became like Tinder, not just Match apps. Because it genuinely worked better.
And yeah I can totally see how the long profiles could be useful for finding friends. But that's not what the site was ever primarily meant for.
The reality is that OkC basically started out for grad students in Brooklyn to be able to find each other, the kind of person who loves writing and reading profiles. But that's not most people, and so as they expanded across the country they shifted to the format that worked better for most people.
What about an alternative business model, pay-per-date? There's an application in NL that charges €7.50 to arrange a dinner, disallowing chat until 2 hours before the arranged date for practicalities. They partner with restaurants and you each get a 'free' (you paid for it..) drink; but with the commitment that your date also paid for it and will therefore show up.
This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!).
One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.
This exists outside NL now too. However, it’s possibly the most shallow app possible. You know literally nothing about the individual except what they look like. For a country like NL where there’s high homogeneity, probably works out. For the US, this is a disaster.
In the US, you’d only get matched if you were a hot guy. It was more brutal than tinder, hinge, etc. Women in the US aren’t gonna spend a single cent on a guy unless he’s mega hot.
This is really interesting. The platform's incentive in engineered more towards finding you a match than to keeping you looking
I guess this is still corruptable. The paltform could make more money by getting you matches thay look good but dont work out. But id imagine thatll only be a problem once they scale and ROI becomes a larger priority
That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.
Very anecdotal, but in my experience people have no attachment to or enthusiasm for dating apps. I've heard (acquainted) couples say the met on dating apps. No one ever said which ones.
I think the difference is are they people asking in a relationship or not - asking which app is categorically asking where they can find someone to hook up with.
Or it's curiosity (genuine or polite). Maybe, for some people it tips the scale into trying the app either because they were already thinking about trying some/any app, or switching away from their current one.
I don't know if anyone who's asked me has started using the app as a result, but I think it (anecdotally, again) supports an idea that a successful results for one app organically helps its name recognition.
Edit: unless you meant the difference was between people asking which app vs which spouse.
No, you understood me exactly as I meant it - which app.
I met a partner of five years on the apps and people often asked how we met but they never asked which app (Tinder) - we actually saw each other on multiple apps but she did not respond on Bumble because it forced her to send the first message, which I thought was interesting feedback.
I mean, one wedding can draw in over a hundred people, and the specific dating app in question gets name dropped not infrequently. The last wedding I went to, Hinge was mentioned in at least one of the speeches.
I feel like dating apps almost exclusively take off via word of mouth. It doesn’t have to be marriage, though, just people finding matches worth meeting.
Almost every dating app is scammy, buggy, heavily paywalled, and barely used. If you see an ad for a dating app, it’s usually in that category.
Pie in the sky idea: users sign up and deposit to an escrow. If after x years, the user has been married to another user on the site for 1 year without being divorced, the matching site receives the funds. Otherwise, the user receives their funds back.
Might also work with using the users' registered home addresses instead of marriage. There are ways to game it and ways to make it less game able, but you get the idea.
It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections?
“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
You might found out the hard way that a lot of people say they want that, but very much want to avoid it.
The main allure of these apps to young women is all the attention from far more attractive men (relatively). Take that away - show her men who might be her "equal" in terms of marriageability, men who might be willing to commit to her - and your service will soon be dismissed and abandoned for only showing ugly men.
You need to sell the fantasy, sell the delusion. Sell hope. The reality hits too hard.
When I interviewed at Okta (May 2016), I created users Dade Murphy and Kate Libby and then hit the docs to check something.. and the docs included Dade Murhpy already.
Once I joined, I had theories on who wrote it and got it on my first try. :)
Measles is popping up in numerous countries the last couple years. Canada has way more cases than the US in absolute numbers and it's catastrophic per capita.
It'd be great to start digging into the "why" and figure out how to mitigate the sources.
> Canada has seen an alarming increase in the number of measles cases since the outbreak began in October 2024, with a total of 5,380 probable and confirmed cases as of Jan. 10, according to Health Canada.
> In recent months, six countries in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) European region that had previously eliminated the disease have officially lost their measles-free status. In other countries, measles is once again considered endemic.
> Although the decision to remove these countries’ measles-free status was taken last September based on 2024 data, the World Health Organization (WHO) did not release the information publicly until this week, once all countries had signed off.
> It'd be great to start digging into the "why" and figure out how to mitigate the sources.
The "why" is that Measles is an extremely infectious viral disease and so it spreads easily. You "mitigate" this by vaccinating everybody you can once they're old enough and thus creating herd immunity. We already knew that a long time ago.
Or I suppose if you think God King Donald J Trump's misfiring brain controls reality you could ask him to Truth that measles doesn't exist any more. Good luck with that.
Growing Anti-vax sentiment results in a gradually falling fraction of immunised population, Measles is an infectious disease with about 20:1 ratio, but obviously incidence is somewhat random, so a population with only 80% vaccination might go five years with no problem, while one with 90% gets unlucky and sees a rash of cases.
This grew as part of a general "Facts aren't true" era in which we've deployed powerful technology that's able to spread nonsense very quickly to gullible people. Trump is just another symptom and his rise to power in the US in particular is also a consequence of systemic flaws in the US government, a known bad model for governments.
The "facts aren't true" stuff is why the Nazis who have decided to protest near me have such a weird collection of beliefs which to them seem more or less equivalent. They believe 5G mobile telephones caused COVID, that trans people don't exist, that migrants are simultaneously both incredibly powerful, almost superhuman, and yet also very weak and entirely useless. None of this has to make any sense at all, indeed if you're the sort of person who wants to make sense of things you're not what they're looking for.
Negotiating treaties is the exclusive authority of POTUS but approving them is the US Senate's job.
"Committing to work together" is probably vague enough that it's not meaningful but "signed an economic partnership" with a foreign ambassador is pretty explicit.
It's actually a crime for unauthorized officials to negotiate with countries directly to influence disputes, under the Logan act.
Going backdoor with Denmark to make "unrelated agreements" (wink-wink) at the same time as the Greenland dispute is just a cheap way to get around that.
* Note that this doesn't mean I agree with the Logan act, but it's pretty obvious what is happening.
It's also something that wont be prosecuted under the current admnistration, given a lot of the Trump family have acted in the role of foreign diplomats despite not holding official positions. Prosecuting the states for this would open equal scrutiny for them.
Not in this case, since the US hasn't sanctioned Denmark. Trump's rage bleating on Truth Social doesn't constitute official policy. Now, if restrictions on doing business with Denmark were published in the Federal Register, it could get complicated.
California set this precedent roughly a decade ago [0] with no challenge. It will stand.
Subnational diplomacy is the norm in most federations, hence why GOP led Iowa [1] and Montana [2] lobbied in favor of India with Trump leading to the current trade deal [3].
It looks like California showed up and participated in conversations, didn't sign anything. Montana appears to have lobbied, again not signing anything.
Iowa is the exception and I'd be curious what gave them the authority and how much, why it wasn't challenged last fall, and if Massachusettes meets the same circumstances.
Conversations are conversations, and that's my point. This is the "MoU"fication of the US, and honestly, it's not a bad thing.
Reincentivizing states to compete with each other for FDI is not a bad policy. If TX and CA talk with energy speicifc SWFs and go on roadshows abroad, there's nothing wrong with that.
It lights a fire under other state legislator asses.
> So it was never about security at all then, was it?
Never was.
I flew every other week prior to covid and haven't once been through the scanners. For the first ~6 years, I opted out and got pat down over and over again.
Then I realized I could even skip that.
Now at the checkpoint, I stand at the metal detector. When they wave me to the scanner, I say "I can't raise my arms over my head." They wave me through the metal detector, swab my hands, and I'm done. I usually make it through before my bags.
Sometimes, a TSA moron asks "why not?" and I simply say "are you asking me to share my personal healthcare information out loud in front of a bunch of strangers? Are you a medical professional?" and they back down.
Other times, they've asked "can you raise them at least this high?" and kind of motion. I ask "are you asking me to potentially injure myself for your curiosity? are you going to pay for any injuries or pain I suffer?"
The TSA was NEVER about security. It was designed as a jobs program and make it look like we were doing something for security.
> The TSA was NEVER about security. It was designed as a jobs program and make it look like we were doing something for security.
To a great extent, it is security, even if it's mostly security theater, in the sense that it is security theater that people want.
A large portion, maybe even the majority, of travelers simply won't feel safe without it. I've had and overheard multiple conversations at the airport where somebody felt uncomfortable boarding a plane because they saw the screening agent asleep at the desk. Pro-tip, trying to explain security theater to the concerned passenger is not the right solution at this point ;-)
Even Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "security theater" has moderated his stance to acknowledge that it can satisfy a real psychological need, even if it's irrational.
We may be more cynical and look upon such things with disdain, but most people want the illusion of safety, even if deep down they know it's just an illusion.
> A large portion, maybe even the majority, of travelers simply won't feel safe without it. I've had and overheard multiple conversations at the airport where somebody felt uncomfortable boarding a plane because they saw the screening agent asleep at the desk.
I’d hazard that this may be true now, but this feeling was created by the same “security measures” we’re discussing.
Anyway, such major population-wide measures shouldn’t be about stopping people being “uncomfortable” - they should be about minimising risk, or not at all. If you start imposing laws or other practices every time a group of people feel “uncomfortable”, the world will quickly grind to a halt.
> I’d hazard that this may be true now, but this feeling was created by the same “security measures” we’re discussing.
Slight tangent but I recall travelling within the Schengen Zone for the first time and just walking off the plane and straight into a taxi. When I explained what I did to someone she asked "but what about security? How do they know you've not got a bomb?" I don't think I had the words to explain that, if I did manage to sneak a bomb onto the plane into Madrid, I was probably not going to save it for the airport after I landed...
I think they're talking about international travel and not having to go through border control within the Schengen space even though you're traveling to different countries.
Yes, but border control isn't security. I don't go through security when I arrive in the US either. (I do have global entry but that just means I usually go through immigration faster.) If I have a connecting flight after arriving in the US I do sometimes have to go through security again with my carryon but that's a function of airport layout.
Just to be clear: I understand the difference. What I couldn’t do was explain to someone who has no concept that customs are not a security check. Or that you don’t need customs for (effectively) internal flights. I suspect part of this is that in the UK, we don’t get many internal flights (beyond connections), so people don’t have an experience of just walking off a plane and out of the airport.
I flew once from Iraq to Sweden (in a private capacity). There was zero controls other than stamping the passport, passport control but no customs inspection. No check of bags and no question of what I might have been doing in Iraq or why I would go from there to Sweden. It was shocking. Just welcome to sweden and off to the street.
Hopefully they haven't changed. It's nice to see a place still left without the paranoia.
Border entry at airports is concerned with a) smuggling and b) immigration control. Passport control may have been all you saw but there was almost certainly heavy profiling and background checking going on behind the scenes. If you had matched a more suspicious pattern than "high-power passport without suspicious history flying an unusual route", you likely would have faced more scrutiny.
> If you start imposing laws or other practices every time a group of people feel “uncomfortable”, the world will quickly grind to a halt.
I mean, yes, quite an apt description of our reality. This has basically been the modus operandi of the whole of American society for the last 3 decades.
Can't have your kids riding bikes in the neighborhood. Can't build something on your own property yourself without 3 rounds of permitting and environmental review. Can't have roads that are too narrow for a 1100 horsepower ladder truck. Can't get onto a plane without going through a jobs program. Can't cut hair without a certificate. Can't teach 6 year olds without 3 years of post grad schooling + debt. Can't have plants in a waiting room because they might catch on fire. Can't have a comfortable bench because someone who looks like shit might sleep on it.
It's an interesting thought experiment to consider how you would organise your ideal society.
I lived in Switzerland for a time and there are many notorious rules (e.g. don't shower or flush your toilet after 10pm; don't recycle glass out of working hours) governing day-to-day behaviour which initially seem ridiculous and intrusive. However, what you quickly realise is that many of these are rooted in a simple cultural approach of "live your life as you wish, just don't make other people's life worse" - an approach I came to appreciate.
The problem with allowing "feels unsafe" to drive policy is that you get this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866201 ; a lot of Americans (and other nationalities) get that "feels unsafe" feeling when they see a visible minority. Or a Muslim. Or someone who isn't a Muslim but (like a Sikh!) is from the same hemisphere as the Middle East.
You get one set of people's rights compromised to salve the feelings of another set, and this is not right.
The worst thing is that indulging it doesn't lessen the fear either. It just means people reach for something else to be "afraid" of.
Oh for sure, as a non-white, bearded person I've had more than my fair share of "random" screenings!
My dad, with similar features, had the additional (mis)fortune of several work trips to the Middle East and China on his passport. He was "randomly" selected pretty much every time on his US trips, until about ~10 years ago.
Hmmm, now I wonder. Like most other people I had suspected that the "random" screenings of people fitting a certain profile were just biases of the agents creeping in. But could it be, given that the whole process is rather public in view of the rest of the people in line, this is also part of that security theater... i.e. maybe the agents are sometimes pandering to the biases of the travellers?
The moment you encode your biases in policy, you create vulnerabilities.
What I’m hearing is that if I want to get something past your security policy, I need to route it through the Netherlands, possibly via a travel agency.
You don't have to profile people to police, and that's very poor policing. You need to assess actual risk, not fake proxy risk like the color of people's skin.
The problem with profiling is that it sucks both ways. People who are regular degular get fucked for the sake of fake policing, and then real threats are more likely to slip through.
> Nah I disagree. A charter plane with 200 Dutch tourists is lower risk than a flight coming out of Bolivia.
What a weird and random thing to say. There's literally no data that can support for or against and neither have a history of terrorism.
Ironically KLM ('dutch') has had more terrorism per flight than any Bolivian airline. Both minimal (Bolivia 1954, KLM 1973,1994). There's literally no other piece of data between these countries that I could find to support this "lower risk".
Further, the travel advisory for Denmark and Netherlands cite terror risk while Bolivia cites civil unrest.
While being woke is not helpful, neither is 'winging it' based on 'what feels white, ahem, right'. At least do a Google search.
How about a flight coming out of Bolivia with 200 Dutch tourists on board? Is it more or less risky than a flight coming out of the USA with 200 Donald Trumps on board? Is there a list?
It is mostly security, but not to residents of the country. Those can enforce their rights. In my country, I can argue with airport security, and win. Foreigners can’t, so they follow whatever rules. A few times when landing in the US, security was extremely rude, I think just looking for an excuse (things like throwing your laptop a few feet away, while staring at you, etc). You take it bc you’re not home, and the cost of ruining your vacation is not worth it.
What I’m trying to say is that , while a lot of it is theater, TSA may be more effective security against foreigners but you as a resident don’t notice because you can opt out. Try going to the UK and telling them you can’t raise your arms while being a US citizen.
I tried to opt out in the UK last time I was there a few years ago. The agent looked at me, confused, and said "so... you don't want to get on the plane?". She told me the the UK didn't allow opt-outs.
This was the only time I've gone through the machine since they were introduced.
Airport security in India is particularly infuriating on this point. Everything gets scanned and fed through over and over again, and everyone gets wanded and patted down over and over again, with maximum ‘fuck you’ to any passenger that dares to question the sanity of restarting your entire screening - because you left your belt on.
Meanwhile, I haven’t even had a western airports metal detector even fire on the same belt in years.
Most western countries also haven't had multiple attempted [0][1][2] and committed [3][4] mass casualty terror attacks nor a direct conventional conflict that for all intents and purposes was a war [5] in the past 2 years.
And airport security in Israel makes Indian airport security feel like a breeze and I found Turkish airport security to be similar to India's (I remember landing in IST a couple years ago post-COVID and how the news monitors all blared about the 3-6 Turkish soldiers who died in Turkish controlled Syria the day previously).
All three are in very tenuous neighborhoods where the risks of mass casualty terror attacks remains a very real possibility and no on-duty officer wants to be the one who's name comes up in an inquiry into a terror attack should they happen.
Also, from what I remember you are either a Chinese national or someone who has travelled significantly to China. It's the equivalent of a Russian national or Russian-origin person traveling to Poland or Estonia post-2022. Anyone with that profile falls under stricter scrutiny in India due to reciprocal treatment of Indian-nationals and Indian-origin people from Arunachal [6][7] and Ladakh [8] as well as the multiple recent India-China standoffs.
India's airport "security" is one of the best examples of underemployment and security "theatre".
The needless repetition and duplication of tasks achieves little actual "security" and is more a jobs program for a population that is desperately underskilled, underemployed and borderline unemployable. Never mind the fact that airports like Bombay are literally meters away from slums, which are a far greater security risk than actual passengers.
Your list of citations is entirely meaningless because Indian airports are no more or less secure than the average airport in the west. What India manages to do extremely well is annoy the daylights out of travellers for mindless bureaucratic reasons.
Please can you explain how security stamping the back of your boarding pass meaningfully adds to "security" and how fifteen checks of your passport could have avoided a single one of the incidents you list?
> And airport security in Israel makes Indian airport security feel like a breeze
Not just in Israel, but even at other airports for flights to Israel! I was surprised to find that flights to Israel from JFK and EWR actually have a secondary security screening at the gate. In fact, the entire waiting area is walled off with only 1 or 2 controlled entries and exits. If you have to leave the area to go to the bathroom, well, you're just going to get screened again when you come back.
And they are very thorough. They WILL rummage through your carry on and purse and shoes.
(I wasn't even traveling to Israel, I was at an adjacent gate but got in the wrong line by mistake, haha!)
> The agent looked at me, confused, and said "so... you don't want to get on the plane?"
Brit here.
That's simply the British way of "calling you out" on your bullshit. Had you given a legitimate reason not to be scanned (and I can't think of one offhand), then I assure you, they would have been quite nice and helpful; certainly so in comparison to American standards of airport security staff!
I've felt more uncomfortable with the UK Border Force than US CBP. It's been a few years since I've been to the UK, but there was usually more tension for Non-European foreigners at the Airport than non-Americans at the US airports.
The point where you present your ticket+ID is before and separate from the physical screening. It could be anywhere from a few meters to dozens of meters separating them.
At the screening stage, the agents do not know who you are or your nationality.
It's not about being recognized, it's about when you are asked to be patted down, having the courage to lie "I can't raise my arms over my head", knowing the risk of being caught is at worst not making this flight. For a foreigner it might be getting banned permanently from the country. Same concept as self censorship. You do what you're told and then you go enjoy your vacation.
I don't think I've ever made it through the physical screening without betraying my accent at some point. Sure you can work your way out of an accent, but it's not easy, and requires years of practice, and probably the most reliable (but fuzzy) low-scrutiny indicator of someone who "aint from around here" in a multicultural society where looks are ~useless for such determinations.
We people are extremely poor judges of our own emotions, particularly in hypotheticals.
Normalize having two lines; one with tsa, one without. See which airplane people actually board after a while. Let us put our time and money on the line and we’ll see what we really think. It’s the only way to tell.
I’m sure in a world with tsa for buses and trains some people would say the same things they do now about our tsa.
Let's not mix "emotions" with "think". If I am afraid (emotion) about something happening, I will be afraid where the maximum damage can be done - in the queue before the security check (think). Most airports optimized that to reduce the queues, but there are still at least tens of people in a very narrow space.
But I personally do not care that much, because I think most terrorists are dumb or crazy, and you can't fix all dumb or crazy. Some of the dumb and crazy become terrorists, some become CEO-s, some do maintenance of something critical. If something really bad happens I would not feel much better if it was a "dumb CEO" that caused it or it was a "dumb terrorist".
>
Even Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "security theater" has moderated his stance to acknowledge that it can satisfy a real psychological need, even if it's irrational.
What about the real psychological need of not wanting to be surveilled that also quite a lot of people have?
Personally I agree with that sentiment. But unfortunately, as the success of Facebook and Google have shown, most people really don't care about their privacy.
> But unfortunately, as the success of Facebook and Google have shown, most people really don't care about their privacy.
In particular concerning Facebook:
The very radical stances that people have concerning Facebooks (i.e. both the success of Facebook, and the existence of people who are radically opposed to social media sites) rather shows that both stances are very present in society and the trenches between these stances run deep.
The situation re: psychological safety becomes very apparent when you mention to foreigners how often guns accidentally make it through TSA in peoples bags - and get discovered on screening on the return flight.
Saucers for eyes, saucers! Hah
The reality is that screening raises the bar enough that most casuals won’t risk it unless they’re crazy, which is worth something, and makes most people feel comfy, which is also worth something.
It’s like using a master lock on your shed, or a cheap kwikset on your front door.
Here we are specifically discussing the gold star on a USA driver license. When there is already the whole TSA kwikset fiasco in place. The gold star indicates that a person provided some pieces of paper that may be fabricated to a very busy DMV clerk. This is somehow meant to prove they would never do anything malicious.
Or... you could slip the TSA person a $50 and say "keep the change". Legally.
There is no risk in submitting false documents. They reject valid documents all the time. They don't report you to authorities when they reject your documents.
So neither avenue is like even a cheap lock. They are more like door knobs that keep the door closed until you twist the knob that is designed to be easy to twist.
Except the risk you'll miss your flight, which in most cases is the screw that is turned.
My wife and I both have RealID driver's licenses. She had to get a replacement, and apparently the machines used to print them for mailing out later (as opposed to going down to their office and getting a replacement in person) are just ever so slightly off - so her license won't scan. She was given a surprising amount of harassment on a flight not long ago over this matter. She got me to take a photograph of her passport and send it to her so she could show it on the return trip - where her license again failed to scan. This is a fairly well-documented problem. Reports from all over the country have it, and it always seems to be certain license printers that just fail.
So now she carries her Global Entry card, which is otherwise only used for access to the expedited line for land and sea border crossings but is a valid RealID in itself, for domestic flights. It scans correctly.
So there are two kind of security, one is preventing innocents who mistakenly brings things like gun or flammable liquid like gasoline. The other is preventing people who actually want to do harm like terrorism. There is no doubt TSA is effective for first group. However the evidence against second group is kind of murky as no country has ever caught anyone in the second group till now.
I think it's human nature to point at something you don't like and if it isn't 100% perfect then point to it and say it's flawed and must be taken down.
You are missing an important element. You can decide for yourself whether AI-produced code is worth the price. You don't get to decide whether the TSA is effective enough to pay for it.
Maybe you are willing to pay 15% for AI that saves you 20%. Even if it isn't very effective, you come out slightly ahead. Or maybe you pay 85% for something you deem to be 90% effective
With TSA you pay 300% for something you might judge to be 2% effective and you don't have a choice.
If you offer the public FDA-inspected cinnamon for a 20% premium over not-inspected-and-may-contain-dangerous-levels-of-lead cinnamon, a lot of people will pay the premium. But a large percentage of people will opt for the cheaper cinnamon.
If you let it be known that the FDA inspection amounts to a high school dropout trying to read a manifest on a shipping container full of imported cinnamon, a lot more people will opt for the cheaper cinnamon. But a significant percentage will still pay the premium.
There is very little about that inspection that protects people, and just because something is not inspected doesn't mean it has lead in it. If you really want to be safe, you should run your cinnamon through your own detection lab.
What we need is an iPhone app that can detect guns, explosives, anthrax, covid, Canadians, and any other airplane hazard. Then let people carry that personal TSA sniffer onto the plane. They can feel safe and secure and the rest of us can save a fortune in taxes.
I would just let the airlines pick if they want TSA screening or not. Customers could buy flights with whatever security level they want.
If you fly intrastate in Alaska there is no screening on commercial flights (it seems TSA must not be required on non-interstate flights). Technically it's still illegal to bring a gun but no one would know one way or the other. It really didn't bother me that there was no security, in fact, it felt great, and at least I could be sure if a bear met us on the tarmac someone would probably be ready.
I know of one other story I heard secondhand from someone experiencing it, of a small regional airline in the South, where if you checked a gun, the pilot just gives it back to the passenger...
Security is a classic example of a public good where this doesn't work well. The cheapest ways to secure an airport (sharing queues, staff, protocols, machines, training, threat models) are going to also benefit those who opt out, creating a tragedy of the commons.
Effectiveness and theatricality aside, that wouldn’t work: the risk that the TSA ostensibly controls for is primarily that of planes being used as weapons against non-passengers, and only secondarily passenger security/hijacking.
One issue is that security theater creates demand for itself. Do things that induce worry and a tendency towards paranoia in the more susceptible parts of the population and then you will gradually raise the general alertness of the population. This then manufactures a desire for these measures. It largely rides off of people's general unwillingness to entertain just how many of the measures are ineffective or nonsensical. "It can't all be pointless. Surely some of it must make us safer." It's not an unreasonable belief in itself, but everyone having that attitude lets security theater grow cancerously.
I've been applying this principle of behavior to... ahem... current events. I feel like this helps contextualize the behavior of the majority during the current economic and political turmoil. People can't help but pretend this wasn't coming for years, and they certainly can't admit to having a part in it.
If it's about satisfying a psychological need, then it should be compared as such to satisfying other psychological needs. Like, say, not getting groped by strangers.
> A large portion, maybe even the majority, of travelers simply won't feel safe without it.
Nonsense. Most of that is just because it’s been normalised - because it exists and the people manning it make such a song and dance about it. Going from that to nothing would freak some people out, but if it were just gradually pared back bit by bit people wouldn’t need it anymore.
Here in Australia there’s no security for a lot of regional routes (think like turboprop (dash-8) kind of routes) starting from small airports, because it’s very expensive to have the equipment and personnel at all these small airports, and on a risk-benefit analysis the risk isn’t high enough. Some people are surprised boarding with no security, but then they’re like, “Oh, well must be OK then I guess or they wouldn’t let us do it”…
We also don’t have any liquid limits at all for domestic flights, and don’t have e to take our shoes off to go through security domestically or internationally, and funnily enough we aren’t all nervous wrecks travelling.
Yeah security people (computer or otherwise), are mostly crypto fascists with hardons for humiliating people and telling them what to do.
It's been proven from time to time that the strength of a security system is mostly determined by its strongest element, and defense in depth, and making people jump through hoops contributes comparatively little.
That's why you can go reasonably anywhere on the web, and have your computer publically reachable from any point in the world, yet be reasonably safe, provided you don't do anything particularly dumb, like installing something from an unsafe source.
That's why these weird security mitigation strategies like password rotation every two weeks with super complex passwords, and scary click-through screens about how youll go straight to jail if you misuse the company computer are laughable.
A growing part of me doesn't care, and doesn't want to coddle fascist mental illness.
If it was "Glass Iraq or make people take off their shoes", then I'll take the shoes...
But honestly? Fuck these people. We have extended them unlimited credit to make social change, and they always want more and worse changes. Their insecurities are inexhaustible. We need to declare them bankrupt of political capital. We need to bully them and make it clear their views aren't welcome, frankly.
We are 25 years deep into "Letting the terrorists win", and I'm fucking sick of it.
What ethnicity are you? I went through an airport -- and nobody else got screened except me. What was special about me? I was the only non-white person in the airport. Upon complaining, this was the response:
> Random selection by our screening technology prevents terrorists from attempting to defeat the security system by learning how it operates. Leaving out any one group, such as senior citizens, persons with disabilities, or children, would remove the random element from the system and undermine security. We simply cannot assume that all terrorists will fit a particular profile.
I used to have a Sikh manager who wore a turban. Whenever we traveled together, he would get "randomly" stopped. While they were patting him down, he would inevitably chuckle and say something like "So what are the odds of being 'randomly' selected 27 times in a row?"
I don't know the specifics of the process for selection, but I can confidently say that the process is bigoted.
Same thing used to happen to me when I had dreadlocks. Made the same joke too. "what are the odds I'd get randomly selected 100% of the time I go through a checkpoint..."
Besides being racist this is kind of dumb. If you’re going to bring down the plane you’re defo not going to look like someone who gets randomly selected 100% of the time. Even the 9/11 terrorists knew this and shaved their beard instead of looking like the fundamentalists scumbags they were.
In proper English usage it would only be a bigoted
(obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group)
check if it was unreasonable to suspect a Sikh of carrying a Kirpan.
The Rehat Maryada would suggest that is in no way whatsoever an unreasonable suspicion.
Sure, your manager likely didn't carry one on airplanes .. but that still falls short of being an unreasonable check.
As a white guy who was caught accidentally carrying a large knife once through security, at the bottom of a carry-on backpack I'd had since high school, I don't think it's in any way essential to use racial or ethnic markers to figure out whether someone is taking something dangerous onto a plane. I didn't even know I was trying to bring a knife onto a plane at a regional airport. There's no reason to think that Sikhs are explicitly going out of their way to hide something.
Interesting that none of these comments seem to be questioning why we can’t just carry a small pocketknife on the plane. We used to be able to before 9/11. The 9/11 hijackings only worked because the policy was comply, land, and let the negotiators do their work. Suicide attacks using commercial airlines just wasn’t a thing. We now have armored locking cockpit doors and no airplane would give up control to hijackers anymore. United Flight 93 was already taken over and heard about the World Trade Center and they revolted.
Now, knives could only be used to commit a crime i.e. assaulting another passenger or crew. Banning liquids does more to prevent terrorists than banning knives. I can see banning them for the same reason concerts ban them, that it is a lot of people in a small space, but that is very different than “national security” or “preventing terrorism”.
Welcome to the club. I inadvertently traveled with not one, but two large box cutters in my carryon satchel for at least 20 flights before I discovered them while searching for some swag. I put them in there for a booth setup in Vegas years prior. Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles.
Still screened and detained 100 percent of the time, sometimes for hours, sometimes having to surrender personal devices, decades later.
> Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles.
What were you hoping to achieve by sending that report?
Most people would have just thought "wow, lucky I wasn't caught with that", taken it out of the bag so it didn't happen again and carried on with their lives.
Deviating from that normal response makes it look like you're just trying to cause trouble.
Yeah, if I had a "Crap, what was that doing in there?" I'd be very quiet about it.
As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.
Some of us genuinely believe all that "cops are there to help you, so try to be helpful to cops" stuff we were raised on. Right up until the point when you actually try to do it and find out how things really work...
You sent a report saying you were not searched for 20 times and now you are searched all the time? Has it been over 20 times that you have been searched?
Honestly, I would just give them a pass to carry a ceremonial knife, if they could prove they were Sikhs and not someone pretending to be. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things and why the same rules have to apply to everyone. I think most reasonable people understand that they can't preserve every aspect of their personal beliefs or pride in a situation involving the safety of millions of people flying daily. Carrying a weapon is certainly a bit unusual as a pillar of faith, but there are plenty of others that could also be deemed antipathetic to the well functioning order of a modern society trying to move people safely from A to B. And the same way I would consider trained and licensed gun owners to be a relatively low threat and a rule-abiding group of citizens, that's how I would view Sikhs with their blades (or even more so). So if you're Amish, take a horse. If it's Shabbat, wait til Sunday. If you're the TSA and you want to be more efficient by discriminating, look at people who have no discrenable ideology, or those whose ideology actively conflicts with your mission of preventing attacks.
Sikh's carrying a knife, a bracelet, a comb, etc. has never bothered me in the slightest in all the decades I've known about this - the Khalistan movement in a particular location during a particular time aside, they're not exactly actual postcards for terrorism (despite what some might think when faced with people and turbans).
They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up.
Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>.
Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
okee yeah, and rules are rules, and there's a reason to think that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where rules could be bent in some cases for individuals if they actually posed no theeat, but we all have to deal with the lowest common denominator wanting to cause the most damage, so here we are.
I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks.
My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger.
If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
The issue isn't really whether a Sikh might be carrying a knife (as Sikhs generally advocate non-violence and pacifism), but if an exemption is afforded to give Sikhs the right to carry weapons on a plane, whether a terrorist might then impersonate being a Sikh in order to get a weapon onboard.
The Sikh blade is ornamental, and usually blunted. There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to carry a blunted blade that basically isn't even a knife. There is no concern of a terrorist using it anymore than any other blunted object, as Sikhs could be required to bring the blunted blade and the blade checked at security.
This is completely absurd and backwards. Violence on planes (at least, phsycial, weapon-assisted) is basically exclusively the purview of organized ideological groups, it's not like crime in the streets. While I'm not aware of any Sikh group who has ever attempted to hijack a plane, the extremely well established general pattern is exactly that extremist sincere believers in a religion or cause are the most dangerous people on a plain.
Not a hijacking, but also maybe a reason not to give all Sikhs a pass on airport security.
> The bombing of Air India Flight 182 is the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history and was the world's deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001. It remains the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Air India, and the deadliest no-survivor hull loss of a single Boeing 747
I think you misunderstood me. That's exactly what I'm saying. And I'm saying that Sikhs with or without ceremonial blades are no more of a threat than Mormons wearing special underwear.
[edit]
To be more specific: An individual with an extreme belief about anything is as dangerous as an extremist member of a group with extreme beliefs. So the smart thing is to look at the beliefs and extramicy of each person. If you find someone trying to board an aircraft who doesn't care if they make it to the end of their flight, that is a security problem.
I think the best and easiest idea is to prevent people from carrying weapons on airplanes. Taking over an airplane with special underwear is not a realistic threat.
In contrast, trying to interview and run background checks on every person boarding a plane to figure out if they are an extremist on a mission or not is (a) much more invasive, and (b) much less likely to work out. Especially when you actually don't want to prevent fundamentalists from flying on planes (I don't think preventing some major evangelical church leader or some radical rabbi from flying would even be constitutional, and clearly not a popular move if attempted).
Note that I am not at all advocating for extra security targeting of Sikhs or any other such religious or ethnic targeting. I am just saying that no one should be allowed to carry a weapon on board a commercial airplane, for any reason.
Notably in India, there have been a few times where Sikhs have been at the head of violent revolts - and a few times where they have been targeted by violent purges/genocides.
They’re generally pretty chill, but they aren’t pacifists.
I'd say that incident falls under political extremism, not religious extremism. Which is all the more reason to check people's individual beliefs rather than their race or ethnicity. Anyone from any background can be radicalized; some formatting is more prone to it than others. Sikhs, as you say, are pretty chill. Not being pacifist doesn't mean you want to go out and kill anyone.
Indeed, I didn't know about this incident, thanks for sharing it.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that Sikhs are more or less likely than any other group to be pacifist. I was saying we shouldn't even be having this discussion, and simply scan people for weapons, and use things like actual random screening to help as needed. And that religious reasons for carrying weapons are not a valid excuse.
scuse me, is there another major religion in modern times whose popular leaders sanctify taking the lives of disbelievers to get to heaven? I'm waiting, I'd love to hear about another one.
@defrost: I apparently can't respond directly to you. It's a mistake to ascribe a singular focus to someone you don't know. There may be one out of ten thousand people in any group who might want to cause chaos or violence, and they may very well have their own reasons. It would be absurd, though, to not acknowledge that there are some "gospels", if you will take that term in the broadest sense possible, or sub-religions, which preach that violence is a path to salvation, and which tend to recruit people for the purpose of violence. There are also some political movements which fill the same vacuum for an aimless, angry human soul without religion.
It is not that I have a singular focus on one religion nor one political movement, so much as that the evidence suggests that, currently, some movements have more violent offshoots and a more violent profile. There are a handful of political and religious ideologies in the world that lead to more suicide bombings and hijackings per year than, say, the total number done by believers in Zoroastrianism, Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Libertarians, Democratic Socialists, Freemasons and Christians combined.
If you had, for instance, Jim Jones's cult or the Aum Shinrikyo boarding airplanes and blowing them up on a regular basis, and your response was that a person had to be a single-minded bigot to notice the fact that most airplane bombings originated with this particular ideology, then I'd say you were ignoring facts or willfully making excuses for ideologies which brainwashed people into doing those things. Possibly for reasons related to disliking your own society, which is perfectly fair, but certainly not neutral or scientific.
No, not at all. I was simply combating the idea that the kinds of reasons that lead to people being less likely to become regular criminals (a religious reason to carry a weapon, being licensed and trained with a weapon) would apply to their risk profile on airplanes.
Isn’t that what the scanners are for? To find large metallic objects? Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that? Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons? If so, we should get rid of the scanners.
Err, not that I know of, I generally use the OED to look up the various recorded uses of words.
> To find large metallic objects?
The OED is for finding words, "scanners" that I've used or made are for mapping background geological structures via seismic waves, gravitational waves, magnetic waves, gamma waves. Medical scanners I've worked with have generally not bee used for finding large metallic objects and some should not be used if a patient has large metal objects attached or within.
> Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that?
In 40+ years of scanning things there's not been a single time I've needed an additioan "random" scan - a few times scans have been repeated due to various failures to save data.
> Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons?
In the comment you responded to I said that it is not unreasonable to think that a Sikh you meet, anywhere, might be carrying a knife, a comb, a bracelet, etc. I did not mention anything about scanners. No, seriously, go and recheck the comment.
> If so, we should get rid of the scanners.
We? All scanners? Okay, well, thanks for sharing that opinion.
I figure various groups of scanner users will want to keep using them, of course. I personally am in favour of scanners for exploration and medical work.
A person can get mistakenly (or not) flagged for special screening and get it over and over again - it happened to me many years ago.
I fixed it by filling out a form requesting a review, after which I received a “redress number” which could be entered into my booking information. It reliably stopped after that.
Not defending the practice but the Mohammed thing has a possible origin that isn't directly racist. The common names among Muslims and their propensity to appear on various watch lists lead to a lot of false alarms on those with those names.
It may be a racist result but there is a pretty reasonable and understandable reason it happens, ignoring the legality and morality of that kind of tracking as well.
Same. Every border crossing. Every flight. Every interaction with police. I always get checked. I always get flagged. I always have by bags opened and my car searched coming back from Canada with officers holding large powerful machine guns and rifles in case I twitch to hard.
I haven't so much as gotten a speeding ticket in nearly a decade but law enforcement and border guards break out the microscope every time they see me.
I am a white male and have TSA pre-check and after walking through the metal detector, maybe one out of several times I get randomly selected for the body scanner. I've never gotten the dreaded SSSS though. I've very rarely traveled alone not on a work trip and never alone on a one way ticket so maybe that helps.
I get it not infrequently when travelling from europe. It's annoying that they pretend that "oh this is random" .. I'm even going up to the airport employees at hte gate and telling them "I'm told I'm here to make new friends today"
It's screwed up that skin color is a marker that would lead an ignorant provincial quasi-cop to assume someone is of a particular ethnicity, and even more so that that ethnicity would lead them to believe an individual adheres to a belief system that might lead them to blow up an aircraft. Very poor set of assumptions and flawed tooling, to say the least.
When all you see is color, everything different is racism.
I'm the whitest white person you'll find, white bread and turkey sandwich. I get screened all the time. Most of the time the agents are not white, WTF would I blame the color of their skin?
Many ICE agents are Latino but it doesn't stop them racially profiling other Latinos.
When it comes to customs & border, it's more about being "ethnically terrorist", which is more so Middle Eastern than Black in US at this particular moment in time.
I once found myself in the "random extra screening" waiting room in LHR before boarding an El Al flight to Tel Aviv, everyone else in the room was Muslim. Random indeed...
I was so confused last time I traveled as I watched this brown skinned family getting shaken down for ID by TSA and they literally just waived me past and said didn't need ID. Mind you I've never not been asked to show ID to TSA before this.
Curious about the downvotes here, it's 100% relevant to the conversation and is personal experience. I imagine it's tone policing to ensure we don't criticize the techo-facist edgelord take over?
Today was the second time in a year I went into one and my crotch got flagged because of my pants zipper. nothing in my pockets. no belt. nothing hidden. etc.
I was then subjected to full pat down and a shoe chemical test as a cherry on top.
Might need to try convincing them next time to let me do the metal detector instead.
What's the point of this higher fidelity scanner if it can't tell the difference between a fly and a restricted object?
Almost always my back sweat from wearing a backpack shows up on the body scanner. Then a TSA agent has to put their gloved hand on my sweaty back. What a shit job lol.
Whenever my backpack has been pulled aside for various reasons (large metal tools, too many loose wires, water bottle), I'll often get the bomb sniffer wipe.
It's hard to put into words, but you're eroding the social contract through your actions. People with conditions get accused of faking it all the time, and it sounds like you're actually faking it.
If he was doing that to get faster treatment at a hospital or even just a restaurant or something then I'd agree. But by doing it to get faster treatment at the TSA check he's literally doing everyone else a favour.
The argument is that if tricks like this were to become widespread, they may start requiring certified medical documentation (or other hurdles) for said faster treatment, making life even more annoying for people with genuine issues.
In that case would actually increase security, right? Ans with genuine medical issues it should be no problem to get the necessary documentation. Either way, the consumers win.
If they opted for a pat down for 6 years, then faster treatment clearly wasn’t the goal. Metal detector + swabbing is not faster than the scanner either.
hahah. I never really comprehended what "I'm going to slide my hand up until I meet resistance" meant. I guess it depends which way the camel's nose is facing, what kinda resistance they're gonna get.
I did meet a lot of older TSA agents who told me they tried to stand as far away from the scanners as possible all day, and they completely understood my position on not going through em. I'm from LA, and I remember when this happened [0] so my general view on letting anyone shoot any kind of imaging radiation through me is pretty dim, but more so if they can't count to ten or tie their own shoelaces.
I fly next week, I will have to decide whether having this conversation is worth not trying to get out of the opt-out procedure. The difficulty will be keeping a straight face.
I’m genuinely confused by this take. Admittedly my knowledge of exactly how the TSA operates is quite shallow, but don’t they xray your bags and scan for weapons on your body?
Are we saying that if they stopped doing that there would not be an increase in incidents?
Or is it that they are overly performative? I’ve never been all that annoyed with raising my hands above my head, but it seems like, in your case, if a passenger can’t do that, they would make an exception for you anyways. Which seems fair?
I did this about a dozen times until I had too many TSA agents become extremely shitty and hostile towards me. The last two times they were making threats as I was walking away that they were going to "get me". I decided my protest opt out excuse wasn't worth dealing with attitude. They usually also made me stand there and wait sort of blocking everyone for 5-10 minutes until they even called someone over
Either they're joking (and should've added an emoji) or more likely, parent is being childish and phrasing points to finding a "clever hack" (i.e., not injured). There's nothing clever about unethical and criminal pro tips.
Fair! I was going to go back and edit, but my comment was more for other people who read your comment thinking it was a good idea for them to do (assuming they can raise their hands over their heads).
Since the TSA cannot force you to prove it - after all, they're not medical personnel to evaluate it and not willing to risk your injury - whether someone lies becomes irrelevant.
If they decide to follow up to make an example of you, they can easily record a video of you until you raise your arms over your head somewhere later in the airport or on the flight. You won’t have a good time proving your case.
Just because you can raise your hands over your head doesn't mean it isn't painful.
In any case, it's legal to opt-out of the scanners, so why would they care what method you use (really what language you use) to indicate you'd rather get a pat-down than go through the scanners? Either way you're complying with the law.
it's legal to say "I can't raise my arms over my head". it is then prohibited to ask people about disabilities, should somebody think to inquire. I was not saying "tell this to a judge", i was telling HN that yall were making assuumptions. (assuumptions makes ass-of-you-and-you)
So... You're lying about having a health condition in a loud and obnoxious way? Not sure what the point is.
Just because you can get around TSA checkpoints doesn't mean it's not "about" security. There's only so much that can be done when we have to balance safety and convenience.
1) its okay to the lie to the TSA and troll them. the TSA is just low skilled jobs program.
2) those scanning machines have leaked their images before to the public so its okay not to want to go through them and have your.png on there forever.
And it’s been confirmed by red teams sneaking weapons through checkpoints that it’s not even doing the basic job. Lots of hassle and expense for little to no gain in security.
You sound insufferable. Why do they need to be a moron? As you state, designed as a jobs program. So, these workers are low paying government employees who likely have trouble attaining a job or maintaining high job security. You likely live a far more privileged life than these workers. You think they want to do this job? And you call them a moron for simply attempting to do their job?
This is brilliant. I continue to opt out and get the pat down every single time. Which is annoying because they deliberately make it slow and anxiety inducing with your bags are out of sight for quite a while.
I used to "punish" the rude or particularly slow ones by insisting on a private screening (since that involves two officers, and Is A Whole Thing) but I haven't gotten a rude one in a few years. But that also just makes it take even longer.
Holy shit that's genius, but I do worry about the minor degradation of respect for actual disabled folks if it becomes 'weaponized' in a widespread way
Most people I know who object to full-body millimeter-wave scanners either do so on pseudoscientific health claims, or “philosophical” anti-scanner objections that are structurally the same genre as sovereign-citizen or First-Amendment-auditor thinking.
I should not need to show an anonymous TSA agent my genitals, even if they are in black and white on some monitor theyre viewing in some back room, to get on a plane.
I could ask the same serious question, why should I have to? There is zero reason to suspect me of being a suicidal maniac. Should we have such scanners to walk into a busy store or bus or subway system? Why don't private pilots and passengers have such screenings?
Tangential: Here in India we have security guards with hand-held metal detectors in malls, railway stations, and urban transit rails (metro) stations.
The first time I visited a different country I was surprised to see my friend accompany me to the check-in counter and even further to drop me off. In India they wouldn't let you enter the airport if your flight doesn't depart soon enough.
I don't think anyone in the US really cares about metal detectors, humans don't naturally contain metal and it is done completely hands off with no extra visual or biometric information or saved data. Plenty of people in this thread who opted out of other security measures still walked through a metal detector without any special note. Court houses and police stations have often have metal detectors that even a Senator or President would have to walk through. The same cannot be said of direct imaging of your body though or facial recognition or anything. If you wouldn't put your children through the process to go into school each day then it seems completely bonkers to require it for any form of mass transit.
It used to be normal in the U.S. to walk people to the gate until 9/11.
Now you can escort someone to the check-in counter and up to the security checkpoint, and meet people at the luggage area to help with bags.
But in practice it seems rare to do so if there isn’t a particular reason, probably because you’d have to pay to park or ride transit and it’s usually a trek beyond that. Honestly if they allowed you to go through security with the passenger and wait at the gate, I’m not sure how many people would even do it here (or how many passengers would want their loved ones to do so).
Pre 9/11 you could go through (useless) security without a ticket but longer ago there wasn't even security. And in some places the "gate" was...a gate. In a fence. So being at the gate meant walking from the street up to the fence. Good times.
Post 9/11 you could get a waiver from the ticket counter to escort someone thru security all the way to the gate. Dunno if that's a thing anymore, but I had them print out a paper and showed it at security several times in the mid 2000s.
A gate pass is a thing to pick up or drop off people who will be flying as unaccompanied minors. I don’t what other circumstances allow their issue, but when I did it a couple years ago, everyone seemed to know the process, so it’s not that rare.
Studies have all come out clean on pacemakers and mmWave. No detectable interference in the hardware or on an EKG while in a mmWave scanner.
I could imagine other conditions potentially but pacemakers have been ruled a non issue for mmWave by academic studies (albeit I can understand still exercising caution despite that).
Tbh I'm not sure but they've done accelerated dosage testing to simulate long term use by repeatedly exposing people to use of the machine over a more frequent period of time.
But mmWave really just is not dangerous. Current generation 5G cellular and WiFi standards are mmWave and they are just as harmless.
Molecular damage just starts showing up with THF/terahertz emissions band but mmWave is in the EHF and is has more than 10x the wavelength of THF (i.e. it is far wider/more gentle than THF). In a very real sense mmWave can't even interact with most of the molecules in your body.
mmWave can interact with the water in your body but at the levels it's being used it's only really useful for seeing the water. You'd needs orders of magnitude more powerful emissions than what these scanners use to actually cause damage at that frequency.
i.e. It's the difference between using the flashlight on your phone to see in the dark and using the concentrated light from solar-thermal heliostats to boil water or heat molten salt. No matter how hard you try, your flashlight is never gonna boil water.
Perhaps I haven't gotten a representative sample, but in 100% of the content I've seen from self-described "first amendment auditors", they're acting unpleasant and suspicious for absolutely no reason other than provoking a reaction. To me this seems like antisocial behavior that degrades rather than supports First Amendment protections. I consider myself a pretty strong First Amendment supporter, but if I routinely found strange men filming me as I walked down the street, I would support basically any legal change required to make them stop.
> I consider myself a pretty strong First Amendment supporter, but if I routinely found strange men filming me as I walked down the street, I would support basically any legal change required to make them stop.
It strikes me that the first clause of this sentence and the last one are unambiguously contradictory.
I don't think so? The behavior of these auditors is not speech in any meaningful sense; they're not trying to communicate any message, they're just trying to make people around them uncomfortable. It's just hard to draw a clear line that would prohibit their behavior without chilling lawful speech.
Right now I don't think there are that many First Amendment auditors around, so there's not much point in passing new laws to deal with them. But if they became more common, it might be necessary to draw the line, as we did in the 90s with stalking.
> The behavior of these auditors is not speech in any meaningful sense;
I didn't suggest it was speech; it's press, no?
Again, I don't have enough context to cast judgment about them being assholes or violating some other law (like harassment, etc) - I don't support that _at all_.
However, the basic right to document one's surroundings in public is absolutely essential to liberty, especially now.
You say "harassment", but that's precisely the problem. Many things that any reasonable person would identify as harassment are protected speech under the First Amendment. So these auditors go around harassing people, knowing that they're causing people emotional distress, because they're bullies who want to make people feel bad.
First Amendment auditors have usually been attention seeking individuals making click bait YouTube videos. It's been interesting seeing the transformation from that to what we're seeing with people monitoring ICE.
To be honest, I watch very little of that content, so I had no idea. If they're unkind, then obviously that sucks.
But walking around with cameras maintaining the unequivocal right to record what happens in the commons seems like a very important and thankless task.
Lots of society is like this. For example, red lights. I run them all the time and nothing happens. You just have to pay attention. It's why the police won't ticket you in SF. It doesn't matter. If anyone else complains you just yell "Am I being detained" a few times and then hit the accelerator. Teslas are fast. They can't catch you.
Another pro tip is to not pay at restaurants. If you can leave the restaurant fast enough before they give you the bill, they must have forgotten to charge you and sucks for them! The trick is not to bring bags so you can fake a trip to the toilet!
if you're not joking, actions like these are why we can't have nice things in society, it's cancerous behavior and just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I think the two comments above yours are poking fun at the guy who is committing a felony by lying to federal agents. They're just making it obvious what he's doing is really shitty, anti-social behavior.
You are grossly misinformed and making an assumption.
You're thinking of being interviewed by a Federal agent. At no point are you being interviewed at a TSA checkpoint. Generally, they have two agents present for that so they can act as witnesses for each other. The FBI specifically uses the 302 for such an interview. Can you cite the relavant US Code here? I can.
Further, you're assuming I'm lying.
As someone who was present (in the room) as DHS was being formed and witnessed the negotiations around the TSA, the "really shitty, anti-social behavior" is sharing misinformation.
This is a scam that the GOP has convinced many of, that taking from the government commons is the right thing to do. But the GOP is the embodiment of a low trust society. I'd rather live in a high trust society.
I'd also rather live in a high trust society, but that's impossible with the government that we have (and it's not just Trump, although he has certainly turned our slow creep towards authoritarianism into a speedrun).
I realized that the GOP has been taking advantage of weaknesses in high trust society. This is an easy thing for fascism to do. So while I want to live in one, they aren't stable and must be protected.
> Does it make you feel good to participate in a meaningless charade of security theater? Or would you rather spend your time doing some of value?
I think there is a lot of value in being part of a democratic society that has structured dispute-resolution processes. Part of the cost of that is occasionally going along with something pointless (even if some things warrant civil disobedience, not everything does), and that's a vital democratic responsibility. So yes, I do feel good doing that - the same kind of good I feel when I pick up someone else's litter or give up my time for jury service. If anything, going along with a law you disagree with is harder, and more virtuous, than those.
So "Just don't be gay/smoke weed, it's not legal, if you don't like it there's a process to get that changed" is the kind of viewpoint that's compatible with your ideology then?
Law in a democracy ALWAYS lags public sentiment because without sentiment to pander to no politician will lift a finger. Overt sentiment always lags behind closed doors sentiment because practically nobody is gonna display overt sentiment until there's some indication from their experience that support for their sentiment is there. There MUST be room for petty noncompliance to let people discover that the noncompliance in some unknown case is perhaps not bad in order to kick start the process.
People like you are actively working to prevent and delay alignment between the people and the government/laws. If everyone subscribed to your ideology nothing would ever get done. If more people subscribed to it then things would change slower than they do.
You can tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night but this sort of compliance as a virtue ideology you subscribe to is the evil that keeps our democracies from delivering good results promptly. I'm not saying go murder your neighbor because "fuck the law" or whatever, but an ideology that does not permit for deviance when such deviance is tasteful is a bad one.
> So "Just don't be gay/smoke weed, it's not legal, if you don't like it there's a process to get that changed" is the kind of viewpoint that's compatible with your ideology then?
Sure (although I don't think there's ever been a law against being gay, only against particular acts).
> There MUST be room for petty noncompliance to let people discover that the noncompliance in some unknown case is perhaps not bad in order to kick start the process.
Petty noncompliance isn't the only source of information, and even if it was, that doesn't negate the cost to society.
> People like you are actively working to prevent and delay alignment between the people and the government/laws. If everyone subscribed to your ideology nothing would ever get done. If more people subscribed to it then things would change slower than they do.
So the wild swings of public opinion will be tempered somewhat, and society's path will be smoothed. Yes, that's the point. Same spirit as having a constitution and a second chamber rather than making everything run on a simple majority.
> I'm not saying go murder your neighbor because "fuck the law" or whatever
But you are. That's where your ideology leads once people start following it in practice.
> I, too, dislike walking far. Here’s how I faked my way into a handicap parking tag.
Cute analogy, but.
Handicap parking tags provide value to those who need them. Depriving them of parking makes their lives harder.
On the other hand, TSA is pure theater, as TFA makes clear. Avoiding this needless ritual saves time for the passenger, for the TSA officers, even for the other passengers, and does not increase risk at all. It's pure win-win.
That’s fine and it is of course security theater / jobs program. I was put off by the feigning of disability to avoid a scanner and/or some inconvenience. This kind of behavior is okay, even great, but please come up with a more tasteful way. Otherwise I hope it’s a parody.
Third Party Doctrine makes trouble for us once again.
Eliminate that and MANY nightmare scenarios disappear or become exceptionally more complicated.
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