I don&#x27;t follow...can you connect the dots for me?

If America were capable of doing that in the common-sense manner you imply, it wouldn&#x27;t need a written constitution.

The only way the people take this country back is to start a third party. A REAL third party, somewhere between the moderate liberals and the libertarians.Without any outside competition, it&#x27;s just recycling the same type of candidates, with the same policies and with the same disregard for basic civil liberties.

Well, the complete collapse of your finances is coming soon. That might do it very thoroughly I think. But there will be some side effects.

Sadly, I lack the faith that such re-examination of our country will happen anytime soon. The inmates are in charge of the asylum and replacing them is going to take decades.

This is pretty harrowing to read. I&#x27;ve been fortunate enough to never go through any of this (but I don&#x27;t _look_ like a &#x27;terrorist&#x27;). I think America needs to take a hard look at itself and the compromises it has made on civil liberties in the name of this supposed &#x27;safety&#x27; that we have now.

The last part made me throw up a bit in my mouth.

I&#x27;m not able to access your site. I&#x27;m getting &quot;Unable to connect&quot; in Firefox. The rest of the net is fine.

Have you considered filing a FOIA for raids on your apartment &amp; the painting?

Regarding the last part, have you asked if your landlord (or someone on their behalf) entered your apartment? For a newly rented out apartment, they may have had some kind of work to do or something to check over, and since you were away, may have just let themselves in.

Author here. I&#x27;d recommend reading until the end - unfortunately, it didn&#x27;t end when I was released from airport.

I couldn&#x27;t even make it to the end.  Land of the free, home of the brave.

&quot;Yeah can you give me about two weeks? I&#x27;m going to take my RV.&quot;-1 client. How bout no.

If I were a consultant today, I&#x27;d look into buying an RV.  No more dirty hotel rooms or questionable restaurant food.  And a much lower chance of a TSA encounter.

Some other options to directly contact JetBlue:Justin Thompson
Director Customer Support
Justin.thompson@jetblue.com
(801) 449- 2732David Barger
Chief executive officer
(718) 286-7900
david.barger@jetblue.com

no idea if it accomplishes anything, but i wrote a strongly worded complaint through the jetblue website here - <a href="http://www.jetblue.com/contact-us/email/concern/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetblue.com&#x2F;contact-us&#x2F;email&#x2F;concern&#x2F;</a>

Possibly worth noting that Jet Blue has had some other problems in their history:<a href="http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2008/09/30/the-video-that-got-a-jetblue-passenger-escorted-off-the-plane-in-handcuffs/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;photographyisnotacrime.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;09&#x2F;30&#x2F;the-video-that-...</a><a href="http://www.jessdugan.com/blog/13699650/JetBlue-stole-my-cameras" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jessdugan.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;13699650&#x2F;JetBlue-stole-my-came...</a>

This makes me so angry. This was one of the reasons I got out of consulting. Every fucking time, I would get an enhanced check. Surprisingly enough, it is nothing new. This is something you face if you are a minority. Hell, I remember a friend from back in Africa whose dad got blacklisted in the nineties because he had a beard. Brown catholic guy with a beard got blacklisted. The only difference now is that at least this guy is articulate enough to vocalize organized discrimination.And Fuck Jet Blue while we are at it.

I&#x27;ve heard the same arguments. Sadly, I have no good answer for how the TSA should do their job. However, treating someone rudely and, to an extent, inhumanly, doesn&#x27;t fit the bill.

I admit, the TSA in this case didn&#x27;t do racial profiling. They skipped that step, and went straight on to &quot;rabid racism&quot;.That they apparently had no idea what a Hindu is doesn&#x27;t make it one bit better.

You&#x27;re honestly advocating more racial profiling and propelling us towards the state of racism, hatred, and paranoia of Israel? Really?

The most popular argument against the TSA that I have heard? They spend too much of their time searching the &quot;wrong people&quot;. You know the kind that wouldn&#x27;t &quot;hurt a fly&quot;? Weasel phrases that in essence mean that the TSA should do what Israel does. Racial profiling. Not that they don&#x27;t do enough of it. At least on paper, they try to mess up that by searching white grandmas from the midwest and little blonde girls. Of course, the latter is what America complains the most about really.

&gt; When will we say enough is enough and do something about it?Sadly, much later than most people think. Look at how long things have gone on in history, before people realized how bad it really was. In hindsight, it&#x27;s easy, but when everyone just seems to be accepting it, it&#x27;s not so easy. E.g. Germany in the 1930s.

Most striking and appalling is the lack of common sense and basic empathy throughout this whole ordeal. For example, he asked multiple times for water, a basic necessity for life, and was denied multiple times. That can&#x27;t be rationalized in anyway—what did they expect, him to drown someone? His requests as to the nature of his detention were denied. His rights to privacy were utterly ignored. And it goes on…We need to wake up and see that those that &quot;protect&quot; our safety have reduced us to a state of fear worse than that which we are trying to prevent. We are now being terrorized by our own terrorism prevention. Merely because we happened to clean for bed-bugs and look Middle Eastern.When will we say enough is enough and do something about it?

Exactly. Even a couple of nights ago, I had a dream about going through airport security on my return trip (even though I returned over a week and a half ago, with no problem).

That makes sense. Most of my traumatic memories have been of events that have literally lasted a few seconds, but I can see how the same effect could happen for a longer one.Guess I should count myself lucky I don&#x27;t have those!

Yes, they&#x27;re called flashbulb memories and they feel &#x27;stronger&#x27; and more detailed than other memories. People assume that they&#x27;re therefore accurate, but really, they&#x27;re no more accurate than other memories.In fact, the repeated recall can cause them to become distorted over time.If you want to preserve a memory, write it down immediately while it is fresh. Don&#x27;t trust that an old memory is accurate.

Traumatic events can leave much stronger memories, almost like they&#x27;re burned in.

If you were in a similar situation, would you not try to mentally note as many details as possible? Especially if something came of it, you would want to remember as much as possible about the cops who interrogated you, what they asked, etc.

Well, as court witnesses often show, you start telling a story and you fill in deep details. Sometimes from memory, sometimes from thin air.

Memory is a funny thing. You don&#x27;t recall a snap shot of all the details at once. You start telling a story and during the playback of the memories you&#x27;ll be able to recall deep details.Reading On Intelligence really solidified my thoughts on how memory (probably) works.<a href="http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;On-Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins&#x2F;dp&#x2F;080507...</a>

he probably told this story many other times before

Extremely disturbing.This was well written and very interesting to read, but I do wonder how one could recall the details so specifically?

Brave of you to share. Hope you get your photo back soon and some free flyer miles or something. You deserve better. We all do.

Thanks. Even though it&#x27;s not coming from the TSA&#x2F;FBI&#x2F;et al., it means a lot.

Some of those enablers are posting in this very thread. Instead of feeling shocked and even somewhat embarrassed at the state of their nation, they denigrate the author&#x27;s ordeal - minimizing his trauma, denying his mental recall, and ultimately blaming him for causing a TSA test to issue a false positive... all while ignoring the common courtesy that should have been afforded to the accused. Give the guy a drink of water. Treat him with respect. Get him on another flight. Notify him that you searched his apartment.It&#x27;s all sad and disgusting.

Just reading this raised my hackles.The only thing I really feel like saying is &quot;I&#x27;m sorry&quot;, as you&#x27;ll never get any sympathy from this system&#x27;s enablers.

There&#x27;s no &quot;perhaps&quot; here. Of course they knew this would happen. That&#x27;s the whole point. It&#x27;s right there in the name: they&#x27;re terrorists because they create terror. The US is now terrified and burning piles of cash and lashing out at its own citizens, which is exactly what the terrorists wanted to happen.

&quot;I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.&quot; - Osama Bin Laden (<a href="http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/31/gen.binladen.interview/index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archives.cnn.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;US&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;gen.binladen.interview...</a>)

To be honest the outcome is probably beyond their wildest dreams.

<pre><code> Terrorism isn&#x27;t a crime against people or property. It&#x27;s a crime against our minds, using the death of innocents and destruction of property to make us fearful. Terrorists use the media to magnify their actions and further spread fear. And when we react out of fear, when we change our policy to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed -- even if their attacks fail.

 – Bruce Schneier</code></pre>

Perhaps the terrorists knew this would happen all along. They knew our paranoia would surpass any efforts they could ever hope accomplish. Instead of terrorizing a few thousand, they could terrorize a whole nation—daily and officially.It&#x27;s brilliant and pathetic at the same time.

I&#x27;m so sorry... that I can&#x27;t yet downvote your comment. What an incredibly derisive and pointless appeal to grammar you&#x27;re trying to make. Having read the entire blog post, that line sounds like a very accurate description of the end feeling.

&quot;Wow&quot; can only refer to how bad the writing was.I found that sentence to be a non sequitur, illogically and gratuitously tacked on as an appeal to sentiment over rationality, and absolute bit of overwritten purple prose.&quot;Oh! The irony!&quot;

&gt;In all my life, I have only felt that same chilling terror once before - on one cold night in September twelve years ago, when I huddled in bed and tried to forget the terrible events in the news that day, wondering why they they had happened, wondering whether everything would be okay ever again.Wow... just wow.

This &quot;We have some female flight attendants. Would you be able to follow their instructions?&quot;They assume he was a Muslim and &#x27;off course Muslims have problems following instructions from women&#x27;.

I lose points every time I criticize Noam Chomsky. Who are the other sacred cows on HN that if you criticize you automatically lose Karma? I&#x27;ll take a stab:Noam Chomsky
Paul Graham
Elon Musk
Jeff Bezos

It&#x27;s not, its a government of people and people have varying opinions, both correct and incorrect that drive their actions.

Eh, I think it&#x27;s a tad more complex than that. The US is a heterogeneous culture with lots of people of varying cultures, religions, and skin tones. Though I&#x27;m certainly no fan of the TSA, and wish the US gov&#x27;t would reform the system in a direction more like Israel&#x27;s, they actually aren&#x27;t treating every non-white person as a suspected terrorist.

Overly generic and condemning criticism about a group of people whom you are angry at for making overly generic and condemning criticisms about groups of people!!9.5 &#x2F; 10

The United States (Government) are a bunch of unenlightened, racist, xenophobic people bent on oppressing people by treating every non english&#x2F;anglo-saxon as a terrorist. Please, someone tell me this isn&#x27;t the case in an absolute sense.

Appaling : <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/appalling" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dictionary.reference.com&#x2F;browse&#x2F;appalling</a>

The way they treated him is appalling. Even if he was Muslim, this shouldn&#x27;t have happened! I travel a lot and have seen things like this happen before my eyes in the UK and Australia. People that look slightly ethnic and taken aside and &quot;randomly&quot; stopped.  
EDIT: Sorry for the typo.

I was going to joke about how you must not have grown up in the 80s-90s, but doing a Google search just now, I see that I might have used the wrong term...The better known term is &quot;model minority,&quot; in which Asians, in America, were held up as what minorities should be like: smart, hard-working, non-confrontational to the status quo:<a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/asians-often-burdened-as-model-minority-20120511" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationaljournal.com&#x2F;thenextamerica&#x2F;education&#x2F;asia...</a>I swear &quot;golden minority&quot; was also a common term, because Asian-Americans were perceived as achieving toward high-pay professions (doctors, engineers, etc) and, well, we&#x27;re also referred to as &quot;yellow&quot;...but there seem to be very usages of &quot;golden minority&quot; and Asian

Pardon my ignorance, but what is a &quot;Golden Minority?&quot;

On an offbeat note, this reminds me of the only time I&#x27;ve ever been thoroughly patted down at an airport. It was in Shreveport and during a weekday, with very little foot traffic. I was with a friend who looks like the classical all-American girl and me, well, I&#x27;m a minority but a &quot;Golden Minority&quot; (being facetious about that term, not serious...). Anyway, the TSA people were very nice about pulling us aside and patting us down and nominally going through our stuff. I thought it was weird but then I looked behind us and saw a woman and child, both dressed in hijab, who subsequently also received the full pat-and-search routine.

This is disgusting to read, can&#x27;t imagine going through that.

It&#x27;s sickening to hear that you had to go through such experiences. Funny that the &#x27;default&#x27; scanner technology didn&#x27;t set off any alarms. Many of these policies just seem to provide the sense that we&#x27;re safer, rather than actually do anything to remove real dangers.

For that matter every restaurant, home owner, bus driver, taxi, parkway, condominium, hospital, school, university or business has the right to remove a person from their premises. That doesn&#x27;t mean people do or have to do it illustriously and then come back and say: we&#x27;ll fly with you tomorrow - we&#x27;ll let you travel on our airline only tomorrow because you&#x27;re not &quot;safe&quot; today.When the TSA circus cleared the person in question there is absolutely no reason for him to be prevented from travel.&gt; I trust you will follow your own principle and boycott every airline.I hope you&#x27;ll find someone who buys your ad hominem&#x2F;bait elsewhere. On hacker news you might want to read up the guidelines [1] on quality of discussions and disagreements.[1] <a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Most airlines reserve the right to remove passengers from a flight if they feel it is safer to do so. This happens all the time, and I&#x27;m sure from the perspective of the expelled passenger it&#x27;s always &quot;unfair.&quot; I trust you will follow your own principle and boycott every airline.

Thank you for posting this. I was about to book a ticket on Jetblue for next week but I am now decided not to fly with them or recommend them to anyone.While we can fix private airlines and businesses for their stupid attitude there is, of course, no way for people to fix NSA&#x2F;TSA and all those inverted bullshitters living on taxpayer&#x27;s money.

Holy hell. For what little it&#x27;s worth, I am so sorry you had to go through that.There is so much horrifying with that story it makes me shudder.

I&#x27;ve never had my flight cancelled...but the rest of it sounds pretty par for the course, even for white people.

Alright. It was a genuine question - ok, they said you weren&#x27;t detained at the beginning, but the moment you were forbidden to use the phone and the door was guarded you effectively were. I&#x27;m just surprised that didn&#x27;t trigger the &quot;I want a lawyer&#x2F;I will leave now&quot; impulse. But I admit to not having been in the same situation myself, especially not in a dangerous country like the USA.The symptoms you described are most probably caused by an extreme low blood-sugar level - combined with the stress of the situation, you were close to collapsing. Or it was simply shock, dangerous as well. I was glad when not reading about that collapse.Edit: Just to make that clear - the situation wasn&#x27;t your fault regardless, didn&#x27;t want to imply that (just realized one could interpret my comments that way). Absolutely unacceptable treatment by both the airline and the police.

It sounds like the best course of action is to just have an attorney present if a situation like this happens again. You knew you were being detained, no matter what the authorities said. As far as I know, there are no provisions anywhere that forbid you from having a lawyer present when and wherever you want.

As I mentioned in the post, they claimed I &quot;wasn&#x27;t being detained&quot;. I asked more than once to use my phone; they denied me.Maybe I could make that more clear.

Not on speed-dial, but I would not need too many calls to get one.In that situation, you don&#x27;t need to have him on speed dial. It&#x27;s enough to stop talking and demanding one and you have to be given the opportunity to call one (in my country including internet access for research) - it was my understanding the the US justice system has the same rules.

Do you have a lawyer on speed dial? I don’t.

It&#x27;s easy to say that in retrospect, but at the time I would probably think that the questions will end in just a few minutes and I&#x27;ll get on your flight eventually... So why involve a lawyer and make this an even bigger deal.

What I don&#x27;t understand: If you are detained for several hours, why don&#x27;t people call a lawyer? Why did he speak to the police (end even the FBI!) without legal counsel?

Alternatively, fire government workers who abuse their power or are incompetent.

The thing is, senior people don&#x27;t eat their dogfood in anything. The CEO of Ford probably drives a Benz. What has worked in all industries is quality control. Government has always had a problem in doing this (the DMV) but that&#x27;s where startups should step into to educate the politician that it&#x27;s good for both public and for the politician&#x27;s future elections (using said startup&#x27;s product).

But who hires and tolerates the dumber, more xenophobic members of society for these positions?The biggest impediment to fixing or eliminating the TSA is that the decision makers don&#x27;t eat their own dogfood. If every Congressperson had to endure the inhumane treatment that passes for airport security these days instead of being whisked through VIP lines the TSA would be fixed within months.

People like to blame the US government for this, though I think the real culprit is that often the dumber, more xenophobic members of society are usually hired for these kinds of positions. As in the case of police brutality, cameras need to be recording all encounters between travelers and airport security, and extensive quality control performed. This is an issue that is tarnishing the United States&#x27;s reputation everywhere. Travelers are often the elite from their respective countries and the US is digging itself into a hole with this.There&#x27;s a big opportunity for startups to provide the backend for this quality control. A hosted webapp that allows teams of inspectors to seamlessly collaborate on monitoring the quality of TSA agents from anywhere.

You don&#x27;t have to say your name, for obvious reasons, but would you mind giving an example of an Indian name, and how all of that information is encoded in it? That&#x27;s REALLY fascinating to me.

I know, my surname is incredibly distinctive.To anybody who&#x27;s vaguely knowledgeable about these things, it not only points out my nationality, but also which region of India I belong to, my religion, and also my caste[0].[0] Not that I pay attention to caste, but as you can see, Indian surnames contain a lot if information, to anybody even remotely trained in reading them.

To me one of the more troubling aspects of this is that in 2013 and after 12 years, the specialists we have fighting this &quot;war&quot; still have trouble distinguishing between Hindu &amp; Muslim (though obviously Muslims should not be treated like this either). It might be easier for me b&#x2F;c I&#x27;m Hindu but just looking at a name is usually enough to at least get past that part.

Not true at all! My rep. is very kind and does actually listen to her constituents. I won&#x27;t say the same for my senators but my rep is pretty level headed and listens to her constituents.Also, your apathy is what is causing the problem! Get out there! VOTE! Talk to your elected officials. Absent you, the lobbyists and mountebanks out there sure will. Monopolize your rep.&#x27;s time. You matter! You count! Act like it!

They have to be listening for you to be heard.

<a href="http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.house.gov&#x2F;representatives&#x2F;find&#x2F;</a>Call your representative today and talk to them about this story if you are disturbed by it. Please, you have to speak to have a voice.

Oh for crying out loud. A well-nourished human body can go for between a week and a month without food. Nothing bad would have happened to his health (he stated he is not diabetic) after a day or so without eating.It was probably because of the inexcusable treatment and stress that he received. That is more than enough to be angry about, no need to make stuff up.

Initial thoughts:It sounds like the phone was nearby during this entire inexcusable ordeal. Too bad it wasn&#x27;t recording the entire time.The names of everybody involved in detaining or interviewing or interrogating should be released and they should explain from their point of view.How can we stop the TSA from thinking religious boom boom terrorism is a real thing in the US when it obviously isn&#x27;t?[Sidenote: I&#x27;ve had the &quot;uncontrollable shaking without being cold&quot; thing before too (due to lack of food). It&#x27;s really bad. Only solution is to eat something immediately. The shakes should go away within 30 seconds. I imagine if you let them continue for more than a few minutes, you&#x27;ll collapse&#x2F;blackout&#x2F;seize&#x2F;Something Bad™.]

Link: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Japanese_American_internment</a>I had never heard of this.

I think you mean &#x27;internment&#x27; or &#x27;relocation&#x27; camps. The rational for the camps was to relocate people of Japanese heritage away from the coasts or other military &#x27;exclusion zones&#x27;.There are plenty of reasons to criticize this policy but calling the camps &#x27;concentration camps&#x27; is factually wrong and only serves to obfuscate the rationale (right or wrong) for the camps.

&gt; It&#x27;s amazing how many people don&#x27;t know we had concentration camps in the USA in recent history.When you say &quot;concentration camp&quot; people think of gas chambers, crematoria, and genocide, which were not components of Japanese internment. The term is still technically correct, but that may be why people are confused and surprised.Maybe my school was odd... Japanese internment was at least mentioned every year in US History between 7th and 11th grade.

It echos of rounding up everyone who is Japanese and throwing them into concentration camps.It&#x27;s amazing how many people don&#x27;t know we had concentration camps in the USA in recent history.We are just a hop skip and jump away from that again, all it would take is another major nightmare.

Differential treatment of foreigners is hardly a unique US phenomena. And don&#x27;t interpret that as my support for any particular US border control or security policy.

It&#x27;s actually a manifestation of the US security state.  Foreigners or foreign-looking people are just the first victims. Rest assured, before long everyone in the country will be suspect.

This is a manifestation of the US institutionalized xenophobia.Good manners and taste should keep me from using this submission as another soapbox against how the US views foreigners, but when you see foreigners as enemies, a citizen who looks or acts vaguely &quot;foreign&quot;— I can&#x27;t offer a precise definition of what &quot;looking foreign&quot; entails, but it&#x27;s a combination of being a part of a small demographic group, and being a part of an ethnicity that is regularly caricatured in the media and in public discourse—will be treated with the same respect and care dispensed to a real foreigner.

Seeing where the airline operates and since I&#x27;m not in US, I won&#x27;t have a chance to boycott the airline. However, if I ever get a chance to travel to&#x2F;out of US(which is bound to happen), Jet Blue will not be my airline of choice.If my friends happen to have to use an airline, I will let them know what I&#x27;ve heard of the airline, and suggest them to find an alternative. That&#x27;s pretty much it. It&#x27;s not much, but I won&#x27;t forget the name Jet Blue.

What is the superior airline that you will be transferring your business to?  Let us all know :P

You were doing ok with the contrarian perspective until the part when you personally attacked the OP. That&#x27;s not contrarian, just mean.

Did you really experience it (as in, you were in NYC at the time) or were you just a casual observer?

I&#x27;d rather live in a country where the process occasionally fails and we don&#x27;t have to put up with &#x2F; subject others to this shit. And yes, I am American and I experienced all the pain and horror of 9&#x2F;11.

Cynically? That sounds like a standard interrogation technique. Keep them off balance, upset them, try and force them to stop lying so as to get the drink they need (not that the OP was lying).

&gt;&gt; Of taking the picture?Zersetzung?

What was the purpose of denying him water? Of taking the picture?

Though for the most part you have a point, I&#x27;m not sure if denying him water counts as &#x27;doing their jobs&#x27;.

at the end they let him go. he triggered alarms, they checked, determined him not a threat, let him go.false positive would be him charged with terrorism.

&gt; Here, the process worked.So a false negative is it &quot;not working&quot; but a false positive is it working? How about no.

&gt;There are far more efficient ways to flag people that fit a certain profile. They should have checked all of his belongings and let him go, and not focused at all on his &quot;attitude&quot;.Did you miss the part where the machines gave him a positive for explosives?

No. There are far more efficient ways to flag people that fit a certain profile. They should have checked all of his belongings and let him go, and not focused at all on his &quot;attitude&quot;. That allows for more checks of other suspicious people with the available time they wasted questioning this one person.The Boston bombers should also have been allowed to fly freely. Their actions had nothing to do with air travel.Either way the situation described is unacceptable, either as &quot;racist&quot;, or &quot;Xenophobic&quot;, or, to your point, as an incredibly inefficient way to carry out profiling.

He also didn&#x27;t do himself a favor by saying &quot;We’ll be visiting some temples.&quot; Is that the best lie he could come up with?&gt;&gt; &quot;You also said a lot of things, kid,&quot; he said with a wink.&quot;Well DUH! YOU GUYS were the ones that made me come here! I&#x27;m a quiet guy, minding my own business. I don&#x27;t want to say anything to anyone&quot;

&gt; gets offended by simple questions about religion, etc. OK, good for him. The more you push back, the more self righteous and arrogant you are during security checksI agree with the other parts of your post. Here though I think he wasn&#x27;t assertive enough. No need to get snarky but a request for a cup of water is not something you just let the cop&#x2F;whoever shake off with a wink.&gt;&gt; &quot;You also said a lot of things, kid,&quot; he said with a wink.You say &quot;yes, like that I want something to drink, repeatedly.&quot; Another thing is to always ask people for their official identification, a badge, a name, a number... They&#x27;re not supposed to be anonymous.

&quot;Here, the process worked.&quot;In what way is falsely detaining an innocent person the process working?

Contrarian perspective:
He fits a certain profile. Triggered a bunch of attributes (address move, chemicals on him, etc.).The 9&#x2F;11 attackers walked through the scanners with knifes.The Boston bombers were flagged, but still traveled freely.After both attacks people were laughing at the stupidity of the enforcement agencies, uselessness of the TSA, etc.Here, the process worked.His account is subjective, everyone else is an idiot, he&#x27;s way smarter than them, gets offended by simple questions about religion, etc. OK, good for him. The more you push back, the more self righteous and arrogant you are during security checks, the deeper you&#x27;re digging yourself in. Those people are doing their jobs. Same with how you should be treating waiters, etc.JetBlue has the right to deny you a flight. ElAl does this all the time, incl. racial profiling. Good security track record.

Giving people water should be a bare minimum requirement in any interrogation.They could be a member of Cobra, who have devised a way to make explosives out of water so they can turn the world&#x27;s oceans into bombs.You never know.

I&#x27;m sure that there is a common way to make explosives with pesticides, but it&#x27;s more common to use pesticides to kill pests. Right? The sensors obviously create false positives in most cases I&#x27;d expect.Giving people water should be a bare minimum requirement in any interrogation.

The problem here is that he set off the explosives detectors. Regardless of what color skin he had or what religion they thought he was, the second he did that, repeatedly, he was in for a lot of questioning.

Wow this is shocking... I think a lot of this is probably related to the issues that the &quot;bullshit jobs&quot; article that was up on HN earlier this week ( <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6236478</a> ) covered. A pithy quote I heard from someone earlier this week seems to ring true here:
If Al Qaeda’s plan was to cause a massive overreaction that would destroy the very idea of America from within: wow, good plan.

&quot;- we don’t do this just for fun - we have to justify our jobs.&quot;

&quot;You’ve got people from five different branches of government all in here - we don’t do this just for fun.&quot;Exactly. You do it because it&#x27;s a secure, well-paying job; there&#x27;s an infinite budget to keep bullies like you working.

He&#x2F;she most likely means 9&#x2F;11 ones

&gt;terroristsYou mean the government?

I felt so angry while reading this. It&#x27;s clear to say that the terrorists have won.

I am a Muslim, and I share openly my thoughts on religion, faith, and related subjects. I frankly do not mind being singled out (once in a while) because I am Muslim as long as it is it is not assumed from the beginning that I am guilty.What I have a problem with is people assuming someone is already guilty because they are Muslim, or Black, or White, or Hindu, or short, or Blonde. When you are start there it becomes a struggle for one person to prove they are innocent and it rarely ends well because from the get go it is set for someone to be wrong as opposed to both parties getting to the truth.I was once asked by a FBI agent to meet and answer questions, which I did happily and readily. He was very polite, and more importantly, he started with an explanation of the situation and why he had to ask questions, we had a chat, and that was the last time I heard about it.

I&#x27;ve set off the explosion detector before. I didn&#x27;t receive anything like what OP did. And honestly, I chalk up a decent amount of that up to having the good luck of being white.I did get pulled into a separate area, and treated like criminal. Two agents stood by me the entire time while another one gave me another pat down. They opened up my backpack and rifled through everything (which was, I think, the most offensive part of everything), and meticulously swabbed and tested each area of my backpack.I did receive similar questions &quot;Where are you going,&quot; &quot;Why are you here,&quot; &quot;Why would your bag be setting off our alarm?&quot; etc..After a few more searches, a few more scans, and a lot more questions they finally let me go through security. Whole process probably took about 20 minutes -- twenty terrifying minutes -- but in the end, it was relatively painless compared to OPs.I don&#x27;t think his treatment was in any way justified by setting off an explosive materials detector.

Agreed. If I set off an explosive detector, I would expect to have a hard time, too.

The dogs aren&#x27;t purposefully trained to give false positives, that&#x27;s just a side effect of how social dogs are.  They want to please their handler and the handler gives them rewards.

Sure it&#x27;s plausible. It&#x27;s just incredibly unlikely (not least because this notion that the TSA is some white power apparatus seems to be at odds with the reality that the TSA is a very diverse workforce. Add that the passenger list in most urban centers is incredibly diverse, and this idea that it&#x27;s just xenophobia seems quite nonsensical. Another post talks about how this demonstrates how the US views &quot;foreigners&quot; -- have these people never been to New York City, where this happened? It is about the most inclusive, vibrant, multicultural place on the planet).Indeed, the narrative of this very story seemed to be overwhelmingly focused on figuring out why he was setting off the explosives detectors. They repeatedly went through his belongings and tried to figure out if he was indeed in the business of making explosions. They almost certainly used a secret warrant to go into his apartment to, again, see if there was an explosives lab there. They really thought they had something when the explosives detector found something it didn&#x27;t like, and there is no rational reason they would do this just because someone was Muslim (again, Muslims make hundreds of millions of flights in the US -- do people seriously think this is what they go through?)

&gt; How do you know they don&#x27;t have a button to push to make it give a false positive so they can hold people?That exact thought crossed my mind afterwards.In the end, they never showed me any evidence that the machine had actually detected any explosive. Nor did they figure out what could have caused the &quot;false positive&quot;.Maybe they did detect something, but then what&#x27;s equally surprising is the thought that they would then just let someone go after they have walked into JFK with explosives on their body.

There is no button labeled &quot;Fuck the 4th Amendment&quot; but a clever technician might know how to manipulate the results, if needed. But why would they need to? They could just lie.

&gt; How do you know they don&#x27;t have a button to push to make it give a false positive so they can hold people?I&#x27;ve never been in the US, but when I travel (Europe, MENA), I am always chosen by airport security, even in my own country when leaving, for an additional search (less annoying than a TSA patdown I read of, but still), and when I asked recently why is it always me, a guy answered I was randomly selected by the gate. Got to start buying lottery tickets.

What incentive does a TSA inspector have to make him or her want to do a private pat down on a traveler like in this story?What does the TSA agent get out of needlessly fucking with some random person?

How do you know they don&#x27;t have a button to push to make it give a false positive so they can hold people?Cops have dogs trained to give false positives on signal and we are constantly spied on and lied to by our own intelligence agencies.So please don&#x27;t tell me this idea is far fetched, I think it&#x27;s very plausible.

The bit that got me as incontrovertibly hilariously-stupid was... they got all upset that he hadn&#x27;t identified to them that he&#x27;d checked some baggage.If the guy is an adversary, you can&#x27;t rely on him to bring that fact to your attention. If the guy isn&#x27;t an adversary, his failure to identify it is (by definition) innocent in nature. In neither sense does harassing the guy about it make sense.

&gt; No water for hours?I often go until late afternoon or longer without realizing I haven&#x27;t had any water to drink. This really doesn&#x27;t seem that bad. The OP&#x27;s claim that his mouth was like sandpaper because he hadn&#x27;t had water for a few hours reads like hyperbole to me.

You are missing the point. yes he set off the explosion detector for which he should have been questioned and he was. The issue is how they did it. No water for hours ? You seriously think that it is ok ? The rest 5% decorations that you were talking about is lot more than just decorations.

And made him pay an additional 700 dollars and miss his flight. 
Huge hassle as far as I can tell.If you detained and questioned an innocent man and ruined his day costing him a weeks wages for some, wouldn&#x27;t you do SOMETHING to make up for it?A decent person would, a bureaucratic organization that is not held accountable sure wont.

A friend of mine set one off when we were traveling in Australia. We talked with the guard (who very 100% ralaxed) and he said that setting off the detector is incredibly easy. While he was searching my friend&#x27;s purse, we were told that some of the chemicals used in make up can set it off. After finding nothing, we were free to continue. Took all of 3 minutes, no additional security, no prolonged questioning, just a simple check and go.

I&#x27;ve always wondered what happens if you set off the detector.The fact is that they allowed him to fly afterwards. Overall it&#x27;s not so horrible.Assuming the thing about the photo isn&#x27;t true, of course.

My dad had food (dates) set off the detector. He&#x27;s now on the no fly list.

It&#x27;s hard to explain a false positive when you&#x27;re given no context about what it could be.As explained in other comments, nitroglycerin is found in things as bizarre as desserts.Unless someone happens to be incredibly knowledgeable about how to make explosives out of common household supplies, it&#x27;s hard to expect them to say, eg. &quot;Oh, that&#x27;s because I happened to eat dessert last night and forgot to wash my hands.&quot;(In fact, if somebody does know that, that may be cause for all the more suspicion!)

My dad flew on the 5th of July a couple years ago. While going through security, he commented that they must get a lot of false positives around that time of year. Their response: &quot;We don&#x27;t test for black powder.&quot;

he set off an explosion detector (and clearly it doesn&#x27;t get false positives often given the response they showed)False positives are fairly common, but usually easily explained -- e.g., &quot;I was target shooting yesterday, there must be some gunpowder on my clothes&quot;. A false positive which the individual involved is unable -- or unwilling -- to explain is far less common.

I don&#x27;t think any airports had &#x27;explosive detectors&#x27; before 9&#x2F;11.

&gt; (In both cases, due a heart medication that apparently triggers false positives).Presuming that this was nitroglycerin, then in some sense it&#x27;s not a false positive at all. It&#x27;s a dessert wax and a floor topping! <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitroglycerin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nitroglycerin</a>

Extended explosion swabbing -- and improved and more discrete equipment -- came about after the failed attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit in 2009 (an almost tragedy that many quickly forget).In earlier iterations of spam filters, it would simply prefix the subject with [SPAM], just as explosion detectors caught lots of things and they quickly dismissed them. As it got better it started moving them to a spam folder. Now it simply moves them directly to deleted. Of course the same thing happens with explosion detectors, where initially it picked up many similar compounds, and eventually started getting much more discrete, and the probability that it actually caught something of significance went from &quot;not really&quot; to &quot;might actually be something real&quot;.Traveling in 2013 is not the same as traveling in 2002. Traveling in New York City is not the same as traveling in Austrlia. All of these are factors that influence the probability that technology is a viable input, and the corresponding risk factors.

If you set off a gas chromatograph for nitroglycerine and then say you have heart tablets then you&#x27;ll be fine. He obviously set off a specific trigger AND couldn&#x27;t account for it (although they clearly tried to get him to).Back in the 70s or 80s a group of friends in Britain were sentenced for participating in a terrorist act because they set off an explosive test. They spent years in prison before it was determined that it was a false positive caused by the coating of a popular brand of playing card.

One time I brought peanut butter in my luggage. It looks like plastic explosive on the scanner so they have to open it and test it. Our teacher actually advocated that we bring it and those 36 packs of AA batteries because they look like plastic explosives and bullets, respectively. He really liked to mess with the TSA.This was post 9-11, I don&#x27;t know how we didn&#x27;t all get arrested.

My bags have set off the explosives detector before, twice. (In both cases, due a heart medication that apparently triggers false positives). I was not taken into a back room or interrogated for hours. They searched me and my bags in more detail, asked some questions, and concluded it must have been a false positive. The experience took about 15 minutes each time.This was a few years back, but I don&#x27;t recall if it was post-9&#x2F;11 or not. It seems like even setting off a detector doesn&#x27;t, alone, justify the extreme reaction the authorities took in the author&#x27;s case.

and possibly bugged. I wouldn&#x27;t live there without a complete sweep, and probably not even after that.

Don&#x27;t forget that his house was potentially searched.

First, Sandy Hook&#x2F;Newtown wasn&#x27;t terrorism. By definition it was not &#x27;the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.&#x27;[1]. It was more of a random spree killing. As for Boston, that&#x27;s a terrible example because it was committed by Chechen Muslims.Second, we don&#x27;t know if there was a false positive. Maybe some cleaner or the bed bug spray do have legitimate bomb-making uses. There&#x27;s a lot of conjecture in the story and even more in this comment thread.[1] <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/terrorism?s=t" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dictionary.reference.com&#x2F;browse&#x2F;terrorism?s=t</a>

Add sunscreen to that list as well. I was briefly detained for that when I was coming back from Hawaii. I&#x27;d gone to the beach the day before, and used the same jeans, leaving trace amounts of residue.Really, there are a ton of false-positive substances that we use every day. We need to realize that a false positive can happen to anyone, regardless of their background or morals, and we should treat suspects (for lack of a better word) with respect.

Is that definitely true? Permethrin sets off the explosive detectors?

If events like Oklahoma City, Boston, and Sandy Hook have taught us anything, it&#x27;s that terrorism doesn&#x27;t have an ethnic profile. It&#x27;s not only insulting, but also extremely unsafe to assume otherwise.I&#x27;m surprised and embarrassed by how representatives of my country treated him. I&#x27;m embarrassed by their cultural ignorance. There should at least be some better training.However, this should be a technology discussion and I completely agree with your comment. The question is about the machine, how often it provides a false positive, and how likely it is for someone to come in contact with a legal and common chemical that can set it off. In short: what have we sacrificed for this measure of safety, and does it really provide the advertised benefits?If we have decently calibrated explosion detectors, then in the unlikely event that they do go off, I for one want that individual questioned very thoroughly, ethnicity and religion aside.The title of the article should be: &quot;Don&#x27;t fly after handling Permethrin.&quot;

Yes, but this is how law enforcement behaves across the board. (And when they do give you a drink then they can grab the cup and fingerprint it and run DNA tests, right?)

If it was just the false positive, that would be one thing but the utterly humiliating, quite frankly stupid, way they treated him was completely unjustified. There&#x27;s nothing that warranted denying him water and not treating him with dignity.

They searched him very thouroughly. They didn&#x27;t find any explosive. So it was clearly a false positive. The way they treated him was absolutely disgusting.

I&#x27;ve set off the explosive detector a couple times. I don&#x27;t take anything but lisinopril and OTC allergy meds. Each incident took 3-5 minutes to resolve, and did not involve any questions not directly related to the screening process. I have no idea what set it off, and as far as I know, neither did the TSA.Apart from those two times, I&#x27;ve been the focus of TSA attention for more than a few seconds on exactly two other occasions. One was when the x-ray tech was confused by the small flatbed scanner in my carryon, and the other was the day I had to fly with expired ID.Again, neither occasion took more than about five minutes, and again, they asked me no questions not directly related to the screening process itself.Also, about half the time I travel on one-way tickets, often between points that my ID does not reflect an address for. I&#x27;ve travelled while tired, I&#x27;ve travelled while stressed&#x2F;nervous, I&#x27;ve travelled with my hair and beard at every conceivable length&#x2F;combination, including long beard, short hair, and a completely shaved head.But I&#x27;m white and have a completely Anglo name.

The machines are not binary. They trigger specific materials. Some are going to be much more common than others, and like every process where they have false positives they react differently based upon their incidence rate.

I think they get false positives all the time.I am a white male that routinely opts-out of the scanners. I&#x27;ve had many many pat downs. One time my bag registered a false positive and I was also subjected to the &quot;enhanced pat-down&quot;.My experience was totally different from OP&#x27;s. The TSA officers went out of their way to reassure me that false positives are not uncommon, that there was nothing to be afraid of, etc etc. They asked me a few simple questions, but it felt more like they were making conversation to keep the atmosphere relaxed, rather than interrogating me.I don&#x27;t recall if further tests of my bags or clothes indicated explosives, but I was let out of the screening room after ~20 minutes.I strongly suspect that the respectful treatment I repeatedly receive during my TSA interactions are due to (mostly racial) profiling, and luck.

I&#x27;ve set off a detector before but because I looked like a young white male at the time all they did was screen my bags and have my hands tested again for explosives and send me on my way.

We don&#x27;t have to have direct knowledge of the impossibly specific situation you&#x27;ve constructed.Instead we have people saying &quot;I am white and I set one off in 2003 in Australia and they let me through, therefore that demonstrates that this is racism&quot; (ignore every case where non-whites got a couple of quick questions and went through).And how utterly provincial are so many people on here? What backwaters do they live in? Go to JFK or Newark and tell me that they pick on non-whites, and I&#x27;ll tell you that they must have hundreds of thousands of employees working around the clock to manage that.Further what an FBI agent purportedly said during the conversational stage is utterly irrelevant. We don&#x27;t know what explosive material the sensor detected, but by the response it seems likely that it was rare.Finally, this isn&#x27;t just about racismIndeed, it isn&#x27;t, even though the overwhelming majority of comments, and the title itself, portends racism. In another comment someone criticizes me for apparently claiming that their treatment is reasonable. Yet never did I say their treatment was reasonable. Who would?they wouldn&#x27;t even tell him what they had foundBecause they believe in the flawed concept of security through obscurity. They likely imagine that giving that information away shows their hand.

As much problem as I have with the TSA and this event...Offering hints as to how a person they do not trust would dissuade their suspicions is a way to guarantee that everyone dissuades their suspicions. It is an information-theoretically invalid way of pursuing an investigation of anything.

&gt;and no one here knows what would happen if John Smith Anglosaxon set off the same detector in the same situation.We don&#x27;t have to have direct knowledge of the impossibly specific situation you&#x27;ve constructed. The FBI agent flat out said that it was about his race when he said &quot;a person of your… background&quot;.And explosive detectors are not really there to find bombs. They are there to reduce manual searches. If they just wanted to find bombs, they could just search everyone. Since that is impractical on multiple counts, the explosive detector is valuable because it narrows down the space. Once you have taken the person aside, searched them, searched their stuff, and come up with no additional evidence (&quot;brown&quot; isn&#x27;t evidence), it&#x27;s time to let them go.Finally, this isn&#x27;t just about racism, but is also about the TSA and the cops being dangerously incompetent bullies. Instead of being polite and decent, they were rude and intimidating. Someone being reluctant and apprehensive under those circumstances is not strong evidence of wrongdoing.And when they questioned him about the chemicals he had handled, they wouldn&#x27;t even tell him what they had found. That&#x27;s the kind of &quot;withholding information&quot; tactic you would use if you were playing the role of a detective without actually having any idea how to investigate. What purpose does it serve? If he were a terrorist, he&#x27;d know what chemicals were in his explosives. The only situation where that information is actually a secret is the one where the suspect is innocent.In other words, they repeatedly created situations that either made guilt indistinguishable from innocence, or where they&#x27;d distinguish them inversely. This is, to put it mildly, &quot;poor form&quot;.

&gt; and clearly it doesn&#x27;t get false positives often given the response they showedHow is this a reasonable assumption? When the probability of it legitimately going off is so low, most times it actually goes off are probably just false positives.&gt; being Hindi&quot;Hindi&quot; is a language, and &quot;Hindu&quot; is the religion.

My mother recently came to the US and set off an explosive detector. It took her just a few minutes to get cleared and she was not at all harassed like the author of the post was. Although she comes from Brazil, she is white, blonde and blue-eyed (a descendent of German immigrants). So I guess there is a difference in treatment according to race.What set off the explosives detector? She had no idea, as that had never happened before to her. The only different thing she had touched hours before was the wipes they gave her during the flight to clean her hands before a meal.

FTFA: &quot;You’ll have to understand, when a person of your… background walks into here, travelling alone, and sets off our alarms, people start to get a bit nervous.&quot;So it does sound like being brown-skinned had something to do with the ordeal.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I&#x27;ve set off the explosives detector before and had a very similar experience as the original link (taken to a side room, questioned, etc).  This is as a white male, although it was in Australia.

I flew out of SFO last week and set off the explosive detector after opting out. My experience was rather different. The TSA agents took my backpack and made a cursory hand-search, doing explosive swab tests on my electronics. After failing to find a source, they took me to the booth to do a more through check. They didn&#x27;t ask me any questions at all about myself or why I might have set the system off other than the normal &#x27;any sensitive areas&#x27; questions. I did volunteer that I&#x27;d spilled a small amount of gasoline on myself when fueling my car the previous day and that I was wearing new clothes that had not been washed since purchase. They seemed entirely disinterested. The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes longer than a regular opt-out pat down.So, apparently that&#x27;s how it goes when a white male sets the thing off.

Let me tell you what would happen and what DID happen to one of my friends who set off the alarm.A supervisor was called in, he double checked his ID, found out my friend was using some chemicals the day before (working on his apartment). Waved him through right after.The explanation may be the thing that got him through but it could also be the fact that they told him what chemical he set off and the fact that he&#x27;s white as hell.

I opted out of the Millimeter waves in Manchester NH airport (BTW, coolest TSA agents I ever met. One of them even said he wouldn&#x27;t ever go through a backscatter machine himself.). They detected some nitrates or nitrites, I forget which (or what those exactly mean). But that&#x27;s a potential sign of explosives apparently. It&#x27;s probably because I had been by a camp fire that morning. If you go camping, or shooting, you should consider cleaning your clothes before going through airport security.This was a flight to return home, so I didn&#x27;t ask to leave the airport, but they did give me the option of going through the porno-scanner or staying grounded. I understand that the TSA at least claims that the scanner doesn&#x27;t actually involve showing anybody an image beyond a diagram (not that I&#x27;m shy anyway), and it&#x27;s nowhere near as risky as the backscatter, so I went for it this one time and I was on my way.

You don&#x27;t think the tests are cheap and fast to allow waiting lines to move faster and to save money?Everything would move much slower if you had to wait 5 minutes in an &#x27;expensive and slow&#x27; device.

Ammonia?I&#x27;m starting to worry about the plane ride on Sunday. I&#x27;ve been handling concentrated ammonia (25%) lately.

The explosive detectors give false positives all the time. Any kind of lotion or hand soap contains glycerin - beep! Any kind of preserved meat product contains nitrates - beep! Fertilizer? Beep! Fireworks? Beep! Heart medication? Beep!The tests they use are intentionally cheap and fast. Accuracy is not the primary criteria.For white people you get an extra 30 second pat down. For brown people you get detained and interrogated all day.Like drug dogs, false positives may be considered a bonus by the security apparatus because it allows the apparatus to work against the discriminated-against class and blame it on something else, as you have just done.

It&#x27;s an emotional argument to soothe their conscience by asserting that there was a legitimate reason for this to happen.If you want to see a major part of why the TSA is still molesting, you don&#x27;t have to go searching for mythical sheeple in far away states - just look at a third of the comments in this thread.

Most airports have layers of ETDs: Quick and &quot;convenient&quot;, but slightly more prone to false-positives at screening, and then expensive, slower machines for secondary screening. In a similar way that a breathalyzer positive might yield a blood test.

Because if he hadn&#x27;t, you&#x27;d conclude that the detector registered falsely.  The fact that repeated tests had the same result confirms that the detector is working (or, at least, that it&#x27;s consistent).

why do people insist on using the phrase &quot;repeatedly set off the explosive detector&quot;? if there is a substance on his person or bags that made the detector register a false positive, it is naturally going to register that same false positive every time it is run over said substance. the repetition means nothing.

I&#x27;ve set off the machine in question before. I am a american male mid thirties swedish&#x2F;english&#x2F;german (and look it). The person assumed the machine was wrong and spent a bit of extra time with me and sent me on my way. This was in 2010.I do not recall if it was during Ramadan.

Those tests get false positives all the time. I failed an explosives test once in Denver. The TSA agent guessed correctly that I had been rock climbing. Apparently this happens a lot, no idea why. They let me go after 5 seconds of chatting.

My bag set off the explosion detector and I had to have an &quot;enhanced&quot; pat down in private.  They agent later admitted to me that the machine I was tested on gives false positives about 50% of the time.

Here we have a situation where someone is being detained and effectively punished (denied food and drink, for example, forced to miss their flight) without any benefit of the legal system. Preventing such things is the entire reason we have a criminal justice system. Within the legal system we have all of these procedures and rights and so forth that have been carefully honed over centuries to ensure that the system is fair and not abusive. Except here we have this bizarre little bubble that is effectively outside the criminal justice system for most intents and purposes which has about the effect one would imagine in such situations.The detained here has no benefit of counsel, no ability to see the evidence put against them, no presumption of innocence, and so forth. And we can see within this one little example a microcosm of why all of those things are necessary and what happens when they are absent.No matter how you cut it this individual was effectively punished, the fact that there are almost no safeguards to prevent such abuses of power today should be chilling to everyone.&quot;Setting off an explosion detector&quot; is not the most important part of this. Imagine the detector as a human being instead (explosives detectors are just as fallible) making an accusation against someone. An accusation is not a conviction. Just because someone cries murder, or rape, or terrorist, even if it&#x27;s a piece of equipment doing that, we shouldn&#x27;t jump to conclusions and rip away every right and protection that people have in this country. Except it seems that we are doing just that and to some degree a lot of people are OK with it.

If you do the math, it becomes obvious they cannot treat everyone that sets of the explosives detectors in this way, given how many ways there are to trigger false positives. They just don&#x27;t have, and could not possibly have, the manpower.

you don&#x27;t deal with false positives by doing the exact same test multiple times. that&#x27;s insane.given the fact that he did not have any explosives or was planning anything nefarious, this whole story shouldn&#x27;t have happened (in any free and&#x2F;or sane country) because other tests and checks should have quickly revealed his innocence.and from what I get, they did so, but chose to detain and harass him, and break into his house (ffs!) regardless, possibly because religion&#x2F;race&#x2F;background&#x2F;non-WASP-ness

It is a terrible ordeal, but for all of the other factors brought up the critical factor is that he set off an explosion detector (and clearly it doesn&#x27;t get false positives often given the response they showed). Everything else (about Ramadan, being Hindi, the color of one&#x27;s skin, etc) may be nothing more than decorations, and no one here knows what would happen if John Smith Anglosaxon set off the same detector in the same situation.Yes, they talked about Ramadan and his situation, and where the parking lot is around his house, and none of this should be surprising to anyone. They&#x27;re using conversation to try to determine whether he&#x27;s lying, gaps in his story, nervousness, and so on. Any single person they talk to will get a conversation that is individualized to the person. Reading too much into it may be misleading.This isn&#x27;t intended to defend the TSA (universally reviled), or any of the other agencies, but repeatedly setting off an explosion detector is 95% of this story. The rest is just surrounding decorations.

&gt; &quot;She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about... &quot;The thing is, they don&#x27;t need to follow you around the same way as in the &#x27;old days&#x27; because, like many things, modern technology makes it easier and more efficient.The tyranny of the future isn&#x27;t going to be like that of the past. That makes it difficult to explain the dangers to people.

The distressing thing is that we&#x27;ve been putting so much machinery into place, and gotten the noose so well fitted, that when the bottom drops out we&#x27;ll only have the briefest of short, sharp shocks before we find ourselves in a terrifyingly efficient machine of oppression.Or you can take the train.

&gt; I&#x27;ve a friend who spent a good deal of time recently in Khazakhstan, and she was very amused by my attempts to express my fears of the United States becoming an authoritarian police state. She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues.And she is right — the US is nowhere near being an authoritarian police state. But it is on a slippery slope, and those of us who have experienced a police state and can detect certain symptoms are deeply worried.What&#x27;s even more worrying is that this quiet (it is quiet, Hacker News represents at a first approximation 0% of the voting population) change takes place in a country which is the #1 military, financial and political world power.

What&#x27;s her experiences with Kazakhstan exactly?I&#x27;ve never been there but would expect from any post-soviet country a great deal of nobody caring about you and not many secret police anywhere.

&gt; She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues.She&#x27;s right, and like her, I have found it next to impossible to explain this to Americans who think the US is turning into a police state.People making this claim should spend a few hours reading on history and learn about the Gestapo or the Stasi.What&#x27;s happening in the US occasionally produces unfortunate episodes, such as the one above, but by and large, the US continues to be one of the most free countries in the world in all respects.

&gt; She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you aboutYou know, it strikes me that one of the large differences between most of these countries, and the US, is the relative size of the population to the government+military. For having a population of 300mm people, somewhere less than 5 million people (~1.7%) work in the US public sector.What this means is, we could have just as many secret police following people as happens under any repressive regime--but the vast majority of US citizens would never be aware of it, since in relative terms &quot;being followed around by a black van&quot; would be about as rare per capita as &quot;being struck by lightning.&quot; You wouldn&#x27;t personally know anyone it had happened to, you&#x27;d only read about it--and so you&#x27;d think it wasn&#x27;t really a thing that happens here.

&quot;The distressing thing is that we&#x27;ve been putting so much machinery into place, and gotten the noose so well fitted, that when the bottom drops out we&#x27;ll only have the briefest of short, sharp shocks before we find ourselves in a terrifyingly efficient machine of oppression.&quot;wow - what a brilliant way of describing it

I was in Kazakhstan recently. I am Muslim, religious, have beard etc... I had interview with nice КНБ (<a href="http://www.knb.kz/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.knb.kz&#x2F;</a>) agent right after customs. It was about 1 minute after which I was free to go. Nothing like experience described here.

&gt; She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues.That&#x27;s the NSA&#x27;s job, or so they think....

I&#x27;ve a friend who spent a good deal of time recently in Khazakhstan, and she was very amused by my attempts to express my fears of the United States becoming an authoritarian police state. She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues.I grew up in a communist totalitarian regime and I am not amused at all. We live in different world now and even oppressive regimes do things differently but that does not mean they are less dangerous... I would say exactly the opposite. Some person claimed in this discussion that &quot;the US continues to be one of the most free countries in the world in all respects&quot; - I am not sure I personally believe that but my main point is that this does not matter at all even if it were true. There is huge inertia and a country might still seem relatively free even years after it passed the point of no return on the way to oppressive regime. When the situation is so severe that it is visible to everyone... it is already too late and the most likely scenario in that case is that the whole generations will be lost.It is my impression that people from countries which in their modern history never experienced totalitarian&#x2F;oppressive regime severely underestimate (or in most cases are totally blind to) warning signs.For those who are interested please let me offer personal view of someone who does have an experience with totalitarian regime - you might think I am oversensitive but despite the fact that years ago I had spent few months in the US and I loved it and despite the fact that I believe there is nothing about me that could trigger their attention I would still be afraid to visit again and I decided to strictly avoid even flying over the USA.P.S. The fact that the guy was even refused water just makes me sick.

I&#x27;ve a friend who spent a good deal of time recently in Khazakhstan, and she was very amused by my attempts to express my fears of the United States becoming an authoritarian police state. She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about and all these other sorts of issues.The distressing thing is that we&#x27;ve been putting so much machinery into place, and gotten the noose so well fitted, that when the bottom drops out we&#x27;ll only have the briefest of short, sharp shocks before we find ourselves in a terrifyingly efficient machine of oppression.

&gt; &quot;Let me ask you this: say you want to check for guns and explosives before people get on an airplane. How do you do it?&quot;Politely. With the view that I&#x27;m dealing with people who are innocent unless found to be otherwise.Edit: Please also note that permethrin is not an explosive. Should everyone who uses insect repellant be treated this way while going through security? I&#x27;m surprised the guy even knew the name of the chemical (I wouldn&#x27;t have).

I don&#x27;t think this is that oppressive.Yeah, well, it didn&#x27;t happen to you, did it?He went through security and set off an explosives detector. The cops showed up and asked some questions. Then he left.&quot;We gave him free room and board for 17 years, then laid him on a comfortable bed and gave him some medicine to make him fall asleep for a while&quot;.vs.&quot;We kept him caged in a tiny, windowless cell and gave him just enough stale bread and dirty water to keep him alive for 17 years, then we executed him.&quot;Details matter, dude.

Well, considering that red teams are routinely able to smuggle weapons and simulated explosive devices on aircraft fairly routinely, the current procedures are shit. Security theater at its finest.And you can&#x27;t detain someone without reasonable suspicion which gives you the authority to investigate whether a crime has occurred. This detention can&#x27;t be indefinite, and can&#x27;t even come close to lasting 24 hours. Once your investigation exceeds around 30 minutes, you have to either arrest the person (assuming probable cause) or release them.

&gt; I think the correct answer to any question is, &quot;my lawyer will answer that. get me my lawyer.&quot;Hopefully. But their answer to that might contain the word &quot;Guantanamo&quot; and there&#x27;s a chance, given that you&#x27;re now an uncooperative brown person, that they&#x27;re not bluffing.I&#x27;m normally not one to buy arguments that the US is truly on a slippery slope to becoming a police state, but this year has made me seriously rethink that.

I can imagine that the same logic was applied in our colonial period to unwarranted searches and seizures. The Loyalists surely said, &quot;Hey, you just lost the lottery. Sure they came in and stole some things and roughed you up a little, but the bruises heal in a few days and they didn&#x27;t steal that much. Overall things are pretty good, so deal with it and quit your whining.&quot;This is, of course, evil.

&gt;&gt;Anyway, I look at this like the lottery, but in reverse. Sometimes you lose the reverse lottery and a day of your life gets fucked up. But ultimately, life moves on and you have an interesting story. You can say that the government is an oppressive regime that is out to get you for your political views, or you can say you rolled the dice and lost.The view you have expressed here demonstrates that you have literally no idea what you are talking about.It is not a &quot;lottery&quot; when the TSA and their goons are profiling people based on race, religion, income, and a host of other criteria.

By coincidence I was watching again the &quot;Don&#x27;t talk to the police&quot; video on youtube.Seems to me that this guy had to talk a lot, answer a lot of questions, without any of the protection the 5th amendment is supposed to provide.

Israel does a marvelous job of it by a brief interview of every passenger. It&#x27;s a matter of how each person reacts to initial eye contact; with proper interrogation training, ill intent is obvious.The TSA technique does everything but what works. Gross wholesale violations of multiple Constitutional rights doesn&#x27;t work.

I don&#x27;t think this is that oppressive. He went through security and set off an explosives detector. The cops showed up and asked some questions. Then he left.This is a vast mischaracterization of what happened.Nowhere in the Constitution does it say the government can&#x27;t hamfistedly accuse you of a crime. All it says is that they have to charge you or let you go in 24 hours, give you a trial, and punish you in a consistent way. They did that here; they asked some questions and they let him go.He was detained without arrest, based on minimal suspicions. Yes, he should have shut the hell up and not answered questions.You can say that the government is an oppressive regime that is out to get you for your political views, or you can say you rolled the dice and lost.Except these dice are heavily weighted against you if you are brown and&#x2F;or non-christian.say you want to check for guns and explosives before people get on an airplane. How do you do it?That&#x27;s not happening here. He was not detained because he had an explosive or firearm, he was detained because he was subject to a different level of scrutiny than the other passengers who went through the scanner.

As someone who was in a fraternity in college that practiced a waterboarding procedure as part of the initiation process, around our time in Iraq, I have come to never accept torture as someone who experienced one of the basic methods.So, go ahead, try it. Call me a troll but you should check your moral compass. Do not argue for the torture, psychological or physical, of others if you cannot hack or attempt to at least once. That is where I draw the line.

&gt; &quot;You can argue about the techniques; religious questions, not giving him water, but it&#x27;s all a well-documented psychological game that they&#x27;re trying to play. If they make the suspect mad, the suspect is more likely to start yelling hysterically without thinking, saving the taxpayer the cost of a long trial. It&#x27;s worth a try, right? (I think the correct answer to any question is, &quot;my lawyer will answer that. get me my lawyer.&quot;)&quot;This is about the techniques. As another commenter pointed out, details matter. &quot;Securing our airports&quot; is all well and good until you start &quot;securing&quot; them via forced detentions absent any charges, denying basic physical needs, &quot;patdowns&quot; that would qualify as sexual assault if someone not wearing a uniform did it, and so on. The whole point is that if you don&#x27;t consider the details and only focus on the goals, then you only consider the benefits and not the costs. Judging from the public statements by officers of the TSA and DHS, this is exactly how they seem to think about these practices.&gt; &quot;Let me ask you this: say you want to check for guns and explosives before people get on an airplane. How do you do it?&quot;They already had checked for guns and explosives. Both his bags were scanned and his body was repeatedly &quot;inspected&quot; as well. The statements made by the officers indicated they were well aware that false alarms due to various common chemicals are routine. Yet they decided to assume he was a terrorist carrying explosives because he was a brown person who hadn&#x27;t eaten traveling during Ramadan, not because of any concrete evidence on his person or possessions.

And by all appearances, they went into his house. While he was at the airport.

I don&#x27;t think this is that oppressive. He went through security and set off an explosives detector. The cops showed up and asked some questions. Then he left.Nowhere in the Constitution does it say the government can&#x27;t hamfistedly accuse you of a crime. All it says is that they have to charge you or let you go in 24 hours, give you a trial, and punish you in a consistent way. They did that here; they asked some questions and they let him go.You can argue about the techniques; religious questions, not giving him water, but it&#x27;s all a well-documented psychological game that they&#x27;re trying to play. If they make the suspect mad, the suspect is more likely to start yelling hysterically without thinking, saving the taxpayer the cost of a long trial. It&#x27;s worth a try, right? (I think the correct answer to any question is, &quot;my lawyer will answer that. get me my lawyer.&quot;)Anyway, I look at this like the lottery, but in reverse. Sometimes you lose the reverse lottery and a day of your life gets fucked up. But ultimately, life moves on and you have an interesting story. You can say that the government is an oppressive regime that is out to get you for your political views, or you can say you rolled the dice and lost.Let me ask you this: say you want to check for guns and explosives before people get on an airplane. How do you do it?

The land of the free.As I read more and more of those stories I can&#x27;t help but wonder at how things changed. I am from a formerly-eastern-europe-soviet-bloc country (Poland) and these kinds of oppressive techniques sound very familiar. The haziness of procedures, lack of basic rights, intimidation, no accountability of state officials -- we&#x27;ve seen all that until 1989. At the time, while the communist regime was imposed on us, the USA seemed like heaven: transparency, procedures, basic rights, free speech, accountable officials.Look at where we are today. I can&#x27;t even imagine being held captive without arrest for hours, being questioned about the purpose of my trip, about my religion and habits, all while travelling within my country. When entering the country, the passport clerk has exactly two options: let me in, or call the police and get me arrested on the spot. I feel free and I am happy to live in a free country, together with people who because of the past oppressive Soviet regime are quite sensitive to abuses of power.At the same time, the U.S. is rapidly degenerating into something that isn&#x27;t quite the sinister oppressive regime, but getting close to the point where it could become one, if a wrong leader gets elected. It&#x27;s scary.And the worst thing is -- American people got so used to the idea of living in a free country, that they do not even admit the thought that things are going the wrong way. Most people don&#x27;t see the signs.

Don't Fly During Ramadan