He still gets no respect!
I believe iamthewalrus(:3= stated that it sounded like you said that, not that those were your verbatim words. In other words, your statement would cause a reasonable person to believe that you felt that Homeland Security should (or could) not be held accountable.
You can argue that point, but probably not by using the old “That’s not a direct quote of mine” technique.
I guess people see what they want to see.
Why would you think that it was necessary to compensate the victims in order to punish the organization? Heads can roll without money flowing to our intrepid travelers.
No, you didn’t say that.
It’s just, if I spent hundreds of dollars on a plane ticket (and who knows what else), and all that was scuttled because some idiots were on the case, whether or not those idiots got fired would be way below getting my money back on my list of things to care about.
Part of taking responsibility for a screw up isn’t just punishing the peon who screwed up, it’s doing your best to make the other person whole. It also makes it much harder to hide behind a policy of screwing people over and firing the little people in the case that it becomes a PR issue. I’m not saying that’s happening here, I’m just saying that if there’s no organizational responsibility, there’s an incentive to let the system get broken.
You did give the reason that the court system would be “tied in knots” dealing with it. If that is the reason to pursue no legal action against such mistakes then essentially they wouldn’t be being held accountable… at least not legally anyway. There could still be other systems in place, for example compensation based on a well thought-out formula to determine the amount. If the system is designed well enough fair reparations can be made that would avoid the vast majority of court cases.
What I wonder is how did “the proper authorities” become alerted to this? Someone must have actually reported those tweets.
I don’t know that DHS screwed up. It’s not trying to have zero false positives when it comes to detecting terrorism. It’s trying to have zero false negatives. In that case, some level of false positives is desirable. If terrorists know that all they have to do is use quotes from American TV to avoid detection, that gives them an easy method to do so. I don’t see that we’re losing much by not having the type of tourists visit here who don’t know that it’s stupid to discuss destroying America before they travel here.
I, For One, Welcome Our New TSA Overlords
They can also use email, phones, letters, more code, smoke signals or skywriting to talk about their evil plans. Any of those would probably be smarter than using the code “destroy America” to mean “destroy America” and tweeting it publicly.
maybe someone can splain something to me? Exactly how did the TSA discover the tweets? did they confiscate their phones or surf the net looking for any mention of a desecration of our most sacred American icon, Marilyn Monroe.
and did the actions of the TSA put these folks on a terrorist list? That would be far more damaging financially than the loss of a week in LA.
If I were to connect the dots and draw a line it would go from airplanes, to trains, to buses, to cars and roadblocks on the streets.
Well, working from one of the articles in the OP:
my first thought would be that the travellers would have had to apply in advance for an ESTA as they are citizens of the UK and entitled to request visa-free admission to the US for a short tourist visit. Maybe that’s where the flags were raised.
Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that airlines need to submit a list of all the passenger names to DHS before the plane takes off. So the agents may have gone on a fishing trip and caught, as it turns out, an old boot or a rusty bicycle wheel.
I feel you are losing something - whether it’s “much” or not is up to Americans to decide, I suppose.
First off, you’re losing competent border control. These agents clearly had no understanding of what they were reading. My WAG is that, when faced with people who obviously represented no threat, they chose to make an example of them rather do the sensible thing and back down.
Which leads to the second problem: if I have to closely monitor my online output in the weeks and months prior to a trip to the US to spend my tourist dollars, chances are I won’t bother. I’ll just go to Australia, or Canada, or Germany, or France, or…well, pretty much anywhere that won’t treat me like Ernst Stavro Blofeld just because I expressed a desire to get drunk in LA.
You aren’t embarassed that the DHS is actually sending back young people making jokes via tweets, in the name of national security? Or do you think that the DHS had actual reason to believe that these people were a threat to our country?
To me, this either shows an idiotic zero-tolerance policy, or else shows that the agents are woefully unprepared to be able to detect a real terrorist threat.
The question is, after stopping and interviewing them, the two jokers spending a night being detained - how did it STILL return a false positive?
Are the investigation techniques of the dept that incompetent? Or is there some part to the story we’re not getting?
Would the tweets merit a “further investigation” - meh - I don’t think so, but if you’re being careful and accepting the hypothesis of false positives then maybe.
Do they merit being refused entry (absent some other, more serious wrong doing) would be the big question - and the answer on that is a pretty resounding no.
It seems likely that, by the time they were actually detained, the decision had already been made to refuse them entry and no further investigation took place.
:dubious:In that case - God bless due process I suppose…
Due process is not applicable here. There were not charged with any crime, and no foreigner has a right to enter the US.
How does everyone here know that these guys posed no threat? Because they were white, non-Muslims? We don’t know anything about these guys, and I don’t know that it’s worth DHS’s time to try and clear them.
John Mace is correct here. They were British citizens with no right to enter the US. So they weren’t entitled to due process. They were returned home within a reasonable period.
Not saying I don’t find the whole thing ridiculous - I do. But the rules for people requesting entry to the US (or any other country) are not the same as the rules for people who are already present in the US.
Well as long as they’re only doing it to foreigners. fuck em. Not worth our nation’s time to ensure they’re treated with anything resembling human rights.
“we’ve got a code 1010, suspect with a social networking account, swarm swarm”.
I feel so much safer.
The two should thank their lucky stars theyvwere not born Muslims. They would have been sent to Gitmo at least. OTH! If the had been Irish of the republican persuasion…
I don’t think that any compensation should be in order to punish anyone. I think there are two different things here;
The lads should be compensated a minor monetary amount for their out of pocket expenses. Not a million dollar settlement for “pain and suffering” or some such. As I said earlier, there is probably no means of the government doing this without admitting liability (which they will never do), so perhaps a travel agent or private business could do the deed.
The people at Homeland security should be punished in that the agents should all be given proper training so that they do not embarrass the country in the future.