There comes a tipping point in every scenario where the bow does finally break. While very little of this last 9 years of “security theatre” on the ground and in the air seems particularly useful (save for the reinforcement of the cockpit) - people have for years accepted various annoyances if they really want to be somewhere.
But at a certain point it’s likely that folks will feel the cumulative toll of so many inconveniences - most of which appear to be nonsensical and randomly enforced – and are so onerous and invasive of basic liberties, that it’s time to think about travel differently.
A person who went to Europe 4 times a year - maybe twice for business and twice for pleasure - might go just once now. He’ll do the other meeting via conference call and take the other trips domestically, or by car, train, boat etc. The super rich and now probably even the merely rich, will find ways to go private.
I think you will see more people driving in to the US from places like Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Cabo, etc. If it takes 4 hours at security and then another extra hour to claim a bag off the carousel due to the limiting of carry-ons, (to say nothing of the angst caused by no restroom, books, access to medication, music, baby formula, notepad, newspaper, water bottle for the final hour – which is beyond absurd) – people will take a look at the door-to-door time suck as well as the toll from anxiety and logically reason that it’s just easier all the way around to get in the car.
The airlines must at once stand up to the TSA and similar organizations internationally and reclaim the security process. If the US does not come to some reasonable solution for the last 9 years of mediocrity and idiocy we will find our economy changed once again, compromised and possibly crippled.
Whatever one may think of Barack Obama, he does appear to be the owner of actual working brain cells. He has to know that none of this can possibly be helpful to business either domestically or internationally.
I was going to add a comment in the related GQ thread, then I realized that it was going to be snarky. So here in the Pit:
Now that flights (some? all? specifics are hazy) prohibit doing pretty much anything involving an object during the last hour of flight, I think all that’s left is for an hour of singing. Anybody up for a very long round of “Row, row, row your boat”? How about “99 bottles of perfume confiscated by TSA”?
What is this, 1960? A computer can search through 400,000 names in less than a second, and present a list of matches (or near-matches) for a human to review.
And just how many people on that flight were named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab? I can understand someone named “John Smith” slipping past security because of logistics problems maintaining a watch list, but among the flying public, it’s not a common name.
Actually, I can think of a song that would be fun to sing. At least for a while.
(Beware, YouTube link)
While I agree with you, I don’t think doing nothing is an option in these times, not if one wants to survive politically.
Christ, fuck, you’re right, the watch list is a fabulous method of keeping terriss off planes and the only reason it doesn’t work is because nobody ever thinks of checking it just out of pure cussedness. There could be NO OTHER POSSIBLE REASON why a TSA agent wouldn’t go check the the watch list database for an Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and why his name wouldn’t show up as flagged. Nope, the system works perfectly, it’s just the darned TSA agents are–what, exactly? If the watch list is perfect, and can be perfectly searched with perfect results perfectly, what other explanation is there? Please show your work.
Okay, so the security folks seem to have come to their senses, at least a little bit:
Some Easing Reported in New Security Measures (New York Times)
Right, there are a lot of loose comments here about google, etc, but I think really little serious thinking about how hard it is with sketchy information to take actionable and coherent -and non wasteful- decisions.
Unless your data base is capturing solid information like identity card numbers, mere names captured by a wide-net association are worse than useless, the actively sap resources from more high value activities.
One of the last times I got to the US, the Customs officer pulled up my file and got a case of the giggles. Being Hispanic himself, he could see that all but one of the about-20(!) “aliases” listed for me were just distortions of my name; that last one was María García. I’ve never used that name, but I did receive a phone call from a collections agency in 1995 or 1996, asking whether I was María García; apparently they were calling every María-anything in Florida (that would easily be upwards of 1M women). García may not be the Hispanic Smith, but at the very least it’s the Hispanic Brown, frequency-wise.
Can you imagine if a “María García” got into the list and from then on, not just every woman actually called María García, but every María-anything, wasn’t allowed to board planes in or to the US? Over half of Hispanic women… that’s how many millions of US citizens and legal residents, never mind us abroad-residing foreigners?
I’m sure the 1-hour limit is not intended to protect the people on the plane, for exactly the reason you state. It’s intended to protect people on the ground.
What the fuck is it protecting people on the ground from?
Bloody farts?
It’s fucking idiocy to pander to the retard chicken-little faction in the US.
I think what you mean is it’s fucking idiocy to pander to them more.
Word. Al-Q must be laughing right now. They’ve been jerking our psychological chains for years now, and at a very low cost to them.
The real problem is, that people have been conditioned to fear. Yellow alerts, prowlers in the bushes, creepy guys on the subway, Halloween razor-blade scares, date-rape scenarios, it goes on and on. With 24-hour news coverage. When we’re in a constant state of unease and fear, we lose our judgement and ability to perceive what’s really going on. When we’re flinching from every snapping branch and rustle in the dark, how can we look around and evaluate what might really be a threat?
It’s time to take back our minds, our psychological well-being… our power.
sorry, don’t claim that this american is going along with this fucking shit. I am horrified by the whole misheveh. I think that there has got to be a better way than allow the terrorized TSA and Homeland inSecurity to abuse passengers like this, but I honestly can do nothing more than I already have [made my political representatives know that i feel that the whole load of restrictive bullshit is useless and counterproductive]
I read an article in a magazine years ago that made that very point: the goal of terrorism (according to the paper) was not to kill people, but to make your enemy disrupt his routine to the point where he is paralyzed by fear and trying to react to things that you have no intention to do again. If that’s true, then Al-Q has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.
Question: Do Nigerians need a visa before hand to fly into the USA?
When I lived in SAudi we need a valid visa to gain entry to the country. When I left the states they checked for it, if I flew through Amsterdam, London, Paris etc they checked for it before I got on the bloody plane!
I am not a security expert, but I am willing to admit that up front.
There are surely things that TSA does that are not effective. I think randomly checking passengers isn’t a good use of time, for example.
However, I continually find that the most strident critics of the TSA have no real substantive ideas themselves on how to improve airline security, other than “Just don’t let terrorists on the plane LOLZ! Use the computerz and do it betterz!1!”
Nice to know that those who are so aggrieved by a change in TSA’s policies that lasted all of three days have not failed to disappoint.
Egg-zackly.
Missed this in my other post.
The person who wrote this in that newspaper is an idiot.
The purpose of terrorism is to use unconventional, violent means to force a country to change policies that in some way affect those who carry out the violence. Al Qaeda doesn’t give two shits about whether travelers are inconvenienced by not being able to carry a water bottle past airport security; Al Qaeda wants the United States out of the Middle/Near East in order to bring an Islamic caliphate one step closer to reality.
In other words, banning metal utensils on airplanes wasn’t an Al Qaeda victory. Zawahiri didn’t make any videotapes proclaiming victory on the imperialist heathen metal cutlery makers and the stooges who support them. They have bigger fish to fry. The author of the quoted opinion needs to get a grip.
That doesn’t mean that they are not sitting in their caves laughing their asses off.