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Flying Faster Without ID
jjh37997 writes "A Homeland Security's privacy advisory committee member finds that flying without a photo ID is actually faster than traveling with proper identification. According to Wired the committee member, Jim Harper, accepted a bet from civil liberties rabble-rouser John Gilmore to test whether he could actually fly without showing identification. He found that traveling without ID allowed him to bypass the long security lines at San Francisco's International Airport, and get in faster than if he had provided his driver's license."
...I know people like to think that it's now so much more secure; but if you don't "look like a terrorist" (which usually means of middle eastern origin) you can get through pretty quick. I went from England to holland and never had to show anything but the colour of my passport (which is bugandy - the English colour) and the fact that I am white and middle class. That was all they cared about. I know a lot of people won't like that the world sometimes works like this (I don't), and I'm expecting people won't want to hear it either...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Exactly; somehow I am guessing if he had olive skin and claimed to be from the middle east, there would have been a slight delay before the hour long full body cavity search.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Well, white, "normal looking", and with signs of reasonable affluence.
As with all things, it helps to look sharp - whenever you find yourself in a potentially dodgy situation, stop and ask yourself, "how expensive of a lawyer do I look like I can afford?"
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
If you're travelling with kids, then yes.
Most of the airlines these days lets you print a boarding pass at home up to a day in advance when using an e-ticket. Don't need ID for that.
Having a reporter watching the whole thing probably didn't hurt.
There was a reporter watching and taking notes as he was searched by the TSA. I wonder how he would have fared if he were alone?
I fail to see how the grandparent, which simply said "Good thing he's white" can be modded +5 insightful while this AC post, which actually provides a little bit of information (an anecdote, at least) can be modded 0. Looks to me like Slash has a little racism going on (or reverse racism, if you like - it's all the same shit to me).
;-)
If you read this, have mod points, and agree, please mod the parent up a bit instead of me.
That's because "profiling" - you know, exercising actual forensic science, is DoublePlusUnGood in today's society because a minority might get "offended." Of course you don't want to offend anyone, that's not the goal. The goal is supposed to be to identify and check the most likely suspects, regardless of what the profile characteristics might be; the fact that in this particular case it's middle-eastern ancestry and subscribing to Islam is just an unfortunate thing. To search whitey just to be PC and not be accused of "racial profiling" is just plain ridiculous, because the truth is it IS racial profiling, based in forensics. Yes, we know most Muslims are not terrorists, most scorn the violence (evangelism via force) that Mohammed embraced for a short time in his life, but the fact is that most of the terrorists are Arabs, so it only makes sense to focus scruitiny there.
(of course some uppity over-sensitive PC nitwit will mod this "flamebait" or some BS)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This proove the old adage that the world is not driven by reality but by the perception of reality.
I would argue that no one in their right minds would try to highjack an airplane again. In the past highjacking was a political statement. Usually the highjackers would fly the plane to a neutral airport and make demands. Often this would include the release of fellow members of their organization who were incarcerated. If you were an unlucky passenger, you would be an unfortuante pawn in a global chess-game. (Obviously there were exceptions.)
After the terrorist attacks on 11 Sept. 2001, no passenger will sit still and let a highjacker take over an airplane. Highjacking is now synonomous with suicide attacks. In my opinion, the real danger to airline travel comes not from highjackers but from explosives being placed on the airplane, e.g. Pan Am flight 103.
But the perception in the US is that flying needs to be protected, so the result is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Others have pointed out that if you are not white, have any kind of middle eastern origins, and you try to fly without an ID, you're pretty much screwed. And because the TSA has near absolute authority about whether or not you fly, they can deny you boarding simply because they feel like it.
The result of all this is that flying, IMO, is not significantly safer than before. We are concentrating our resources on "fighting the last battle." Making sure passengers have proper Identification doesn't make flying any safer. One could point out that some of the highjackers on 11 Sept. 2001 had valid IDs, after all they entered the country legally. As a society we should concentrate our efforts on preventing bombings or other bomb like devices. The "shoe bomber" Richard Reid in late 2001 probably represents a greater threat, yet checking to make sure he has proper identification isn't going to help.
I would argue that the checks they do at airports to check for explosives are worthwhile. But making sure you have an ID with you are not.
So what: a well-dressed polite white man gets through a shorter (yet more thorough) security line because of a lack of ID. First, the airlines have to account for people not having IDs. Wallets get stolen, IDs are lost or forgotten, in other words, shit happens. Second, this lack of ID is a rare occurence so of course the line will be shorter, and even if the actual screening takes 3-4 times as long than the "normal" screening you will get through faster.
Incidentally, a little politeness can go a long way when dealing with government workers, especially in places like an airport or the DMV. Just think: these people deal with complaining a**holes all day for crappy pay, you might actually make their day a little brighter by being polite, or, God forbid, almost friendly. The time for civil disobedience in not after waiting 2 hours in the DMV line.
it isn't because of any racism, it is because an AC posted it.
Is this intended as a favorable or pejorative description of John Gilmore?
If John Gilmore is a rabble-rouser, then in my opinion the USA needs more rabble-rousers. If we had 100 million of them, the politicians would never have dared take away all our rights.
There's something to that. I think many mods read at 2 and up. I find that if any of my posts start at 2, they're much likely to go up. If I post w/out karma bonus, they're likely to languish at 1. Sure, I post some rather disposable comments at 1, but not all of them are as such. The difference in mod performance is much greater than the spread in post quality, IMHO. I'm sure being an AC, and thus starting at 0, is a double whammy, esp. since many people filter out ACs entirely.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Well, of course. It's very simple, most people are misunderstanding the purpose of airline security.
The purpose is not to stop terrorists. It's abundantly clear that the measures that have been taken are ineffective at doing so. The purpose of airline security is assure middle America that Something Is Being Done .
Towards that end, it's much more important that people who look "Middle American" appear to be given much more scrutiny, because they're the ones footing the bill - they have to be the ones to get the warm fuzzies and thereby get assurance that it's safe to fly.
If you want some idea of how completely absurd the whole thing is, try being a pilot (or just pretending to be one) at a smaller airfield (yes, that still services larger jets) and see how easy it is to access airplanes without a single challenge from anybody. At most, you'll be asked for the tail number of your aircraft - which you can read from the big freakin' characters on the side of every airplane.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Profiling is doubleplusungood. Everyone likes forensic science, though.
All terrorists are people. The terrorists who attacked on 9/11 were indeed arabs. This does not all the terrorists make. Where's your data that leads you to believe most are arabs? Do you have a pie chart for me? How did you define terrorist? There are a ton of white, disillusioned brats like John Walker Lindh in the world. Of course there are some pretty bad ones in southeast asia. Just look up jemaah islamiyah or the abu sayaf group. Did I mention there are more muslims in that part of the world than the middle east?
Of course I would agree that we might want to lax security for the 85 year old grandmother type, and pilots who simply have to walk to a different terminal to their next flight should be given the chance to go around security, but it would be stupid and reactionary to say arabs are the only threat.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
You make an interesting point, but it's wrong. Profiling based on race in fact is detrimental to security, because security officials concentrate on skin color as opposed to the behavior that actually indicates likilihood of being a terrorist -- nerviousness, shifting eyes, standing around in a corner, I don't know -- stuff like that. (My source is a professor on an NPR program I heard last August. I recall when I was listening to it, too, so if you really care I could probably track down who it was.)
How many terrorist attacks on airplanes have we had since September 11? What, the shoe bomber? That's a sample size of 1. And all the time we hear about the increasing threat of "home grown terrorists." Slashdot readers should know not to extrapolate from small data sets.
but the fact is that most of the terrorists are Arabs
Crap. Most of the terrorists I've had to worry about during my life have been Irish Catholics. Many of the terrorist attacks on US soil have been at the hands of white Christians. Racial profiling is bad because it doesn't work more than for any other reason.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Also, it probably doesn't hurt that he's on the DHS's privacy advisory committee, according to the name on his ticket, and his employer (the Cato Institute) is a well-known think tank and has a high-res photo of him on their website.
What do you want to want to bet the security supervisor's phone call went:
"Any idea why a Jim Harper might be trying to fly without an ID? He says he mailed it home instead of carrying it with him."
"Jim Harper... like the Jim Harper? White, brown hair, balding, thin widow's peak, short beard and mustache, grey eyes?"
"Uh, yeah, that sounds like him."
"He's on the DHS privacy committee. Make sure he's not sneaking a fake bomb on the plane or anything, but don't keep him from flying. And don't let on that you know who he is."
I mean, the people checking him out probably had access to hard-to-fake photographic identification than anything he could possibly be carrying himself. And a quick Google reveals that his new book is about "How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood". It seems obvious that, if he attracts enough attention that somebody looks him up, he'll be given exactly the treatment that he got: pretend to ignore his identity and check him sufficiently thoroughly that you'd catch it if he had anything prohibited.
An ironic thing to ask in this particular thread, don't you think?
Whine whine whine, you poor oppressed white boy.
Not only is racial profiling "not PC" and "offensive" to those we hope to gain intel from, but it's stupid. If you profile Muslim Arabs, how many Ted Kaczynskis are you going to stop? Or Timothy Mcveighs? Or Eric Rudolphs?
Do you think our enemies are retarded? If we annouced to the world "we will only search arabs, never whites" exacty how many seconds would pass before they recruited a white person to blow up a plane?
Aesop said it better than I ever could:
A DOE blind in one eye was accustomed to graze as near to the edge of the cliff as she possibly could, in the hope of securing her greater safety. She turned her sound eye towards the land that she might get the earliest tidings of the approach of hunter or hound, and her injured eye towards the sea, from whence she entertained no anticipation of danger. Some boatmen sailing by saw her, and taking a successful aim, mortally wounded her. Yielding up her last breath, she gasped forth this lament: "O wretched creature that I am! to take such precaution against the land, and after all to find this seashore, to which I had come for safety, so much more perilous."
Tell that to the cop who caught the Oklahoma City bomber, jackass:
You would have been harassing innocents, and would have ignored whity. Good thing that cop did his damn job instead of knee-jerking (or "using forensics" as you call it).
You can't take the sky from me...
Next time you're in the middle of a 40 car pileup on the freeway, tell that to the EMT cutting you out of your car.
I tried to use that excuse to get out of a speeding ticket and even chatted with a couple of my civil engineering buddies at the state transportation department. After that chat, I gave up and pleaded guilty. The research doesn't back the "everybody else was doing it" defense.
-h-
Its going to the extremes. I live in India, and in the past few years airline security has always been tight because terrorism is very very old over here. So what was the security. No ID bullshit. You walk into a metal detecter. If it beeps you are frisked. They ask you to remove keys, wallet, cell phone and keep them separately. Simple 1 min process which happened parallely to your bag in the X-Ray. Heck if you are carrying a camera bag you could give it to them and tell please check it by hand as you dont want your films getting spoiled. Simple and effective. Infact so effective that inspite of the very real threat of terrorism(bomb blasts on streets etc., are common in some parts of the country), there was one hijacking after 1990, and that too from Nepal(A neighbouring country). So nothing wrong with the security measures over here. Now lets contrast that with the US. Before 9/11 you could walk upto the plane to see people off as if they are boarding a bus! And after that they make you remove your shoes and what not. If they really want to learn how to secure airports and prevent hijackings, visit Israel, India or any country which has borne the brunt of terrorism for so long.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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You are SERIOUSLY overestimating both the intelligence of the average screener and Mr. Harper's public visibility. We're on Slashdot; lots of privacy geeks here, and I'm sure not 0.1 percent of us knew who Jim Harper was (not to mention that the DHS has a privacy commitee). I know I didn't know him.
Now, remember this story?. If the kind of conspiracy you are expounding were true, don't you think it would have been a lot easier to ID Senator Ted Kennedy than freakin' Jim "Nobody you'd know" Harper?
Don't forget the Oklahoma City bombing, the *other* major terrorist attack on US soil. It's still recent history even if it has been overshadowed.
And the terrorists in that attack were not only white boys, but they were also Americans. And if memeory serves, McVeigh was younger, but Nicols was well into middle age.
Generalizing about who might attack doesn't help. Checking everyone equally for dangerous chemicals and weapons does. It's really that simple.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.