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TSA Wants You To Keep Your Seat, and Your Hands In Sight
An anonymous reader excerpts from an AP story as carried by Yahoo News about changes stemming from yesterday's foiled bombing attempt of a Northwest Airlines flight: "Some airlines were telling passengers on Saturday that new government security regulations prohibit them from leaving their seats beginning an hour before landing. The regulations are a response to a suspected terrorism incident on Christmas Day. Air Canada said in a statement that new rules imposed by the Transportation Security Administration limit on-board activities by passengers and crew in US airspace. ... Flight attendants on some domestic flights are informing passengers of similar rules. Passengers on a flight from New York to Tampa Saturday morning were also told they must remain in their seats and couldn't have items in their laps, including laptops and pillows." The TSA's list of prohibited items doesn't seem to have changed in the last day, though.
How ridiculous can flying become? Just say "F**K YOU" to terrorists, and fly as if nothing had happened. Otherwise they've won.
Indeed. It's the streisand effect of terrorism... 9/11 could have been at most a minor annoyance but instead it became the rallying cry for numerous restrictions on freedom with questionable results at best.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I have to agree with you. An hour? There's a lot of flights where I'd never have a chance to visit the lavatory.
And we wonder why the airlines are having so much trouble making a profit today?
I've been avoiding flying because of the TSA for ages now. First you have to go through massive amounts of trouble at the checkpoints, worry about your luggage, now you're even going to be interfered with on the flight itself.
My fear that eventually travelers will all have to fly wearing issued paper-tissue gowns and be sedated during the flight approaches...
I don't read AC A human right
Impacting our day to day to lives = terrorism has succeeded.
Its psychological warfare. The mind is infinitely more powerful than any bomb.
I've canceled my vacation. Not because I'm afraid of terrorists-- I'm not, at all. We're talking at about 1 death per 4 million passengers.
No, it's that in response to this sliver of a threat, you're guaranteeing that I'll spend twice the time in line, and the flight will be as miserable as you can make it. This will cost literally billions of dollars (at 300 million hours, about 450 lifetimes) of productive passenger time per year. And all because some twat might set his crotch on fire-- good thing you don't allow us to have water anymore.
Alright. Fine. Let the airlines go out of business; this nation of cowards deserves it. I suppose we'll need another bailout, to pay the airlines to leave their aircraft on the tarmac.
Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for imaginary security are assholes.
You beat terrorists by raising a middle finger in their direction, mocking them mercilessly and accepting casualties once in a while. You kiss terrorist arse when you pull this kind of crap. What's next, handcuff passengers to their seats and have police strutting up and down the aisles during flights? Give me an effin' break!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Most people regard the annual road toll as a "minor annoyance".
I can understand where you're coming from but it's neither the fault of the flight attendants nor the cleaning crew that your country has such shitty regulations, but they're the only people who will suffer from your protest...
That's the "they are just doing their job" cop-out. If they aren't happy with the consequences of working for an organization that denies people their basic human dignities, then they should be looking for a new job. To give them a pass because they are just little people in the machinery of a big faceless organization is to give the big faceless organization a pass.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's stupid not because it's exaggerated, but because it's ineffective. It's BS. I went to a conference in the US at the end of November, and was reminded just how bad it is to fly to and from the US. I have also flown to and from Israel, a country very much in the crosshairs of terrorists, and the security procedure was MUCH more humane, both on the flights and at boarding. (in fact, I didn't even need a visa for Israel, while I need to go through an incredibly complicated and expensive procedure to get a US visa... but this is a different story (or is it?)) The Israelis do have some security processes in place, but they are mostly stealth and unobtrusive. Well, in any case, they must be doing something right, because there has not been a hijacked or otherwise terror-affected flight to or from Israel in decades now.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
2 people die per second... 144000 per day.
4 babies born per second... 5760 per day.
I don't understand this math.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Every life is important. Just because it's not possible to prevent deaths everywhere , doesn't mean you should be ok with unnecessary slaughter of innocent people.
In the real world, resources are limited. If spending 50 billion dollars on anti-terrorism saves 4000 lives, and spending 50 billion dollars on food aid saves 1 million lives, then the latter is clearly a better decision, notwithstanding the fact that every life is important.
Of course, in the real world, what we actually ended up doing is spending 1 trillion dollars fighting two deadly wars with heavy civilian casualties.
The death of one man is a tragedy — the death of a million is a statistic.
Go "BOO" enough times and the US will spend itself into financial ruin. Wait -- that's happening NOW!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
It should be. I know it's tragic but it shouldn't have been turned into the media extravaganza it was. Hell, there even was an official song. The proper response to terrorism is to non-hastily look into measures that allow that particular attack to be prevented in the future (such as, in this case, making the cockpit inaccessible from the passenger room during the flight) and nothing else.
The exact point of terrorism is to disrupt the target country. Now look at the situation - not only have the USA ruined their image over two wars, they (and everyone else) spend lots of money on harrassing innocent travellers in a way that doesn't even do anything, breeding contempt all the while. A few thousand deaths in an act that is extremely unlikely to ever be successfully repeated again should not be enough to let the most well-armed country in the world tumble head-first into raging paranoia against anyone and everyone, including its own citizens.
Regardless of the "if we don't X the terrorists have already won" rhethoric, the government of the States has done exactly what the terrorists wanted and it's still continuing to do so. The terrorists have already won and they keep wining because at the moment they and the government are working in the same direction: Away form the citizens towards ever greater surveillance and power concentration at the top. They're essentially using each other as PR agencies.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
More people have died from deciding to take a car more often (instead of an airplane) than there died in 9/11. And most of those deaths weren't even on the planes, but in the buildings. (Never even mind the economic damage caused by the car crashes, insurance payouts, and travel time lost that could've been spent on business matters directly; and, more indirectly, the 3-trillion dollar Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the iraqi lives lost due to Blackwater having fun, etc.)
Terrorist attacks in Europe or Israel have taken far many more lives than they have in the US.. The planes flying into buildings happened, sure.. but "9/11" was created in the mind of the world by the US response to it.
I can understand your thoughts, and I myself remember where I was on that day. I remember the discussions I had on that day.
BUT... What about all of those people that died in Spain? Or how about the ones in London? Have the Europeans decided to lock down all of their train stations and require body cavity searches?
Those people lost lives as much as anybody else, yet all we remember is 9/11. All we talk about is 9/11. All we have to endure are the endless lines of security searches, of taking off our shoes, belts, and what have you. Of me personally being searched for 45 minutes because Jolt decided it would be cute to introduce a brand new novel can of pop.
http://imstartintofeelit.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/jolt-blue-raspberry.jpg
Yes it was my mistake for taking fluids in my backpack. But was it my mistake that the TSA thought it was a brand new device? I am not blaming the TSA because they are doing their jobs. I am blaming the paranoia going through the American society...
Want to know what gets me even more, where are the twin towers V2? Want to know how inept parts of American society has become, just look at what has been built after the 9/11 attacks, NOTHING, NADA, ZIP! That is the tragedy. Think of it as follows, your enemy blows up your bridge, and yet nearly a decade later you still can't rebuild it. Who is weak I ask!!! (If it were up to me I would be forcing a mandate through to build a new set of towers to show them one is not weak...)
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
If he had set it off in the toilet, then the restrictions introduced would probably be worse. They would probably have banned the use of the toilet on planes.
Either way, "the terrorists win."
Terrorists are just spoiled children. They throw very big and dangerous tantrums for attention. Their acts and our responses are all attention.
Terrorists, like spoiled children, are best discouraged by ignoring them. Will there always be spoiled children? Yes. It's a fact of life. Can't stop life.
So he will do this much earlier. Or is there some physics that makes an explosion 30 minutes before landing more dangerous then 1 hour and 30 minutes?
People smuggle drugs on planes all the time. (They put in in places where some people keep their watch.) One stick and two matches should be enough. And I am sure that they will be able to put the match on the stick. It is not that they need a fuse. That is only there for safety.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
9/11 had such a profound impact on the U.S. because it was spectacular, it was unprecedented, and it happened here. And, thanks to the 24/7 cable news cycle, we watched it unfolding, live, from our living rooms.
Anytime you have a large number of fatalities occurring from a single spectacular event, it will have a stronger emotional impact than a much higher cumulative tally of deaths over time. That's why airliner crashes, for example, are newsworthy and annual statistics are not -- those 100, 200, 300 deaths may be statistically a drop in the bucket compared to the annual deaths from car crashes, cancer, or whatever, but they occurred in a single, dramatic event.
The notion of using airplanes, and civilian airliners at that, as flying bombs was also not a possibility that was in the popular consciousness, not even as a plot element in an action movie. (How many people commented, on 9/11 and in the days following, that it all seemed unreal, like watching a movie and not reality?) And crash those planes into three of the most well-known, high-profile buildings in the world (the two WTC towers and the Pentagon), with a fourth crash into the White House or the Capitol (depending on who you believe) prematurely thwarted, and you have the ingredients for a real-life spectacular that will have a profound impact, regardless of how the numbers stack up statistically.
And it happened on U.S. soil. Prior to 9/11, with the possible exception of the OKC bombing, large scale terrorist attacks were something that happened in those "other" countries around the world. And with the perpetrators being "foreigners" (as opposed to a domestic malcontent like McVeigh and whatever conspirators he may or may not have had, depending on what you believe), and it's not hard to fathom the almost immediate adoption of the "America is under attack" and "we are at war" memes that were so adroitly exploited by the government.
Finally, the smug xenophobia and self-centeredness of Americans played a role. Why do you think a domestic plane crash, even a smaller commuter plane with fewer than 100 souls on board, gets hours of constant, live coverage on CNN while a jumbo jet with hundreds aboard crashing halfway around the world merits but a sentence or two at the hourly update? Think of the impact Hurricane Katrina had while killing fewer than 2000, compared to the Asian tsunami that killed 250,000 five years ago. Now consider how much attention, concern, and TV time were devoted to both. Sure, the Pacific tsunami did get some screen time, especially now that the ubiquitous presence of video cameras in average people's hands gave us some shaky, dramatic, horrifying footage to see. (Though I strongly suspect that if there had been no video at all, the event would have been even more marginalized on U.S. media.) But with the exception of a handful of Western tourists caught up in the disaster, those quarter million souls are "other" people..."fer'iners"...you know, them people that dress weird and talk funny and don't look like us. On the scale of emotional involvement, a couple thousand American lives merits an "OMG, this is horrible, something must be done" while 250,000 Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Thais, et. al. elicits an almost Seinfeldesque "Ah, that's a shame....wonder what's on HBO right now..."
So, it's not sheer numbers that determine what impact death has on a culture; it's all about context. Who got killed, where, how and why.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Yeah, he knew Japan would be attacked. He didn't expect the US to attack its own citizens.
So why is the Government attacking its own citizens?
You're right - dismantling your own democracy as a response to terrorists is definitely not the right response. Particularly when the countermeasures are so stupid. Worth noting that there *is* an effective way of combating terrorists however. Remove their community support. They don't come from nowhere and they don't arrange all these plans and have these beliefs without some friends and neighbours wondering. But a people that see occupations of their countries or US support for regimes like the Saudis are a people that are angry enough that they become less willing to stop such individuals themselves. And these communities are the best defense against terrorists.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
American funded Irish republican terrorists murdered two innocent children on that day.
If we'd done our foreign policy then the way we and the US do now, we'd have responded by sending the troops into Mexico to force regime change...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
When Yamamoto struck at Pearl Harbor, he knew exactly what the response would be.
When Yamamoto struck Pearl Harbor, he was flying a Japanese flag on a Japanese warship made in Japan. It's pretty easy to find the bud and nip it.
When the hijackers attacked, most of them were from Saudi Arabia, all from the middle east, all had proper Visas, all had been in the country for at least weeks if not months or years. They did not fly any flag and did not represent any country. They used box cutters and airplanes as weapons.
Both groups knew the effect of their attacks. I can promise you that bin Laden got exactly what he wanted. A cosmic war of Good and Evil, with Bush even saying as much on television, between Islam and the West. He got us to give up the liberty we fought and won over hundreds of years in less than two hours, with the loss of a lot property and 3,000 lives.
Imagine if instead of torturing people and invading two countries and starting two wars we had produced evidence, fought hard to extradite bin Laden from Afghanistan, tried him at the world court, and locked him up for the rest of his life. We would have said that the West is not barbaric, fundamentalist religious fanatics are. We are constitutionalists - we believe in the rule of law, equally applied to everyone. We may not achieve perfection, but we're the closest thing the world has got. We are genuinely here to make the world a better place, and we have learned from the mistakes of former world super powers.
Everyone says if you want to change the world, start with yourself. How about reminding everyone that freedom isn't free, not because you have to invade and sacrifice the lives of soldiers, but because sometimes you have to obey laws that your enemy does not. Sometimes you have to recognize that liberty and security are mutually exclusive.
If you let emotion and hate dictate your actions, not only do the terrorists get a recruiting tool to attract more followers, they remove the moral high ground where you once stood. Then it's just two barbarians at each other's throat, one with satellite guided weapons and tanks, and the other with suicide bombers and IEDs.