Slashdot Mirror
DHS Sends Tourists Home Over Twitter Jokes
itwbennett writes "In a classic case of 'we say destroy, you say party hard,' the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security detained a pair of British twenty-somethings for 12 hours and then sent them packing back to the land of the cheeky retort. At issue is a Tweet sent by Leigh Van Bryan about plans to 'destroy America,' starting with LA, which, really, isn't that bad an idea."
The terrorists have won.
According to the New York Times report on this subject:
Information gathered during this interview revealed that both individuals were inadmissible to the United States and were returned to their country of residence.
That's the government talking. But they don't say that it was the Twitter posts themselves that rendered the two "inadmissible." They say it was "information gathered during this interview." Presumably the people interviewed repeated many times that it was all a joke, they didn't mean it, etc., so it seems unlikely that the "information gathered" was anything that was said. It seems totally possible, though, that there was something else that flagged them to be blocked at the border during the interview (for example, they had prior drug convictions).
Breakfast served all day!
The US is fast on track to be earth's most totalitarian society.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A critical detail absent from the summary is that these tweets took place weeks before their trip -- they weren't done at the airport. So whereas previously one could not make a joke at the airport, now one may not make a joke anywhere, anytime.
The jokes in question were not made in the airport. They were made much earlier, while still in Britain. DHS just ran around like a chicken with its head cut off. The inability to confirm whether "destroy" is British slang, or that the other tweet in question was a Family Guy quote is absurd.
The corner of a round room
So, you're saying, "It's OK because they're white and thus obviously not a threat?"
No, I'm saying absent any contextual information, 140 characters can be widely interpreted as different things by a global audience. An audience who subconsciously fill in the context based upon their own individual culture, background, beliefs, ideas, worldview, etc.
Happens both in Tweets and in Slashdot posts.
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itwbennett, the author of this story, is now on the DHS no fly list.
They also ticked the: 'Aways subject to full cavity search.' option.
Isn't that the default?
Really?
First: It was a tweet.
Second: It was a joke. When did we get such a stick up our ass that making a joke is cause for arrest and deportation?
Third: Airports are not dangerous. Flying is not dangerous. Taking our national security too seriously though - that to me as a freedom loving American - is downright terrifying. Once the tools are in place, they will be used. They will be abused, and it is *damned* hard to get rid of them.
+1 Disagree
With all due respect, and with every sincere attempt to be sensitive to the loss of your relatives, I have to disagree that the GPP is vile, lewd, disgusting or hate speech. It's someone pointing out (accurately, IMHO) that we are on the fast-track to fascism and a police state. We may not yet be engaging in the type of infamy that WWII Germany was known for, but the comparison serves as a warning about what could happen if we don't reverse the trend. The worst horrors of the Third Reich did not begin as soon as Hitler took office. Likewise, we have not yet reached a comparable level of evil in our government, but I have to admit, I no longer recognize the country in which I am living.
Incidentally, for whatever it's worth, my father-in-law was a PoW in Nazi Germany. IMHO, I would be dishonoring the sacrifices he made if I didn't warn others that what happened in the past can happen again if we allow it.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
...so are you going to vote Ron Paul? He's the only politician thats said he'd do exactly this.
All people seem to just be born as scared-to-death xenophobes, and most just don't learn any better as they age.
Native Americans probably would be better off if they had been *more* xenophobic. Beware Europeans bearing blankets.
We had our own camps, too. We didn't kill the Japanese like the Nazis killed the Jews, but they certainly were imprisoned, they certainly lost almost all of their material possessions, they certainly died in the camps due to lack of adequate medical care and suicide, and, in some cases, yeah, they were killed by sentries "trying to escape".
There's plenty of horrific things in our own history that are on par with the Nazi's. How many fucking Native Americans did we put in the ground over the 250 years our nation has existed? How many Chinese immigrants died building the railroads? And of course, the millions of African-American slaves...
I'm not saying that we should allow these things to cast a pall over our entire society, but it's important that we remember these atrocities lest we repeat them. Sugar-coating history, and especially our culpability in these foul acts, does a great disservice to those that fought and lived and died through those times.
While we may not have condensed our atrocities down to a 30 year period like Nazi Germany, we've definitely had more than our share spread out over the 250 years our nation has existed...
indeed. but this doesn't explain why, after detaining them for twelve hours, they were denied entry to the country. are we to believe that they were unable to convey that context successfully to their interrogators, or that those same interrogators couldn't get on some internets to investigate the whole "destroy" idiom? i can't help but think of the rob corddry character from the second 'harold and kumar' movie when i try to picture the clowns that thought these brits were an honest-to-god threat to america.
It doesn't explain why, if the DHS thought they actually intended to "destroy LA" that they put them on a plane back to the UK without any charges.
Terrorists, bent on destruction, and THEY PUT THEM ON A JUMBO JET.
Nothing could demonstrate more clearly that the DHS knew full well it was a joke and was simply punishing the tourists.
Yeah, but they're really small little bits. So small that if you squint, you don't see them.
Today, I saw kids smoking weed about a block from a high school, watched a downloaded film, did tai chi in the park, read a pretty radical book while sitting on a big cement block in front of the Dirksen Federal Building (it was almost 50 outside here in Chicago today).
I read articles about hundreds of people protesting in one town and a bunch getting arrested and hundreds protesting in another town and nobody got arrested, so there still seems to be a fair amount of localization of the phenomena.
I drove back from a week in Memphis this past weekend, and I didn't really notice the gulags and FEMA prison camps. In fact, I saw a whole bunch of bumper stickers which were about as disrespectful to the president as it gets and the people driving didn't seem all that worried about getting arrested and tortured.
I think it's absolutely appropriate to talk about certain laws as being fucked up, wrongheaded and a big mistake. In fact, so many people did that about a particularly bad law a few weeks ago (SOPA) that there were congressmen who decided it was better not to vote for it.
Yes, there are forces trying to make things worse, and there are forces who are trying to make things better. The "worse" side is better funded, but the "better" side is more talented, more technologically skilled and has better-looking chicks.
It doesn't help when you talk about "destroying a great nation" because sane people say, "What the fuck is he talking about?" Better to talk about, "This is a shitty fucking law, and if we all go down and get in some congresspeople's faces, there's a good chance we can scare them into not voting for it." A bunch of idiots and paid shills known as the "tea party" did that in 2009 and '10 and made all the politicians shit themselves. Imagine what a bunch of motivated, reasonably intelligent people with good communications and technical skill could do. When the Patriot Act passed, everybody was too scared and/or lazy to do anything about it. 9/11 was still a fresh memory and nobody knew what the fuck to do. Most important, nobody went to get all up in their congress-critter's face and made him shit his pants. There's actually a pretty good tradition of making politicians shit their pants in this country and it's a tradition that people have forgotten, thinking that if they tweet enough, and put enough comments on the Internet, that's just as good as having 100 people show up at a congressman's event and getting all up in his face.
If you're an American citizen, or a resident of the US, stop whining and go make a politician shit himself. If you're from anywhere else, take a look at the sequoia in your own country's eye (UK and Europe, I'm looking at you) before you start pissing and moaning about the douglas fir in our eye and the "fall of the once-great America".
Hell, I'm still trying to figure out when the golden era of the "once great America" actually happened. When I was born, you couldn't drink out of the same water fountain as me if you were sufficiently dark-skinned and there has been some kind of ugly shit or another every decade since. Everybody's responsible for their own golden fucking age, OK? If you want some, you have got to make it happen.
You are welcome on my lawn.
'Emporer' is the american spelling.
Actually, it's not the American spelling. It's the illiterate jackass spelling.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Seems like the DHS have improved on the lower bound of Richelieu's requirement.
"If you give me six lines written
by the most honest man, I will find
something in them to hang him."
- Cardinal Richelieu
Welcome to America. We've been here and done that before. Got the t-shirt. And judging European history, it's not really unique to us.
And then people did some stuff and things got better.
Every so often, people have to do some stuff to keep away the darkness. So far, all I hear from you is darkness-cursing. Go light a fucking candle for christ's sake.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You had a good point, but you lost your credibility by claiming that Obama hates the rich. I find it unlikely that he would particularly hate himself for his own wealth (he is a millionaire).
Despite what the Republicans have been saying, the Democrats, Obama, and the OWS folks (most of them, anyway) actually have a relatively nuanced argument. The basic principle is that the wealthy have received the benefit of society in excess of the middle class or the poor, so they should pay a higher percent in taxes. It's the same philosophy behind donating to your university - it helped you get where you are, so you want to give back. It's the same principle that explains why the poor pay fewer taxes than the middle class. The government, if you believe one ought to exist, should be a joint effort. (If you don't believe that a government has a role, I have nothing to say). What "class warfare" exists is in the wealthy attempting to wiggle out of their moral, ethical, and legal obligations to pay a proportion of their income as taxes to the entity that secured their ability to make that income.
A more specific issue is the capital gains tax. "Normal" people work; they get paid, and that income is taxed. But "the 1%" don't need to work (if they don't want to) since the earnings on their investments aren't the same, and they're taxed at a much lower rate. But they haven't produced anything, they're leveraging their wealth to produce more wealth. It's not bad in and of itself, but if you subscribe to the economic principle that people act according to incentives, you can see that we, as a society are incentivizing the wealthy to avoid doing anything productive with that money, since then they might be taxed at a higher percentage than if they'd just let it sit. People also have problems with the "soft power" that the wealth brings, like accountants that can figure out how to pay even less in taxes.
The problem people have isn't with success. They work hard, they make a good living, support their family, pay their bills and taxes and things - but then they see that there's this other class, where if they could possibly get into it, they wouldn't need to worry about pesky things like work and money, because it'd all take care of itself. The objection isn't to the wealthy, or even the disparity, but to the feeling that there's an institutional clique that's keeping them out. And they hear the wealthy still complaining about taxes and trying (successfully!) to get them lowered. And they get angry.
Remember all those old movies or TV shows, where the good man who's being harassed always tries to defend himself with "I pay my taxes"? When did that stop being a matter of pride?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Look I'm not saying this as a "flag burning" hater of America, but what is this Once Great Nation you're talking about? Was there ever a single time in American history where a great atrocity wasn't occurring?
The country was created from genocide of native Americans, built upon the rock of slavery and may perhaps have started becoming "free" for a large part of the population in the 1960s. You had your own concentration camps for the Japanese and McCarthyism showed that even as a white middle class male, your freedoms were severely limited.
Don't get me wrong, many great things have been achieved in America, but this "once great nation" stuff requires an awful lot of white washing of history. This is no different from most countries that have played a big role in history, but you are probably the best in the western world at ignoring large parts of your history so you can call yourselves great.
Look, I love equality for everyone and I think prejudice is stupid. But can we please stop pretending that Muslims are a "race" or an ethnic group? They are the followers of a religion, Islam.
Some religious extremists love spreading this lie because it allows them to stop any criticism (legitimate or not) of their actions by labeling it as "discrimination" or even "racism".
Please don't fall for it: there's a very important difference between attributes like ethnicity, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, place of birth and other characteristics like religion or political ideas.
Everything in the first group is something that people get assigned at birth and cannot change, so discrimination based on them must be strongly opposed. But the stuff in the second group is something that people can change at any time if they want to, so criticizing people for their religion or political ideas should always be fair game.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()