Slashdot Mirror
Fighting TSA Harassment of Disabled Travelers
An anonymous reader writes "A man with a neurological disorder is currently pushing the TSA to release a full list of its policies and procedures after a series of incidents in which he was harassed while trying to fly. His condition requires medical liquids and causes episodic muteness, and the TSA makes his encounters very difficult. From January: 'Boston Logan TSA conducted an illegal search of my xray-cleared documents (probably motivated either by my opting out or by my use of sign language to communicate). They refused to give me access to the pen and paper that I needed to communicate. Eventually they gave it to me, but then they took it away in direct retaliation for my using it to quote US v Davis and protest their illegal search (thereby literally depriving me of speech). They illegally detained me for about an hour on spurious, law enforcement motivated grounds (illegal under Davis, Aukai, Fofana, Bierfeldt, etc). ... TSA has refused to comply with the ADA grievance process; they are over a month beyond the statutory mandate for issuing a written determination.'"
I haven't traveled to the USA.
The exchange rate makes it a reasonable destination, but I don't want to be treated like dirt.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Security guards that the government for some reason decided were federal agents. If this were any kind of public servant (apart from police of any kind), you could expect adherence to some kind of professional standard, but you're looking at the mall cops of the state security apparatus. A joke from top to bottom.
Yeah, where does he get off having a neurological condition rendering him unable to speak?
That bastard.
Good security is not about making clever rules. It's about dealing properly with the exceptions of those rules. Banishing liquids from airplanes is nothing more than a rule. Its level of security depends on how you deal with the situations in which you must, or at least should, allow a bottle of liquid on an airplane. If you don't have rules for that, if your personel is not trained and aware for those situations, your whole security setup is vulnerable for social engineering and it becomes nothing more than security theater.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Some geeks have interests reaching beyond IT. This is expression of both i.e. their geekismo and their broad interests. I do not see a problem here albeit I admit the amount of IT or broader technology related articles is rather low or late. Maybe this is sign of times. The basic technology is offshored to Zamunda and the rest is too complex to be understood by an average geek and/or discussed in a popular thread. Quite frankly the others social sites for nerds are either populated by aggressive indihviduals with agendas or are bloody boring. For the geek from old good times when we were writting applications in the house and could understood how they worked within limited time that is too bad. Considering all this I think /. is still not that bad.
This is what I don't get about people these days.
None of you are willing to sacrifice ANYTHING or inflict ANY kind of inconvenience upon yourself to deal with the issues that need to be dealt with. You just sit there and whine and complain about everything, you make up excuses from thin air and say you've got no choice. Well, news flash, you do.
You want to get rid of the TSA?
Don't fly.
It's that simple. No, don't tell me you have to. You don't. You get enough people together and you all refuse to fly until the TSA is dismantled, and you know what'll happen? The airlines will get things changed in a hurry and the TSA will evaporate in a puff of invalid logic. It's that simple!
"Oh but it isn't and I have no choice and I need to fly and-"...
Yeah, that right there, that's the reason why the TSA still exists. You're unwilling to inconvenience yourself. None of you are. So the TSA will continue to inconvenience you instead, because they've got you by the balls (sometimes literally) and they know it. They'll continue to squeeze and squeeze, they'll expand out into the rest of the world like a cancerous tumour and then, when you find yourself in a police state and the TSA controls all major forms of travel- you'll wonder why you didn't do something sooner.
The fact that you think you have no choice is precisely what they want you to think, because that is what gives them control over you.
Cue the endless stream of "I have to fly, you're wrong, if I wish really hard I'm sure the TSA will go away all the same" replies.
Pournell's law of bureaucracy:
Once an organization reaches a certain size, it's primary focus changes from servicing customers or citizens to perpetuating the bureaucracy.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
He ought to sue those persons responsible, as individuals. Going all the way to the top. IMNHO, there is more than cause for him to do so. And he certainly has standing...
A few multi-million-dollar judgements against individual TSA agents and managers would do a lot pour encourager les autres.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
First of all flying is not a right, if you don't want to deal the the TSA, don't fly.
Secondly this guy has a pretty rare medical condition that is sometimes assisted by having juice. But then he
doesn't want to provide any documentation about his condition to support his claim that he needs his juice citing
(among other things) HIPAA, which doesn't apply to the airport or TSA since they are not medical providers.
He doesn't want to purchase his juice from the concessions because they don't have his 'favorite' brands of juice
and also is carrying 3 liters of it.
So he expects anyone to be able to get by with liquids just by saying "I need my juice, for medical reasons, I'm not
going to tell you more."
While I think the no liquid rule is silly, it is the rule. That would defeat the purpose of it.
The first and last time I encountered the TSA (Toadlike Stupid Assholes) was a bad experience which I won't detail, so I no longer fly commercial. I drive wherever I go which could be a 3,200 mile round-trip to visit relatives. It takes about 2.5 days both ways out of my vacation time but I do get to see a lot of pretty country on the trip. I no longer need to put up with Toadlike Stupid Assholes wanting to question me and look in my luggage and feel my junk. I also miss out on the travel time to-from airports (at LAX it's very stressful) and I don't have to eat airport/jet plane food or listen to kids crying etc... etc...
The TSA is just one of the many violations of my god-given rights some of which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights. What really saddens me however is the sheep-like response of the majority of the public in putting up with these violations. Every time some government jack-booted thug violates a citizens rights the citizen should protest loudly to whoever will listen. But instead most of the sheeple will either knuckle under and go along to get along and be thankful he wasn't beaten or shot to death. When it happens to somebody else the sheeple sometimes laugh and make fun of the poor soul who is now in the hospital or morgue because he dared to open his mouth and protest or resisted (in the mind of the thug anyway) even slightly.
Yes. In many ways we live in a totalitarian police state. The fact that sheeple deny it is because they were mostly educated in a government school and raised by their parent sheeples. Few are the scholars who know what life would be like if the Bill of Rights were strictly enforced by placing every government thug on trial for rights violations and the agency he works for to be civilly liable for monetary damages.
http://www.ncc-1776.org/
Publicizing these type of stories is good, but how can we best see their powers reigned in and actually enforce respecting our rights?
One thing to consider: just in the past few days, the TSA has finally complied with a court ruling from July 2011 that said they had illegally implemented new scanning policies without requesting public comment. EPIC has finally managed to get the TSA to set up the comment system.
Some people might consider submitting comments. The TSA probably won't listen directly. But they will become part of public record, and if a court case ever does manage to really challenge some of the TSA policies, it will be harder for courts to say, "Well, nobody seems bothered very much by all the enhanced scanning and patdowns."
By the way, from the summary:
they are over a month beyond the statutory mandate for issuing a written determination
That's NOTHING. After illegally failing to take public comments before implementing a massive change to the accepted norms for searches, federal courts directly ordered the TSA to comply with taking comments. You can still read all the news stories from July 2011, when people thought we finally had some sort of victory for privacy -- maybe the TSA would finally listen. But they did NOTHING. Presumably, they were just waiting, hoping that Americans would get used to the new searches, and they wouldn't have to deal with the problem. After a full year had passed, EPIC finally got a hearing to consider a writ of mandamus to force the order to be adhered to. (Seriously -- a federal agency refusing to implement a simple court order?? After a year of dragging their feet, the courts, if they were at all honest, should have implemented an emergency stay right then and there and shut down the scanners until the TSA complied... at a minimum. If your average citizen did something like this, they'd be tossed in jail for contempt of court.)
Months more passed, and finally the writ of mandamus was denied, because the TSA said it would finally get around to dealing with this issue by Feb.-Mar. 2013. And it seems they waited until the last few days possible to finally implement the comment system.
If you have something serious to say about this, here's your chance. It may or may not make a difference, but I think it's certainly more likely to be effective than complaining on Slashdot every week or two when a new TSA story comes along.
Who the hell are any of you that you get to decide how we refer to ourselves. We are not USians where ever you got you got that please stop, Ask anyone in the world who the Americans are, and I promise you more then 90% will tell you what we already know. That the term Americans refers to the citizens of the United States of America. Try it for your self, go down to Venezuela and call them American. I bet they won't thank you.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.