I too am incensed — but not surprised — when the TSA manhandles four-year old girls, children with cerebral palsy, pretty women, the elderly, and wheelchair users for humiliation, abuse, and sometimes theft. Any bureaucracy that processes 630 million people per year will generate stories like this. When people propose profiling, they are really asking for a security system that can apply judgment. Unfortunately, that’s really hard. Rules are easier to explain and train. Zero tolerance is easier to justify and defend. Judgment requires better-educated, more expert, and much-higher-paid screeners. And the personal career risks to a TSA agent of being wrong when exercising judgment far outweigh any benefits from being sensible.
The proper reaction to screening horror stories isn’t to subject only “those people” to it; it’s to subject no one to it. (Can anyone even explain what hypothetical terrorist plot could successfully evade normal security, but would be discovered during secondary screening?) Invasive TSA screening is nothing more than security theater. It doesn’t make us safer, and it’s not worth the cost. Even more strongly, security isn’t our society’s only value. Do we really want the full power of government to act out our stereotypes and prejudices? Have we Americans ever done something like this and not been ashamed later? This is what we have a Constitution for: to help us live up to our values and not down to our fears.
May 14, 2012
On the TSA’s most recent security theatre follies
April 30, 2012
New frontiers in border control bureaucracy
Travelling by air to the UK is a good way to discover the joys of forming queues. The British national pastime of days gone by has been making a stirring new appearance at British airports. The agency responsible is doing everything it can … to suppress information and forbid photography of the queues of people waiting for hours to get through customs:
Heathrow Airport has been ordered by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to stop handing out to passengers leaflets acknowledging the “very long delays” at immigration, which have become a serious government concern in the runup to the Olympics.
Passengers flying into the airport at the weekend reported having to wait for up to three hours before clearing passport control. But after leaflets apologising for the problem were handed out by BAA, which owns Heathrow, the UKBA warned that they were “inappropriate” and that ministers would take “a very dim view”.
The airport operator was also told to prevent passengers taking pictures in the arrivals hall, according to the Daily Telegraph, which obtained correspondence from Marc Owen, director of UKBA operations at Heathrow. Pictures of lengthy queues have been posted on Twitter by frustrated travellers.
April 25, 2012
Why fly?
Amy Alkon on yet another blatant attempt by the TSA to lord it over passengers, especially the young, weak, and vulnerable:
Chris Morran on Consumerist excerpts a Facebook post from a Montana mom, Michelle Brademeyer, who was flying home from Kansas with her two young children and their grandmother. Grandma apparently triggered some alarm at the checkpoint, and was forced to have a seat and wait to be groped by an agent. That’s when the 4-year-old ran over to give Granny a hug. Sweet — until the TSA went all police state on them. The mother writes:
[. . .]
First, a TSO began yelling at my child, and demanded she too must sit down and await a full body pat-down. I was prevented from coming any closer, explaining the situation to her, or consoling her in any way. My daughter, who was dressed in tight leggings, a short sleeve shirt and mary jane shoes, had no pockets, no jacket and nothing in her hands. The TSO refused to let my daughter pass through the scanners once more, to see if she too would set off the alarm. It was implied, several times, that my Mother, in their brief two-second embrace, had passed a handgun to my daughter.
My child, who was obviously terrified, had no idea what was going on, and the TSOs involved still made no attempt to explain it to her. When they spoke to her, it was devoid of any sort of compassion, kindness or respect. They told her she had to come to them, alone, and spread her arms and legs. She screamed, “No! I don’t want to!” then did what any frightened young child might, she ran the opposite direction.
That is when a TSO told me they would shut down the entire airport, cancel all flights, if my daughter was not restrained. It was then they declared my daughter a “high-security-threat”.
[. . .]
The TSO loomed over my daughter, with an angry grimace on her face, and ordered her to stop crying. When my scared child could not do so, two TSOs called for backup saying “The suspect is not cooperating.” The suspect, of course, being a frightened child. They treated my daughter no better than if she had been a terrorist…
A third TSO arrived to the scene, and showed no more respect than the first two had given. All three were barking orders at my daughter, telling her to stand still and cease crying. When she did not stop crying on command, they demanded we leave the airport. They claimed they could not safely check my daughter for dangerous items if she was in tears. I will admit, I lost my temper.
Finally, a manager intervened. He determined that my child could, in fact, be cleared through security while crying. I was permitted to hold her while the TSO checked her body. When they found nothing hidden on my daughter, they were forced to let us go, but not until after they had examined my ID and boarding passes for a lengthy amount of time. When we arrived at our gate, I noticed that the TSOs had followed us through the airport. I was told something was wrong with my boarding pass and I would have to show it to them again. Upon seeing the TSO, my daughter was thrown into hysterics. Eventually, we were able to board our flight.
Terrorize ‘em young and they stay terrorized, pliable, and afraid to confront authority. It won’t be long before the TSA is Tasing ‘em before they can run away (if they don’t already have that power).
April 5, 2012
Some practical travel tips from LegalNomad
She’s been travelling the world for the last four years, so she has some potentially very useful tips for you (not so much for you expense-account business travellers, but for backpackers and hikers):
2. Be a travel parasite.
No, this does not mean mooching off friends or family. What it means is learning how to use guidebooks to your advantage. While they are useful to have for the history of a place or the basics in itinerary planning, I rarely look to guidebooks for the name of a hostel or restaurant. Instead, I look at their recommendations as things to piggyback on. Lonely Planet recommends a place as “Our Pick”? Great, I go there, and walk two doors down to stay nearby. Rough Guides says “this is the best restaurant in town”? Perfect! Almost every one of those recommendations will spawn another restaurant within walking distance. Industrious entrepreneurs quickly learn that when these books recommend a place, they quickly get overcrowded and prices go up. The solution: they open a place right next door or nearby to handle the spillover. Without fail, those are the places that are cheaper, more delicious and not jaded. Being a parasite isn’t always a bad thing. (Having parasites? Not so much.)
[. . .]
6. Your taxi driver knows where to eat breakfast more than you do.
Swap this out for tuk-tuk driver, songthaew driver or rickshaw driver, where appropriate. When I go to a new place, I find the eldest cab driver possible and ask him where he ate breakfast. Once he gets over his shock that this is what I want to know, he tends to break into a huge grin and start talking about food. Eventually, he takes me there. And the food is almost always delicious, fresh and somewhere I’d have never found without his help. Taxi drivers: more than just getting from A to B.
[. . .]
15. Packing does not get easier.
I wrote a piece on long term travel and the things it doesn’t fix. In it, I talked about how, 2.5 years into my travels, I still hated packing. It’s now 4 years into my travels. Guess what? I still hate packing.
H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.
April 1, 2012
February 7, 2012
Sailing around the world solo was less trouble for this teen than dealing with the “child welfare” authorities
Gabrielle Shiner on the remarkable achievement of Laura Dekker both in circumnavigating the globe and in getting around the “authorities” which were determined to stop her for her own protection:
Last month, Dutch teenager Laura Dekker became the youngest sailor ever to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world. This was a phenomenal achievement, requiring incredible personal courage and endurance. But marring her celebrations was the fact that the Guinness Book of Records failed to recognise her achievement on the grounds that it was deemed ‘irresponsible’. Furthermore, Dekker has claimed she may never return to her home country due to the treatment of her, and her parents, by meddling Dutch authorities.
[. . .]
The Dutch authorities’ reaction to Laura Dekker shows that they have become a Frankenstein of the mentality that inspired the introduction of menacing tobacco labels and countless similar policies. The doctrine that individuals need to be saved from themselves has unleashed a swarm of crusading bureaucrats who relentlessly raid our private lives. Joost Lanshage of the Netherlands Bureau of Youth Care exemplified this pervasive creed as he protested, ‘If Laura had drowned we would be accused of not doing enough to protect her.’ Lanshage assumes his responsibility over both Laura and her parents with uncanny ease. More alarming, however, is Lanshage’s testimony that this is what society has come to expect from public authorities.
Forfeiting judgment to a faceless state erodes the importance of personal interactions as it undermines our dependence on family, friends, and community. The state’s hijacking of the responsibility for our lives also robs us of the ability to exercise and develop our personal judgment. This crucial aspect of our development is being debilitated by the craze to squeeze individuals into the shrinking mould of acceptable citizenship. Denying us the right to take risks, enjoy successes and suffer through mistakes restricts our ability to act according to our individual values and develop purposefully. We’re sacrificing our individual autonomy for the comfort of apathetic mediocrity.
As this process continues, unique approaches to life and education increasingly become unacceptable. After Dekker mentioned on her blog that she had to temporarily put schoolwork aside in the face of dangerous storms at sea, Dutch authorities mounted their high horses once again and summoned Laura’s father to court. While the 16-year-old conquered innumerable challenges that the vast majority of adults would not be capable of facing alone, authorities back in the Netherlands fretted at the idea that she would fall behind with her school work. As Dekker rightfully reflected on her blog towards the end of her journey, ‘Now, after sailing around the world, with… the full responsibility of keeping myself and [her boat] Guppy safe, I feel that the nightmares the Dutch government organisations put me through were totally unfair.’
February 4, 2012
When Canada’s Department of Transport became transphobic
Tabatha Southey has an interesting article in the Globe & Mail. I was unaware that the Canadian Forces now support transitioning transgendered soldiers (and have done for more than a decade), but that another branch of the government headed in quite the opposite direction last year:
While I think we should take the transgender community’s word for it — that transitioning works to transform often excruciatingly unhappy gender-dysphoric people into contented people — there are lots of studies that back them up as well.
It’s hardly something that anyone would do for kicks. Transitioning isn’t for sissies, which is why it’s heart-warming that our military made a practical and humane decision to accommodate transgender soldiers. And it’s also why it’s unfortunate that since July, 2011, a Department of Transport rule has been on the books that could prevent those same transitioning soldiers from flying home for Christmas.
The existence of this rule was brought to light this week by blogger Jennifer McCreath. It states that if “a passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents,” that person is not allowed to fly.
I’m prepared to believe those who say transgender and inter-sex people aren’t the demographic the rule aims to catch, but that leaves me wondering who it is the authorities are trying to nab.
January 31, 2012
Homeland Security Theatre: The case of the “Destroy America” Brit twits
Jim Harper sifts through the evidence in the “Destroy America” Twitter case:
The Department of Homeland Security has been vague as yet about what actually happened. It may have been some kind of “social media analysis” like this that turned up “suspicious” Tweets leading to the exclusion, though the betting is running toward a suspicious-activity tipline. (What “turned up” the Tweets doesn’t affect my analysis here.) The boastful young Britons Tweeted about going to “destroy America” on the trip — destroy alcoholic beverages in America was almost certainly the import of that line — and dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe.
Profoundly stilted literalism took this to be threatening language. And a failure of even brief investigation prevented DHS officials from discovering the absurdity of that literalism. It would be impossible to “dig up” Marilyn Monroe’s body, which is in a crypt at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.
[. . .]
Other facts could combine with Twitter commentary to create a suspicious circumstance on extremely rare occasions, but for proper suspicion to arise, the Tweet or Tweets and all other facts must be consistent with criminal planning and inconsistent with lawful behavior. No information so far available suggests that the DHS did anything other than take Tweets literally in the face of plausible explanations by their authors that they were using hyperbole and irony. This is simple investigative incompetence.
If indeed it is a “social media analysis” program that produced this incident, the U.S. government is paying money to cause U.S. government officials to waste their time on making the United States an unattractive place to visit. That’s a cost-trifecta in the face of essentially zero prospect for any security benefit.
January 22, 2012
Transitioning from “shithole specialist” to ordinary journalist
Everyone changes to some degree as they get older. Some get wiser, some just get older. Others, like P.J. O’Rourke, have to cope with wrenching career changes:
After the Iraq War I gave up on being what’s known in the trade as a “shithole specialist.” I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for 21 years, in 40-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq.
Michael Kelly, my boss at The Atlantic, and I had gone to cover the war, he as an “imbed” with the Third Infantry Division, I as a “unilateral.” We thought, once ground operations began, I’d have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, “I’m going to be stuck with the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you’re driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abeyya contests.” Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport.
[. . .]
Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun. I don’t seem to own any fun outfits. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. “Halt!” say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages.
I say, “Observe that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.”
“We are courteously allowing you to proceed now,” they reply.
This doesn’t work worth a damn with the TSA.
Then there’s the problem of writing about travel fun, or fun of any kind. Nothing has greater potential to annoy a reader than a writer recounting what fun he’s had. Personally — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this — I have little tolerance for fun when other people are having it. It’s worse than pornography and almost as bad as watching the Food Channel. Yet in this manuscript I see that, as a writer, I’m annoying my reader self from the first chapter until the last sentence. I hope at least I’m being crabby about it. Writers of travelogues are most entertaining when — to the infinite amusement of readers — they have bad things happen to them. I’m afraid the best I can do here is have a bad attitude.
January 14, 2012
How much is your time worth?
In an article about the recently approved high speed train link between London and Birmingham, Tim Harford points out a few oddities in the calculations that supposedly show how beneficial the new railway connection will be:
But it’s not just about forecasts — it’s about the value of time saved because of a faster journey, right?
That’s true. The high-speed link would save about 40 minutes on a journey from London to Birmingham. How much that is worth is an interesting question.
If you have a morning meeting it might mean an extra 40 minutes in bed.
It might indeed, which is priceless. HS2 Ltd told me that they use numbers from the Department for Transport. The DfT apparently values leisure time at about £6 an hour — this, intriguingly, implies that the UK government’s official position is that anyone under the age of 21 is wasting their time earning the young person’s minimum wage and would be wise to chillax in front of the Nintendo.
What about business travel?
Well, business travel is valued at £50 an hour. Unless the business travel in question is commuting, in which case it’s £7 an hour.
What?
Doesn’t make a bit of sense to me, either. Perhaps the idea is that commuting is eating into your leisure time, which is almost valueless apparently, whereas business travel is eating into your employer’s time, which is precious indeed. Complain to the DfT if you don’t like it.
January 3, 2012
Security Theatre: “So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost”
Charles C. Mann visits the airport with security guru Bruce Schneier:
Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.
To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.
[. . .]
From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9/11 flights didn’t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been “a week in Havana.” When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. “No big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,” Schneier said. Events have borne him out. The instigators of the two most serious post-9/11 incidents involving airplanes — the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009, both of whom managed to get onto an airplane with explosives — were subdued by angry passengers.
[. . .]
Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets — shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist’s goal isn’t to attack an airplane specifically; it’s to sow terror generally. “You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it,” Schneier says. “Congratulations!”
December 24, 2011
December 20, 2011
December 4, 2011
The Economist looks at Seasteading
And it manages to avoid the mocking tone that’s common to most articles on this topic:
THE Pilgrims who set out from England on the Mayflower to escape an intolerant, over-mighty government and build a new society were lucky to find plenty of land in the New World on which to build it. Some modern libertarians, such as Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, dream of setting sail once more to found colonies of like-minded souls. By now, however, all the land on Earth has been claimed by the governments they seek to escape. So, they conclude, they must build new cities on the high seas, known as seasteads.
It is not a completely crazy idea: large maritime structures that resemble seasteads already exist, after all. Giant cruise liners host thousands of guests on lengthy voyages in luxurious surroundings. Offshore oil platforms provide floating accommodation for hundreds of workers amid harsh weather and high waves. Then there is the Principality of Sealand, a concrete sea fort constructed off Britain’s coast during the second world war. It is now occupied by a family who have fought various lawsuits to try to get it recognised as a sovereign state.
Each of these examples, however, falls some way short of the permanent, self-governing and radically innovative ocean-based colonies imagined by the seasteaders. To realise their dream they must overcome some tricky technical, legal and cultural problems. They must work out how to build seasteads in the first place; find a way to escape the legal shackles of sovereign states; and give people sufficient reason to move in. With financing from Mr Thiel and others, a think-tank called the Seasteading Institute (TSI) has been sponsoring studies on possible plans for ocean-based structures and on the legal and financial questions they raise. And although true seasteads may still be a distant dream, the seasteading movement is producing some novel ideas for ocean-based businesses that could act as stepping stones towards their ultimate goal.
September 25, 2011
The new TV show will have to be highly imaginative to match the real Pan Am
Scott Van Wynsberghe looks at the fascinating history of the real-world Pan American:
To say the least, it was a peculiar charter flight. At some point in the first half of the 1960s, Pan American World Airways put one of its planes at the disposal of Indonesian president Sukarno. However, Pan Am was also working with the CIA, and the plane was wired for surveillance. As well, Pan Am vice-president Samuel Pryor — who was the airline’s liaison with the CIA — staffed the flight with “stewardesses” who were actually German hookers. Pryor would later reveal all this to co-authors Marilyn Bender and Selig Altschul for their 1982 book on Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe, The Chosen Instrument. Referring to Sukarno, a known womanizer, Pryor commented, “I was afraid to expose our Pan Am girls to him. Our girls were nice girls.”
The new ABC television series Pan Am, which premiered on Sept. 25, will have to go a ways to beat that image of intrigue and sexism. Still, the creators of the series deserve credit just for reviving interest in a company notorious for combining flying and spying.
[. . .]
Amid the profits in Latin America, however, were the roots of shadowy affairs to come. As early as 1930, Pan Am quietly acquired SCADTA, a Colombian-based German aviation firm, but the existing management was allowed to remain. That caused trouble later in the 1930s, as war threatened in Europe and Washington fretted over the proximity of so many German fliers to the Panama Canal. In early 1939, the U.S. military — well aware of the true ownership of SCADTA — simply ordered Trippe to purge the Germans from the company. When American replacement crews arrived, they discovered that someone had been modifying SCADTA planes to permit the mounting of bombs and machine guns.
Over a year after the SCADTA affair, in mid-1940, U.S. authorities were so worried over a possible spread of the Second World War to the Western Hemisphere that they decided to create a chain of installations across the Caribbean and the coast of Brazil. The problem was that all this would require complex military treaties, for which there was no time. Airfields and radio stations could, however, be built by a private company pretending that all the activity was just routine business. If war did reach the hemisphere, panicky local governments could then permit the U.S. military to take over the sites. Pan Am was chosen for the job, and a secret deal was finalized in November. According to historian Stanley Hilton, German military intelligence attempted to monitor the ensuing construction.
