Ugh what a constant sad reminder of America becoming cowards & letting a new police state loser-dom emerge after September 11th. A sad sorry institution which will always only ever demand more, will further perpetrate demands against the individual, and never ever face real meaningful pushback against their infinite hunger to intrude.
Shitty shitty embarrassing part of American history, like the whole sad "homeland security" complex which has done nothing, is nothing, protects nothing, but ever encroaches.
> you do have the right to opt of facial imaging at TSA checkpoints
I’m curious as to whether the author has put any thought into how practical this advice is. My plane takes off in an hour. What does this “right” entail?
1. Not going to jail for refusing to get a biometric scan, or
2. Getting into a long argument with TSA where I point to the specific subsections that say I don’t need to comply with having my picture taken again, lose the argument and don’t go to jail, or
3. Part 2 but I win the argument and don’t go to jail
My point isn’t that rights aren’t important. My point is that it’s silly to expect normal people to be able to articulate the law in the heat of the moment. These things need to be ironed out long before then, because my revealed preference of not wanting to miss my connection is frankly a lot more important than my revealed preference of not having my picture taken.
I've found it's rarely faster, but usually not too much slower. You do get to let your shit hang out for awhile on the other side though, and I never like leaving expensive laptops and cellphones and wallets just lying there indefinitely.
Also greater chance you get a false positive on the swab and that will blow your schedule as they tear apart all your luggage looking for a bomb or gun that doesn't exist. That easily chews half an hour if you're lucky.
What do you mean by "the normal line", and how is it possible for the patdown process to be faster? I have never gone through a TSA body scanner, but I go through the same security line as everyone else, and there's always a short wait for the TSA to call someone up for the "assist". I wonder what you're doing differently.
Modern body scanners show a "heat map" of areas of interest rather than denude people like the early ones did. I'm wondering if raw imagery is captured and stored.
Surely the first step of this is a basic understanding of your right, no? Or are you suggesting this isn't worth talking about unless the author lays out a plan to undo decades of state privacy encroachment and our unending march towards a surveillance state?
No, I’m saying an individual level strategy of enforcing rights is a recipe for failure, and to the extent that the line wasn’t just a pat way to wrap up it’s pretty disappointing to see the author advocating it. Maybe I’m just arguing with someone on their way out the door in which case I’ll just shut up.
It’s reminiscent of the rhetoric passing on responsibility for externalities (environmental destruction, child labor etc) to the consumer. It doesn’t work and companies know this.
All things being equal, I would choose to preserve my privacy, just like I’d choose not to have child slaves harvesting cocoa. But all things are never equal. Just because I buy a chocolate bar doesn’t mean I agree with child labor, just like agreeing to take a picture so I can board a plane doesn’t mean I support the government spying on me.
The reason people fly domestically in the US is that non plane travel is both slower and more expensive than flying.
“High speed rail” is less than half the speed of a 787 say, so a beat case scenario would make it an 11 hour trip. Except that best case scenario would require the route have no stops and be essentially flat and a straight line with essentially no stops. I would guess in practice a best case high speed rail would have that be in the order of twenty hours.
It also wouldn’t stop the TSA wanting to have pervert scans and mugshots. The moment any significant amount of people started using it, the TSA would want to “protect” us.
What trip is "it" you're referring to that would take 11-20 hours?
The busiest domestic US air route is Las Vegas - Los Angeles, which takes only a bit more than an hour. There is an idea to connect them by high-speed rail which would make the trip 3 hours: https://www.hsrail.org/brightline-west/.
That would be faster than driving, which lots of people do as well.
SFO->NYC is a 5 and a half hour flight, which is 11-20 hours on high speed rail.
That's obviously an extreme example. But yours is an extreme as well: the busiest domestic flight air might be LV<->LA, but that doesn't mean it's a significant amount of domestic traffic.
Now high speed rail between some of the major centers is obviously something that makes sense, but it also _only_ makes sense for major centers. So the myriad routes regional airlines make possible (and that I suspect make up a significant proportion of total US air traffic) are of questionable value for high speed rail, if high speed rail were even possible.
You mention people driving to Vegas. People are driving to Vegas from LA because it's cheaper than flying, and LA->LV isn't even an insane drive: google maps says it's four hours which is about as long as I spend commuting each day in the SF Bay Area, so that seems reasonable. I'm going to say my google "la to Las Vegas drive" is optimistic and say in practice it's a 5 hour drive, but that's only two hours slower than the high speed rail under that pessimistic view, which itself is 1-2 hours slower than flying. At the same time flying is cheaper than high speed rail - I looked at a bunch of prices on Eurostar from London to Paris and Brussels (because la->lv be further than Brussels but less than Paris) and the cheapest prices I found were consistently more expensive than flights. Now I can't see why we would expect high speed rail in the US would be cheaper than flying when in Europe rail is more expensive than flying, and existing non high speed rail service in the US is already more expensive than flying.
> the busiest domestic flight air might be LV<->LA, but that doesn't mean it's a significant amount of domestic traffic.
There's apparently 352 flights between the cities each week, I would say it's pretty significant.
> People are driving to Vegas from LA because it's cheaper than flying (...) I can't see why we would expect high speed rail in the US would be cheaper than flying
That's partly a political decision. Highways get lots of public funding, there's no reason rail shouldn't get funding too, if that's what's necessary to incentivize using it over flying. That's the direction Europe is going in (in addition to taxing air travel due to the negative externalities it's causing).
The reason 9/11 was possible was that pre 9/11 passengers on aircraft were expected to cooperate a wait for authorities and hostage negotiators. Post 9/11 that’s not a thing that people will allow happen, but now even if they did, breaking into cockpits is essentially not possible - as evidenced by the pilot murder/suicides that now require at least two people in the cockpit at all times.
The most common reason for guns and threats of gun usage on flights in the last decade of us flights have been us air marshals getting in arguments, or simply leaving their guns lying around aircraft.
The TSA theater is BS that has nothing to do with making people safer, so the existence of an actual threat isn’t relevant.
The TSA was born out of 9/11 - prior to 9/11 the assumption was “we’re been taken to Cuba” and so no one fought back until it was sadly too late.
In the post-9/11 world people aren’t going to just silently wait for rescue, and the core threat (the ability to enter the cockpit) has been stopped.
Hijacking a plane to go somewhere (at least in US airspace) isn’t going to work.
So any attack will be terrorism. Assuming something planned (as 9/11 was) you can “easily” kill a lot of people with a train - as numerous accidental derailments have demonstrated.
If trains could sprout wings and become guided missiles sure... but passenger HSR is fairly constrained in its destructive/terrorism potential compared to jets.
Two of the biggest reasons are: HSR would be faster than roads (HS = high speed) and it would also reduce CO2 emissions. Compared to planes, it may be faster depending on the flight pre-check time but it would still reduce CO2.
Meh, lets just go back to boarding a plane on the runway with minimal checks and upgrade pilot cabin doors. These arguments that planes (and to some extent buses) are faster because of how shitty preflight checks are on airplanes are ridiculous. Fix the pre flight checks.
From my very core I take exception to this kind of thing. And this is one reason why tools like the OMB control numbers are important.
From a purely pragmatic, devil’s advocate perspective though, I did arguably give up my “facial privacy” the moment I mailed off a passport application. Now, that’s no reason to refine the government’s corpus of facial recognition data for me. At the same time if my face is already in a federal database does it make sense to not embrace the potential for increased throughout at airport security?
Last time I checked, getting on an airplane was a private transaction between the airline and me. Either party can back out- the airline can refuse you as a customer, and I can no show. As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t so much about TSA per se, but me using the services of a for-profit company. If they want to demand that I do something, and I still want to use their services after stated , then I do the “something.” I don’t feel my rights are being trampled on here, at all. It’s really hard to go to Japan in a car.
The TSA, although a federal government institution, ultimately will follow the money. If enough people no show because of these requirements, I would bet they’d become different. I, for one, don’t mind. Call me a sheeple, call me whatever you want, but sashimi is better there than here, sooooo……
My point: you DO have rights. You also have choice. What you do with those rights and choices… Is up to you.I am in violent agreement with janalsncm
It would be great if they could figure out a way to stop air travel crime that's fast, and stop doing the parts that take forever like taking off your shoes or removing things from your backpack. Go ahead, scan my face, biometric everything, spy on every square inch of the airport and the luggage, just hurry up.
> Why is my tax money going to pointless shit like this.
Because something must be done, this is something, so we are doing it.
Also, less flippantly, because the TSA has been pushing for REAL-ID for the past 20 years, and every year, the required adoption date for it has been pushed back by a year. I believe the current 'deadline' is May 2025 (Pushed back from May 2023).
There's no national id, and not all states are in compliance with their mandates, so they are de-facto building their own.
They have only themselves to blame for many of the issues with REAL-ID. The mandatory requirements are onerous and worse, they were repeatedly changed and miscommunicated with state programs. CA ended cancelling millions of previously issued ids a few years back. Thankfully mine wasn't one of them because I've never been able to sufficiently prove where I reside with any combination of passports, voter registration cards, and online utility bills to the satisfaction of random DMV employees.
Voters got scared, politicians made feel good legislation that took away rights, and voters/politicians passed those laws to feel safer and make it seem like something was being done.
Kinetic energy is the product of mass and the square of velocity, so the energy of a plan is a few orders of magnitude greater than a bus. Train is on rails
You already give them a photo id when you go through the security line. This can already be correlated with the numerous cameras filming you go through the line. This privacy train left the station long ago. If TSA wants their own pic to feel important then whatever.
It’s literally a mug shot, a photograph (shot) of your face (mug) for official record. For the express purpose of identification by a law enforcement agency, no less.
> Travelers who volunteer to use the new system are directed to insert their drivers license, ID card, or passport into the appropriate reader, stand on a marked spot in front of the webcam, and remove their face mask, so that the image from the ID (or, more likely, from some back-end image database linked to the ID, although that hasn’t been disclosed) and the image from the webcam can be compared by some undisclosed algorithm.
Right in the most literal interpretation of the term, there is alignment. In other news, I can’t believe the yearbook committee wanted to take mugshots of my kid!
As you can see, there is what something colloquially means, and what something literally means. But I know you know that
Btw, you should skip, hobble on a crutch, take a wheelchair, or do a zombie sway in an airport rather than walk normally because your gain contains a biometric signature.
