Every time people complain about the TSA and are asked how they should do security people say they should evaluate the person - look for signs of nervousness and things like that.
And now they do and you complain anyway. So - what's your preferred method of screening people?
The US version of behavior detection isn't even in the same league. The Israelis have guys on the other side of cameras who monitor people from the point before they get out of their cars. Their system is so comprehensive that it would be cost-infeasible to implement here. It also sucks to end up on the wrong end of, over the years there have been a few reports by people who have had that unpleasant experience too.
The TSA version is a guy walking around the terminal engaging people in conversation and looking for things like "micro-expressions." (which are themselves a farce)
Bored minimum wage guy waving people through a metal detector and running bags through an x-ray machine without looking at the results? That worked fine for a few decades and did no worse than the gigantic TSA rigmarole.
> Every time people complain about the TSA and are asked how they should do security people say they should evaluate the person - look for signs of nervousness and things like that.
Putting aside the obvious falsehood ("every time") there's obviously a little critical analysis required to differentiate between people who are nervous because they don't like getting airplanes, people who are nervous because they're about to miss their flight, people who are just generally anxious, and people who are nervous because they're about to blow up an airplane.
As I put in another comment... I can believe that the BDO thought "That guy over there is behaving brown", which made him check him.
That's the problem with USA security, against say the one in Europe or the middle east (I think Israel has very good trained anti-terrorist immigration officers): In these other countries, there are a lot of darkish-skin people, so they really have to learn how to profile someone who is up to something. In the USA? I guess the majority of time they just use the skin color... and that's why they get a lot of false positive, and /very/ annoyed people.
This writeup is not only just nit-picking his story - it's using the TSA as witness against itself.
I am most certainly not going to the take TSA's word for what happened. That would be like taking the NSA's word to congress for example. What do you think happens by lesser agencies on non-sworn testimony when they see what their big-brother can get away with?
And the "behavior detection" has already been outed multiple times as a huge pile of poo. It's identical to the signals cops can give their dogs for false positives to search someone anyway just because they want to.
By the way, if he was so dangerous and already being watched YOU LET HIM GET INTO A CROWDED TERMINAL WITH LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE WITH HIS LUGGAGE AND BACKPACK.
Morons. So someone is only dangerous if they get on the plane, not in the crowed terminal eh?
I feel so safe now at your crowded checkpoints.
Prove to me they didn't search his home without serving him a warrant and then we'll talk about the accuracy of this story.
>Prove to me they didn't search his home without serving him a warrant and then we'll talk about the accuracy of this story.
Can't really prove a negative - what would the evidence look like? The reasonable question to ask is "prove to me they did search his home without serving him a warrant."
Did you read the original article? If so re-read the very end of it to acquaint yourself with the evidence that his apartment was searched without a warrant.
Edit: P.S. note that I said evidence not proof.
P.P.S. I find it somewhat weird how people are so eager to jump to the defense of law enforcement with shouts of "that evidence proves nothing!" while at the same time supporting the idea that a now known to be false positive explosives test is more than sufficient to justify someone's ill-treatment for hours at the hands of law enforcement.
I'm not saying that Mukerjee's story of missing and tampered items in his apartment is sufficient to convict any law enforcement agent of wrong doing but maybe it's enough to justify an investigation (which could easily be rolled into the investigation into LEO behavior around the entire incident).
It does not seem unreasonable to me to believe that someone (other than law enforcement) broke into his apartment and, finding it nearly empty, rifled through his suitcase, and took the picture simply out of anger.
None of us on here know exactly what happened but the above seems (to me) just as likely as law enforcement breaking into his apartment. I would think they would also visit the apartment/residence he was vacating.
It's certainly far from proof, but it is very disconcerting.
Let's go through the lines of evidence here.
First off, there were apparently no visible signs that anyone had broken into his apartment. If the FBI or the police had picked the lock or if they had gotten the super to let them in and told him or her to remain silent about it then that would explain such an absence. A thief could also pick the lock but why would they bother if it is so easy to simply break through the door?
Second, this seems like exceptionally odd timing for a random act of thievery.
Third, why would anyone except law enforcement bother to put everything back almost exactly where it was before?
The most logical conclusion that I can come to is that a law enforcement agent searched Mukerjee's apartment and probably took the photo so that it could be scanned or for some other reason but accidentally forgot to put it back. It's certainly not a very high degree of proof that such a thing happened but I think it's the most likely possibility, though it's mostly just a side-show compared to the other more troubling issues in this case.
> The most logical conclusion that I can come to is that a law enforcement agent searched Mukerjee's apartment and probably took the photo so that it could be scanned or for some other reason but accidentally forgot to put it back.
Have you ever considered that his landlord could have come into the apartment to make sure it had been cleaned up properly by the outgoing tenants (remember, he had moved in the night before his trip). If the landlord had found a poster that had fallen off the wall, he may have thought it was trash left by the other tenants and thrown it away. His landlord would not have had to break in.
I don't think it's impossible that law enforcement searched his apartment; but if they had, wouldn't his bags have been unpacked, rather than just one of them a little out of place?
But really, why doesn't he just ask his landlord or super? If the police came, they probably would have asked the landlord to let them in. I mentioned the landlord idea on the previous thread, but he never responded.
> Have you ever considered that his landlord could have come into the apartment to make sure it had been cleaned up properly by the outgoing tenants
If that's legal in the US, or something one might expect, that's almost more shocking to me than the original story. If any of my past landlords had entered my flat without permission, I would have called the police on them, with good cause.
> In general in New York City, a landlord may only enter a tenant’s apartment for three reasons: emergency repairs, non-emergency repairs or improvements, and apartment inspections. Emergency repair requires no advance notice to the tenant. However, access for non-emergency repairs and improvements requires a minimum of one week’s advance written notice, and access for inspection requires a minimum of 24 hours advance written notice.
If he was on vacation, then 24 hours written notice for inspection could consist of putting the notice on or under his door, waiting 24 hours, then going in for the inspection and removing the notice.
I've had my landlady enter my apartment without permission or notice before, and it was a little bit creepy, but I let it slide since she was such a nice lady. She wasn't some owner of a big apartment complex or anything, just had a second house down the street that she rented out, I think mostly so she could store all of the extra furniture she picked up at flea markets and couldn't fit into her own house. In fact, the reason she had entered our house was to stash a few lamps that she did't want her sister to sell at a yard sale, so we came back one day and there were extra lamps sitting around.
Off topic, but here in Australia if the landlord entered a the apartment without sufficient notice or permission from the tenant, then he DID break in (well, not 'break' in, but certainly entered illegally)
Applying Ockham's Razor here, surely the most probable option is that nothing actually happened, and for whatever reason he's simply misremembering it? Maybe he was going to put the poster up but didn't, maybe it fell off but he forgot about it, etc.
And if this seems implausible, consider -- how many times have you found yourself saying things like "I could have sworn I left the keys right there", and then finding them somewhere else? Is it more likely that you misremembered, or that they were moved by ninja-like FBI agents?
Is HN really turning to conspiracy theories now just to justify any "TSA bad" stories that make the frontage? Lets stick with actual evidence, which for the break in there doesn't seem to be any actual reports or proof of this happening.
I read the original article. I don't see any particularly good evidence his apartment was searched without a warrant. He says a picture on his wall was missing, and some luggage was moved. Now, his apartment being searched is one possible excuse; but the landlord of the apartment he just moved into, or some maintenance staff, coming in to fix something or check on something, and finding a poster that had fallen off the wall and thrown it out in the assumption that it was the previous tenant's, is a lot more likely to me than the government searching his house without a warrant.
It sounds like the TSA's actions were excessive and heavy handed. It sounds like perhaps he got a little argumentative, due to being hungry (as he said, he hadn't eaten; I know I get cranky when I go too long without food), thirsty, and upset about missing his trip.
The TSA, and whatever other officers interviewed him, should probably be trained better in dealing with this kind of situation. In particular, using behavioral excuses to detain someone who's been singled out for extra screening is silly. Many people get upset about that kind of thing. And given that none of these TSA agents have ever actually interacted with a terrorist, and most likely never been trained with anyone who has, it's hard to believe that their training is any good at actually distinguishing a terrorist from someone who's just mad that they haven't had food or water in many hours. Heck, if you were a terrorist, you would prefer to blend in and act calm to singling yourself out for more screening by acting angry.
I feel like his article was a bit of an overreaction, but likewise the TSAs screening policies are much bigger, costlier, more painful overreaction.
> Prove to me they didn't search his home without serving him a warrant and then we'll talk about the accuracy of this story.
How do you prove a negative. The key for me is that he got the NYPD & Port Authority mixed up. Innocent on its own, except the bit where the Port Authority has no jurisdiction outside airports.
This is one of the major problems with unregulated and unsupervised NSA activities (and other agencies). We've seen them blatantly lie about their actions, to the public and to congress. They've lied under oath without any repercussions.
I don't know if I can believe any official reports. They say the FBI wasn't involved, and I believe them but "they" have proved unreliable in the past. This is the fertile soil for conspiracy theories and it's the governments own fault.
We're left with Occam's razor. Mr. Mukerjee was probably feeling a little hot-headed that day and maybe he mouthed off to the first TSA guard who placed him on some list. He probably doesn't like or trust the TSA since he opted out of their preferred method of scanning. It's pretty believable that the agents don't know much about hinduism since they are not targeting potential hindu terrorist, but extremist muslim terrorist (if you consider terrorists true muslims which I don't). It seems likely that he set off multiple security alarms. Police TSA aren't going to know about venture capital or care about your job. They are just asking to see if you slip up or act nervous. Israeli security simply asks "how are you doing today" not b/c they care but b/c a persons reaction tells them a lot and they will drill down if you get agitated by their questions.
In the end, Mr. Mukerjee did nothing wrong. He got agitated by something that would anger all but the most patient individuals. That's actually the scary part. Al-Qaeda and other terror groups have shown again and again that they are VERY patient and persistent. One of their agents would probably have gone through the main scanner and if detected remain very affable and friendly with the TSA.
This is one of the major problems with unregulated and unsupervised NSA activities (and other agencies). We've seen them blatantly lie about their actions, to the public and to congress.
I'd like to point out that the TSA's shining example of the effectiveness of their behavior-detection officers has itself turned out to be a sham.
It's expected. Even in the most optimistic of circumstances, you have to believe that innocent people will get caught in an anti-terrorism net. Same as most things- innocent people get arrested far away from airports, too.
The question (and failure) is what happens after that. But false positives in themselves isn't surprising.
> Completely skimming it, the test sites had false positive rates of 0.6 - 1.8%.
In other words, the test is almost completely useless. Given how low the base rate of terrorists sneaking through bombs is, a positive test result on one of these machines is >99.9% likely to be a false positive.
Let's do the math. We'll assume there are never any false negatives and just look at the positive results. Let's simplify "0.6-1.8%" and just call that "1%". Out of 100,000 bags, let's assume that ONE contains a bomb being snuck through by a terrorist. 1/100,000 is our postulated base rate of terrorism. 1/100 is our false positive rate on the test.
So let's put 100,000 bags through the machine. There will be 1,000 false positives and one true positive. which means that if some bag "tests positive for explosives" the odds are a-thousand-to-one against that being a valid result.
"But," I hear you cry, "we RUN IT THROUGH AGAIN when we get a positive result!"
Sure, that would work GREAT if false positive results were COMPLETELY RANDOM. But they're not. More likely than not, the false positive is being triggered by something that is or was actually in the bag. So when you run it again, there's a good chance that it'll trigger again. The "false" part of "false positive" is that the thing in the bag that it's triggering on...isn't an explosive. It's just some other chemical.
It's not just the high false positive rate, it's the combination of a high false positive rate with a really low base rate. (If there were a lot more terrorists, the test might be worth doing!)
The combination of those two facts means that getting a hit on explosives gives you almost no increase in information. Any look at plausible numbers makes the test nearly useless at finding explosives, though it's still at least theoretically possible the test could serve as a sort of deterrent, albeit primarily a deterrent against movie-plot threats.
My guess is that the true purpose of this test is to make the people who sell explosives-testing equipment comfortably well off. Any other purpose would be served roughly as well with a box that triggered based on random number selection.
I am extremely, bitterly familiar with the base rate fallacy (I was an intrusion detection researcher, and spend 4+ years working on statistical anomaly detection the Internet backbone).
The fallacy doesn't make a value judgement. It points out something counterintuitive about the accuracy of a filter or test. That thing is important, but not dispositive. If the base rate is low and the false positive rate is percentagewise high but the overall number of hits is manageable, low-power statistical tests can have utility as pre-filters.
I have the same thought every time I go through airport security ("whoever designed this probably doesn't know about the base rate fallacy"), but if the system is only ejecting 1-2 candidates per station per hour for expensive "offline" screening, it's not untenable.
It's not untenable in the sense that it's possible to get that amount of work done, but that doesn't make it worth doing. TSA is fundamentally trying to solve an unsolvable problem. No matter how many resources they throw at it, there will always be ways to evade their checks. A smart terrorist will find a way to get through undetected, find a way to avoid the check entirely (say, by bribing a TSA employee or airport employee), or will just bomb the next available target of opportunity - perhaps the security line itself. There is simply no plausible scenario in which the TSA's checks actually prevent terrorism.
(Yes, one could postulate really stupid terrorists who somehow don't realize they'll get caught going through security, but terrorists who are that stupid are likely to have their plans fail without the TSA's help. See also: the shoe bomber.)
The double-negative is bad style, but the fact is actually reassuring. It means that the typical TSA agent sees a ton of positive results each week and has never seen a valid result. In other words, the agent is not fussed at all by the positive test outcome; they just have to double check to clear you.
"Mr. Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO) while in line for what appeared to be unusual behaviours. [...] it is impossible to assess what caught the Officer’s attention, but the TSA source indicates Mr. Mukerjee was already on someone’s radar before he chose to opt-out."
What 'unusual behaviors' led to him getting flagged? While maybe Mr. Mukerjee had suspicious behavior I'm skeptical of saying that his looks did not contribute to the heightened harsh treatment. Would a Caucasian male get the same treatment?
I sincerely doubt there's a way to differentiate between someone who is ill and someone who is pale and has the jitters because they're about to do something bad. I moreover call foul on the notion that there are enough of the latter set to build an effective training program to create effective BDOs.
What's actually happening here is probably that BDOs are being used to justify retroactively special treatment given to people for invented reasons. It's sort of like a false alert from a drug dog - it's a claim that you can't really cross-examine, since the supposed microexpressions someone exhibits are too fast or too small to be picked up by a camera.
Israel has been doing behavior profiling beginning at the moment you get out of your car at the airport, and run one of the most secure airports in the world. Even though the word profiling has a bad connotation in the USA, it works.
Supposedly the Patriot Missile was protecting Israel during the first Gulf War, but there are as far as I know zero confirmed hits (IIRC the Pentagon generously thinks that a few scuds were deflected, but Israel thinks otherwise).
The point is that just because a program is thought of as 'famously effective' doesn't mean it actually is.
(just as an addendum to the above, compare: drug dogs, in theory, and in practice, in light of recent disclosures about the DEA's 'parallel reconstruction' program.
It's been used by Israeli airport security and, if done properly, isn't based on ethnics or appearance. I don't think it's a bad thing as long as it's just used for screening.
However, the original account indicates that the questioning went far beyond "non-intrusive questions".
"Be careful about what you have on your laptop and memory card in your camera. They could search everything. The pictures of your kids taking a bath maybe interpreted in a different way by immigration officers. .... And certainly don’t buy any porno DVDs here in Thailand to take home. You have been warned. Don’t take this lightly."
So... purchasing goods abroad which are illegal in the US, and then trying to import them into the US, may result in those goods being confiscated and you being made to pay a fine?
This is unprecedented in the history of everything!
TSA Officer “You can leave, but I’m keeping your bag.”
Aditha was speechless. My bag had both my work computer and my personal computer in it. The only way for me to get it back from him would be to snatch it back, at which point he could simply claim that I had assaulted him. I was trapped."
the issue faced by Adithya was not too different from what Miranda faced at UK airport last week
"Be careful about what you have on your laptop and memory card in your camera. They could search everything. The pictures of your kids taking a bath maybe interpreted in a different way by immigration officers. The same goes for buying fake goods or pirated DVDs while on holiday in Thailand. Many people have said that in America and Europe these items have been confiscated and they were given a big fine. It’s not worth it so don’t buy any fake goods while on holiday in Thailand. And don’t copy any pirated movies onto your laptop. And certainly don’t buy any porno DVDs here in Thailand to take home. You have been warned. Don’t take this lightly."
If your intent was to bait-and-switch from "trying to bring pirated DVDs from Thailand gets you in trouble" (obvious) into this, perhaps you should have been less obvious about it.
I know it won't happen, but I wish this blog post would go as viral as the original. Not that I accept this post as the complete truth, but because people deserve to hear two sides of the story. Often times all people will hear is the accusations of something like this and accept it as fact and the eventual acquittals (or explanations) never get as much publicity. Like Mark Twain said "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
Agreed. I'm upvoting because everyone is calling out the author on his bias and BS.
Funny how if a stranger on the street infringes on your rights, you're allowed to get agitated and aggressive, but if the government does it, you're supposed to be submissive and cooperative.
This blog entry is a example of how cheaply one can buy sycophants. Someday he will write about how lovely his bottom bunk at the reeducation camp was.
EDIT: Oh man. After a bit of searching, it looks like Steven Frischling is exactly the man to represent the TSA's position. He was born to the task.
This reeks of the most cowardly pandering to proto fascist mission creep I've read in a long time. I mean take these key quotes for instance:
>Mr. Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO)
>Mr. Mukerjee became verbally aggressive
>Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag.
I know a lot of you HNs live in America and probably arnt familiar with dictatorial or cold war communist institutions but these kind of articles are classic examples of the publics refusal to acknowledge injustice perpetraded by a power hungry government institution. The sooner people realise that their government is not all good the better. In the meantime articles like these and those who write them continue to facilitate the decline of public freedoms and personal liberties.
Interesting. Perhaps if there were a term to succinctly describe a zeitgeist where participants think they are doing good but actually causing great harm in retrospect, without invoking Godwin's law. Also, any lessons or warning signs for dark periods would be helpful.
I agree, it's easy to say that someone became verbally aggressive and agitated after the fact. It doesn't excuse poor treatment, and it's probably not even true, since it's a judgement call and impossible to disprove.
> Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO) while in line for what appeared to be unusual behaviours. As the official Incident Report makes no mention of the BDO’s involvement it is impossible to assess what caught the Officer’s attention, but the TSA source indicates Mr. Mukerjee was already on someone’s radar before he chose to opt-out.
As a Mexican, I laughed loud after reading this:
BDO Officer thinks: "Mhmm.. that guy on the line is behaving brown, better check him out".
Every "brown" (Mexican, middle-easter, Indi or person with similar color) can confirm how they get "randomly selected" in a lot of checkpoints.
Somebody got aggressive after being detained for hours on end and having their flight cancelled, at expense? Holy shit! Pack your bags, men: we found ourselves a terrorist.
When you say aggressive, make sure to specify that you mean some blogger paraphrased an anonymous unsourced person claiming a month after the fact that the guy was aggressive with no supporting evidence.
This is gripping reading for me, because "Mr. Mukerjee" is someone I know by first name, indeed nickname, even though I have never met him. (He was my son's roommate for most of the last year, and was the crucial connection for my son getting his job in New York City.)
I appreciate seeing someone else's perspective on the incident that has appalled all my Facebook friends who have seen Mr. Mukerjee's own account
of his experience at the airport (which was a top post on Hacker News for about a full day). We can all learn something about any incident by hearing a second opinion on it.
That said, if Mr. Mukerjee’s behavior that day was "aggressive," my interpretation of that, never having met him, but knowing his roommate very well indeed, is that he was assertive about claiming the civil rights of an American. (I imagine he was also hungry, tired, and eager to travel to see his family.) It's too bad that people who assert their rights are taken to be acting suspiciously, but let's examine the incident and modify the system in a way that makes it easier, not harder, for a tired and hungry traveler to get straight answers and have factual misimpressions resolved, rather than assuming that every loyal American[1] is a terrorist.
After formal study of the law and work as a judicial clerk in a state supreme court, I find that my bottom line is that I still have to remind myself to be very deferential in the presence of law enforcement officers--especially armed law enforcement officers. Asserting my rights is not something the system makes easy to do, EVEN FOR A LAWYER, once the situational triggers of law-enforcement occur. But this is all the more reason to let the great majority of travelers who are neither terrorists nor lawyers, but just people trying to make a living and spend time with their families, enjoy efficient, friendly travel. Something went awry here, and being just one remove away from directly knowing the victim, I'm inclined not to blame the victim.
[1] I am sure that Mr. Mukerjee has a strong sense of being an American because he met my son in Ireland, where both were as part of a summer program. The Irish kids teased all the Americans in the program for their horrific accents in spoken English [smile]. My son and Mr. Mukerjee forged their friendship through their shared Americanness in a foreign land, and I think the United States ought to treat all its own citizens and all the foreigners who visit America better than current TSA procedures treat air travelers.
AFTER EDIT: Another comment in this thread reminded me to check the background of the author of the blog post kindly submitted here. Wired reported in 2009
that the blogger was questioned by TSA agents after releasing a TSA document on his blog. It seems that at least some of the time he has been most interested in posting an interesting read for frequent travelers, and not necessarily trying to curry favor with TSA. I think he succeeded here, too, agree or disagree, in writing an interesting blog post (as did Mr. Mukerjee in his blog post).
> Asserting my rights is not something the system makes easy to do, EVEN FOR A LAWYER, once the situational triggers of law-enforcement occur
Since it's apparently impossible to prevent the abuse of our rights, it seems the simplest remedy is easy-to-claim compensation after the fact, right out of the department's budget. Unjustly detained for 3 hours? That's a payment of say $500 (professional hourly rate plus extra for emotional distress). Denied your usual food/water/bathroom/medication? Physical distress add-on. Laptop stolen by goons at the border? Replacement value of laptop plus several hundred dollars for setting it up. Court acquittal verdict? Reimbursement of all lawyer fees + payment for your time spent in court and/or jail.
Until these agencies are no longer able to externalize their damages onto the public, they have little reason to lower their false positive rate.
>Until these agencies stop externalizing their damages to the public, they have no reason to lower their false positive rate.
Completely agree. This seems like a completely reasonable course of action (compensation for lost time) but instead they just aggressively search and detain people and the only punishment they get is if someone gets "uppity" and asserts their rights, at which point some low-level nobody will be suspended with pay. Wonderful.
That's a perspicacious line of thinking, but beware of perverse incentives. You've now created a market where people can try to get themselves unjustly detained and distressed in order to collect that payout. Money always attracts parasites.
I imagine 100 years ago, before terrorism, before the TSA, before the NSA snooped on our phone calls or Hacker News posts, before all of this... I imagine there was a guy who wanted to do something, got stopped by police for a couple of questions, and got agitated by the hassle and it turned into something bigger.
Now 100 years ago, that guy couldn't write a blog post about it and get worldwide attention. But then again, it's just always been true that when dealing with the authorities, if you rub someone the wrong way, if you act belligerent, if you want to run the other way as soon as the police ask you a question, if you test positive multiple times for explosives... well, it's always been true that you're going to have a bad day that day.
Mr Mukerjee had a bad day. But then again, he tested positive for explosives multiple times!
> These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag.
> However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it.
> While false positives are not unusual for ETD, it is unusual a person and their items could fail so many times using different testing equipment.
What would you have done in a situation like this, when people's lives are at stake and it's your fault if something goes wrong and someone gets hurt?
One of the things you get when you have a horde of untrained, uptight civilians dressed in uniforms is an incredibly unprofessional behaviour from someone who is supposed to do law enforcement.
The agents did several things that escalated the whole deal, things which a cadet would have immediately understood. To quote just a few:
> These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag.
> However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it.
This is wrong on the following levels:
1. The first fucking thing you do when you detain someone is explain them why they are detained, how long they will be detained and -- if they have not actually broken any law and are there for preventive action, what you are doing in order to prevent it. If you exceed this period by the most infinitely small amount of time, you immediately tell them why it is taking longer (in some civilized countries not doing this is reason enough for the state to start selling politicians' kidneys to pay damages). Basically, what the dudes should have done was say: "Hello Mr. Mukerjee, we have to detain you on the basis of <whatever law they are doing it on> because we have suspicions that you might try to harm the passengers on board. We need to check a few things up, this will take <how much fucking time can it take to check a stupid suitcase and a handbag>. I understand this may sound outrageous to you, but we need to make sure." It's particularly important that you use normal-sounding words and sentences in an active voice. Someone who isn't a regular jail offender will most likely be panicked enough to to understand a word you're saying if you start throwing shit like "we believe you might be a threat to the safety of the crew and the passengers of the vessel".
2. If you don't want people to get agitated, you don't offer them external triggers. If you want to conduct a search, you immediately remove all the bags after conducting a thorough inventory of it in the presence of the guy you're searching. "Mr. Murkjee, we need to search your bag <on the basis of whatever law allows us to do that without a warrant>. Can you please tell me what's inside? We will have to remove all items in another room, we need to make a list of the items inside to make sure you get them all back". Of course people are going to get nervous if they are in danger of losing their work. They kind of depend on it to eat. If you don't remove these belongings, people will naturally keep peeking at them and grabbing them and insisting on touching them because they're afraid. It's a natural reaction.
3. If you detain someone for longer than half an hour, you provide for their needs period. You ask if they need water or a snack. If they're guilty, they'll have a long time to be thirsty and hungry in prison, but there's a long way before that. You do this for two reasons that you hear about in the first six hours of training (if your instructor is slow, it can probably take as little as four...). First, basic sensations of thirst and hunger amplify the sensation of fear. Second, dehydration and low blood sugar levels heighten the symptoms of fear and panic, like anxiety and shaking.
4. When someone tested positive for something, you either don't tell him and get on with it on your own, or you tell him and ask for an explanation. Maybe the dude visited a friend whose kid got a chemistry kit as a present and splashed it all over the table in the living room. Either tell him "Mr. Murkjee, you tested positive for di-hidrogen oxide, a substance we believe may be explosive. We need to conduct a further search through your items -- we have people working on that right away so that you can be back on yo...
Thanks :-). Restaffing the TSA may not be necessary though -- not radically; there seems to be a problem with the culture there and with how performance is measured. That's systemic and comes from higher in the hierarchy.
Specifically, I think good directions would be:
1. Driving away the "law enforcement" culture. Are members of the TSA staff registered as policemen, assigned to a station, going through police academy and under the rules and discipline of police training? If not, they aren't law enforcement and shouldn't be treated as such, and should either a) be disallowed from conducting any kind of search without the supervision of a policeman or b) covered by the same regulation as a regular policeman. You can't have people do police stuff with non-police discipline, eschewing the checks and balances law enforcement has in order to make sure it enforces, you know, the law.
2. Providing immediate legal counseling as soon as you step into a private room. Large crowds tend to be a good protection against abuse. Once you step into a room, anything more than searching through personal items should be covered by a lawyer, and people should particularly only be questioned only in the presence of a lawyer. This is because a) the lawyer would be able to assert the rights of the person being questioned and b) the lawyer would be able to explain what's happening in layman's terms. When a particularly uptight ex-postal employee who just discovered authority exceeds gets nasty, a third-party reminding him he's stepping outside the law works much better than the person on the receiving end of his newly-discovered authority asserting his rights -- risking to be regarded as "aggressive" and "overly-assertive" by someone whose most important previous responsibility had been making sure stamps are correctly positioned on the envelope.
3. Explicitly encouraging and rewarding correct behaviour from TSA personnel, while at the same time applying serious disciplinary action. Let's be honest here, there's a large enough supply of unemployed people who can search a bag that you can afford discharging abusers, and sufficient public frustration that you can afford offering the occasional bonus to people who go out of their way to clear up misunderstandings.
It's sad. No, scratch that, it's fucking outrageous that this explanation is even necessary. Somehow we've internalized the notion that kafkaesque nightmares are to be expected and necessarily endured by good little citizens in order for our country to continue to exist or something. In many ways this is more frightening than living in a 1984 style dystopia. Living in a dystopia of our own making that receives more popular support than condemnation is almost too distressing to contemplate.
I believe that current TSA policy is to allow the traveler to be able to see their belongings at all times, and if they search it search it in front of the traveler.
From what I can tell this has even been emphasized lately, now when I opt out at SFO they have me bin my stuff and wait until they are ready to pat me down before running it through the x-ray. Once it has been x-rayed they put my belongings where I can see them (but are quite clear that I shouldn't reach for them) while they do the pat down.
That sounds like a risky procedure in public places (but, as I mentioned elsewhere, I'm not too familiar with the details of the TSA procedures).
When I took the course I mentioned in my post above, the explanation was along these lines: when you want to check someone who carries a bag, you need to remember that he has certain expectations about the safety of his belongings. If you're in a public place, it's reasonable that you never remove the belongings without assuring the owner that they are safe and well-guarded. So when you stop a gang of half-drunk teenagers on the street, you don't ask them to drop their backpacks on the sidewalk and then go ten yards further to search them. You ask them to leave the backpacks in a single place, right near them, and while your colleague searches the backpacks, you keep an eye on the dudes.
That's the common-sense thing to do: no one would let their bags two meters away from them in an airport, even if they kept a constant eye on them. You can't just expect someone to be okay with leaving them god knows where.
If you ask people to put their belongings away in a designated area, the correct thing to do is to have that area placed well away from any passers by and a guard near it. That way, you can tell the owner something along the lines of "Please put your bag in that bin over there; don't worry about it, it won't be stolen -- that man staying guard there isn't leaving, he's there to make sure you get it back just as you left it. We need to ask you a few questions, and then we may have to search your bag. we'll search it in front of you to make sure no one steals or breaks anything, and if all checks out okay, you're free to go. Any questions before we start?"
As our instructor mentioned it, it's really important -- especially in places like airports, concert arenas and whatever -- where you might expect one terrorist every two years and ten thousand disoriented folks with a scare of flight who triggered the bomb detector with their cheap after-shave every day -- to treat people without hostility, with an attitude of collaboration, not suspicion. Very few travelers are at fault for the US' foreign policy (and those that are probably don't go through the whole TSA hell), so it's not their fault that some guys from the Middle East want to blow up their planes. In places like these, you want to treat people so that they can say "yeah, I know this is inconvenient, but the guy is only doing his job", and because they are already under a lot of stress, you want to make sure you don't heighten their fear.
> We will have to remove all items in another room,
Searching the bag in another room has too much abuse potential. If travelers let bags out of their sight even for a few minutes the TSA could easily steal or break anything of value in there with no accountability. So the existing procedures mostly don't allow that - searching has to take place in the presence of the passenger.
I'm not familiar with the details of the TSA procedure (thankfully, I'm not an US citizen and haven't been there since the whole post-9/11 mess started) -- but I would agree that searching the bag should be done in front of the owner.
That's actually the recommended policy in most cases (not only TSA), for several reasons. One of them is the one you stated; another one is that suspicions related to a particular item can be cleared more quickly by just asking the owner, and if you do it right, you can also get various hints about anything illegal (e.g. the guy is ok until you find the hidden pocket).
There's only one case I know of where searching without the owner's presence would be legitimate -- if the exact testing equipment and procedure must not be divulged, for fear it might reveal vulnerability. This is a form of security by obscurity though, and a sane system shouldn't need that. I'm sure this isn't the TSA's case, but there are cases where it can be an option -- for instance, in an underfunded law-enforcement system that can't afford sufficiently broad testing equipment. In their case, introducing further delay in the obsolescence of their equipment probably ought to be understood. This comes in various other incarnations -- e.g. if you suspect the bag may contain dangerous substances, you typically want to search it in a special, sealed room.
Nonetheless, if searching is done in another room, that's always done according to a procedure that ensures accountability: you ask the owner to tell you what's inside, make a list of everything there, and ask him about the working condition of every gizmo inside. The proper way to do it is with a constructive attitude -- if the bag is stuffed with various items, you assist the owner by taking the items one by one. You don't let him touch them, in case he might sneak up that bag of TNT when you aren't looking, but you help the guy -- if he's got thirty gizmos inside, it's only natural he won't remember them all. But in this case, the search is then conducted by someone else (in order to avoid subjectivity issues -- e.g. the dude has a vintage handheld radio from his grandfather, it's filled with explosive but when you do the search, you test it superficially because it's a vintage radio, what the hell...)
You should be careful and say that lives may be at stake. Even if we had a much improved system, the vast majority of closer examinations would be of innocent people. Actually, I guess the false positive rate goes up with the effectiveness for quite a while.
> it is unusual a person and their items could fail so many times using different testing equipment.
So maybe it's finding something true. BFD. You look in the bag, verify there's no explosive there, and let him through.
Maybe the bag had fireworks in or near it at some point. Or magician's supplies. Or a chemistry set. Or any number of other things. There are a dozens reasons why a bag might actually have been near explosives or chemicals that are similar enough to explosives or explosive precursors that the test would correctly show positive.
Nobody cares whether the test result was an error or a "correct" reading based on something that IS NO LONGER IN THE BAG - either way, you let him through. Why the hell not?
Or it could be somewhere hidden in the bag, in a lining somewhere, etc. Or it could be somewhere else on his person, having left traces on the bag after coming in contact with it.
Right, that's why they do a search. Amd if it's hidden so well you won't find it in a search, it'll be hidden that well tomorrow too - where is the sense in pestering this guy for hours and sending him home to get on a plane tomorrow rather than letting him get on a plane today?
The sad truth is that the terrorists here are us. The primary reason nobody has blown up a plane recently in the US is that nobody is TRYING to blow up a plane in the US. If somebody were seriously trying, they'd have done it already.
He tested positive for some chemicals that produce false positive on TSA explosives test, not for explosives. As the original article admits, this is a common occurrence. However, it became very clear very soon that he actually does not have any explosives on him. What were they doing once that was clear?
They were trying to catch him for anything they could imagine. Maybe he was the next marathon bomber, coming from a laboratory session. They'd be national heroes, or at the very least they'd make damn damn sure that nobody's ass could be on the line for letting the next marathon bomber slip through TSA.
(What? TSA's job isn't to protect marathons? Silly patriot, do you want to let the terrorists win?)
>>> That said, if Mr. Mukerjee’s behavior that day was "aggressive,"
Once I've read about him being "aggressive", my BS detector went off immediately. If he'd indeed be aggressive, he's be tazed, handcuffed and detained. It's not like we haven't read what happens to people that law enforcement considers aggressive. I'm pretty sure "aggressive" here means "didn't kowtow to the TSA workers enough and mumbled something about him having some 'rights'".
How I hate these stenographer-to-the-powerful articles.
The guy makes his money as a consultant to airlines; he here gives the official side of things under cover of perfect anonymity and official deniability. He does it while pretending to be a neutral arbiter of fact, showing no skepticism at all about official claims. And, naturally, he doesn't bother to follow up with the author of the blog post he responded to. I guess he was just too gosh-darned busy writing down what people with nice uniforms told him.
This just in: guy with hand in pocket of airlines believes airlines did just the right thing. What innovative reporting!
Yes, clearly it's impossible for the actual event to have transpired differently than what the person said. No one ever exaggerates things or misrepresents them on the internet.
It's possible, likely even, but the extremely antagonistic way the article was written gives it pretty much zero credibility.
Especially with nitpicking like pointing out it was Port Authority police rather than NYPD - it was an irrelevant correction, as the point is he likely saw shields, and most people would have no clue about that kind of distinction and would simply assume NYPD, given that it is one of the best known police forces on the planet.
The Port Authority vs. the NYPD is not an irrelevant correction.
It's two completely different government enforcement agencies, with two completely different jobs, one of which is to actually care about what goes down at the airport.
The PA's presence isn't weird. The NYPD's would have been.
It's not like law enforcement agencies ever cooperated or gave tips to each other, or participated in joint activities. It's not like we just recently learned that NSA gives tips to DEA and IRS and then the latter lie to judges about where the info came from.
Right, because your stomach and head really care if they are hurting when you are held up in a room by Port Authority vs NYPD. They looked like police officers vs TSA officers.
The point remains that dissecting the blog on that level just reveals Fish for a piece of crap he is taking money to publish whatever they gave him.
> And, naturally, he doesn't bother to follow up with the author of the blog post he responded to.
FTA (the first paragraph, actually):
I was initially approached by his supporters, and put in touch with him, to help spread his story … however … once I began researching the story, his detailed blog post began to unravel.
Unless you mean that he should have shared with Aditya Mukerjee his article/accusations/assumptions/whatever and allowed him to respond to or rebut it prior to publishing it.
> Unless you mean that he should have shared with Aditya Mukerjee his article/accusations/assumptions/whatever and allowed him to respond to or rebut it prior to publishing it.
That's typically how journalists try to do things, and it's a reasonable thing to do - that's why you almost always see "We attempted to reach X but received no response" or "X was contacted, but had no comment".
The standard is relaxed somewhat for blog posts, I suppose, but at the very least the thing to do would be to send the original author a link to the post as soon as it was posted, asking for comment, and include a note to that effect in the post.
That's exactly what I mean. He has quotes from sources contradicting the blog posts. He allegedly spend quite a bit of time talking with people. Any real reporter, and hopefully anybody with an interest in publishing a fair article would have called Mukerjee and said, "Hey, let me check some things." But this article treats airline and government claims as fact.
In January of 2010, I was coming back from the Middle East and landed in JFK airport after a 20 hour flight. This was weeks after the underwear bombing incident and I was expecting heightened security. I went through the cotton swab test which came out to be positive and was detained for an hour at the airport. I complied with the TSA for any searches they wanted to do on me (I was tired and was frankly a little alarmed by the positive cotton swab test).
After an hour and a thorough search of my belonging, I was rescheduled on a different flight (for free) and I got back home.
Something about the original story did seem a little strange to me. I am a text book "random search" person - born in the middle east, Arabic sounding name, frequent trips to the middle east, etc. But I always tend to comply and be honest about what I have been doing. Besides that one detention and "random" screens, I've not been too bothered by the security personal (remember, they are people too). I guess I am just used to more intrusive searches in other countries.
Edit: For the record, I am not a citizen or permanent resident of the US (work visa).
I disagree because I knew the laws of the country before I came over in 2007. I am not a citizen and so cannot try to lobby for a change in laws. Actually, that might be illegal.
With respect, I think you're accepting an unreasonably low standard of conduct on behalf of the TSA. Why should you just accept "random" searches because of dark skin or arabic sounding name? (Even if 90% of terrorists are arabs, which isn't true, but even if it were, that still means that only 0.0001% of arabs are terrorists, which makes the whole racial profiling strategy not only bad morals, but also but operations). More importantly, what would happen if you asserted your rights, even to the smallest degree? What if you asked for an explanation of procedures before they're being performed, would the agents then qualify you as "aggressive"? What if you refused some procedures and asked to leave? What if you asked to call your lawyer?
I also have an arabic-sounding last name (though I'm white as a snowflake, and ironically jewish), and I also have to go through "random" searches on occasion (I had four incidents like this in the airport in Israel). Yes, the agents are polite to me, but I don't do very much to assert my rights, mostly because I feel like it would be picking the wrong battle. However, I don't have the confidence that they'd remain polite and professional if I did assert my rights, and many, many people have the same trepidations when they go through border security.
When a U.S. citizen has to feel trepidation upon entering his country when he's done absolutely nothing wrong, there's something very wrong with our system. (At the very least, I'd expect them to post procedures for public scrutiny and allow going through the regular court system when something goes wrong; as of now the whole thing of "being in limbo" just seems completely backwards)
I forgot to mention (now added), I am not a US citizen or resident. I was pretty aware of the situation in the US before I consciously decided to come here for university and then remain for a job.
The main point of my post was that I think the original poster could have cooperated a little better with the TSA. But, I take that view because I know I am a 'guest' in this country. I guess being an American would give you different expectations. The US border agent can refuse entry to me. But not to you under any circumstance. In that case, I think it is worth asserting your rights, like Mukherjee.
While I acknowledge that in practical terms you are sure to get more hassle for asserting your rights, they are still your rights.
Under the law you are subject to the same laws and privileges as any citizen - you are expected to obey our criminal laws while on US soil and you are also expected to have the same civil rights while here too.
If every textbook case got the worst treatment then the problems would be so obvious that they would have been fixed a long time ago. It is like "driving while black" - if cops pulled over black drivers every single time they were on the road the practice would have been stamped out long ago.
If tomorrow you got the same treatment as Mukergee did, then all of the tolerable experiences you've had up to that point wouldn't console you all that much.
Well of course the ordeal seems perfectly justified when one repeats the useless bureaucratic procedure at every turn. There was clearly some reasons that these events happened, and that is the whole fucking problem.
And please do tell, why is it wrong for one to be agitated or aggressive when being hassled by goons? Any pretense of civilized interaction vanishes the minute they threaten you into complying with their theatre.
> However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it. When someone is acting unusual, alarms for explosives and then starts grabbing for their bag against instruction by security personnel, security and law enforcement pays attention.
Seriously? If my bag has my expensive laptop, iPad and other stuff in it I'm gonna be likely to grab for it as well. I wouldn't want to leave it with the TSA — especially when there have been reports of theft and unprofessional behaviour.
How can they possibly classify his behaviour as "unusual"? It seems pretty normal to me.
Well, I can understand why he'd become "agitated" after being told his options were to leave without his bag or be subjected to an "obscene" screening.
Also, regarding:
"There are no independent sources within the TSA or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who can find any record of NYPD involvement – let alone a search of his apartment by federal authorities – and there is no incident report referencing any further action involving Mr. Mukerjee."
Given what we know about NSLs and such, how could we possibly believe that the lack of unclassified records is proof that no search took place?
whether it was blogged about or not, it seems like this author obtaining and reporting so much internal detail about this incident is an incident unto itself.
also, his shilling herein for TSA and Jet Blue smells like a conflict of interest:
Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is... airline emerging media consultant working with large global airlines...
I've checked the news articles, and it seems like the guy was indeed arrested for forgery and fraud, and ended up in a pre-trial diversion program for first-time offenders.
I had just assumed that this guy was just writing down what officials told him, but if 1/10th of the allegations on the blog are true, then maybe he just made up all of his supposed statements.
Great claims require great evidence. It could be a jilted lover or frmr business partner.... Who knows. Are there any public records which support this counter-blogger's claims?
The other thought is: does the original blogger have any hard evidence beyond nitpicking and counter-claims provided by JetBlue to trash our traveler?
Airport security is frequently humiliating. I myself have been nearly reduced to tears just by customs agents when crossing the border on business. However, this man set off a bomb detector. He set of the machine that detects bombs, repeatedly. After that event, nothing Mr. Mukerjee reported is particularly surprising, and I would expect to have a similar experience if I set off the same detector. I don't believe his race had nearly as much of an effect on his experience as is believed.
The problem here is that he was pre-selected by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO) while in line and then the TSA claimed he rang their bell for explosives.
We can't assume that government agents are on the up and up. Their word is open to question if they have no proof of their claims. Since they don't deny the story, I tend to lean to Mr. Mukerjee's perceptions as a more accurate account of the day.
There is ample evidence that local, county, and state law enforcement will trigger false positives to provide justification for searches. This behaviour by law enforcements makes me believe it plausible that the TSA and other "Agents" And "Officers" (I thought TSA were still neither) orchestrated all this to incite behavior they could use to justify further investigation.
Regardless of what chemical detectors he set off, and what suspicions they had, it was disgraceful that he was "detained" for such a long period without being provided with food and water.
Do you really think it is appropriate that such interrogation techniques are used on travellers after they have been cleared of carrying any sort of explosive device?
No, he set off a machine that detects a wide range of chemicals, some of which may be used to manufacture bombs. That's important to keep in mind: This staff needs to be able to handle false positives on a regular basis.
If they treat people like shit, it's a serious problem, as the vast majority of people who sets off these detectors will be entirely innocent, and will be frustrated and/or scared at being singled out and detained.
> However, this man set off a bomb detector. He set of the machine that detects bombs, repeatedly. After that event, nothing Mr. Mukerjee reported is particularly surprising, and I would expect to have a similar experience if I set off the same detector.
I wouldn't. My bag often sets off the bomb detector repeatedly; when that happens they just search it and send me on my way. It's no big deal. If the bag sets off the bomb detector repeatedly, the most likely reason for it is that the bag was at one point in contact with some chemical that is related to an explosives precursor. And that's OKAY. It's no big deal. You check whether the bag has explosives in it RIGHT NOW, and if it doesn't, you send the guy on his way!
(FWIW, I think I've triggered due to (a) flash paper (a magician's supply), (b) fireworks (of the safe-and-sane variety). In both cases the offending material wasn't actually present, but it had been IN the bag or IN my clothes in the prior week)
Your not making your case at all. It's like saying "yeah we violated his rights, but we had our reasons" if the whole world ran on the reasoning of one person or organization it's usually considered authoritarian. Which is exactly what's happening in the US
Flagged due to behavioral traits, seen to exhibit assertive behavior, ratted out by a robotic terrorist detector, etc. These are not good reasons to detain someone for an extended period and to deny them the ability to travel. These are the hallmarks of a society slipping into statism and subjugation.
Where is the presumption of innocence? Where is the protection of the liberties and rights of the individual? Where is the responsibility and accountability of the agents of government and the officers of the law?
Nowhere to be seen here.
These are not the sorts of trends and behaviors on behalf of the state we should be defending.
"This is absolutely correct, at this time he was in limbo, he was not being detained, but he could not leave. A person cannot simply leave the security area of any airport once they are on the airside but have not satisfactorily completed screening. Once a person has passed through security, but is not cleared to fly and then chooses to leave, such as Mr. Mukerjee, s/he must be escorted out of the secure area (and usually the terminal)."
Does this "defined event" actually have any legal status? How long can it take until the defined event occurs? It's possible that this is an intentionally murky area of the law (i.e., a judge can decide that preventing a person from leaving for an hour in case X is okay but 1 minute in case Y is not). Even so, it seems like if there's a person in front of you with legal authority to let you out of a secured area and you are asking them to let you out, then either they have to let you out or you are being detained.
That sounds precisely like 'detention'. For instance, people are detained pending trial. In fact, imprisonment is also being free to leave after some defined event occurs - namely the completion of sentence. This third option is exactly the first option.
No. In that case you are detained until that event occurs, like the person showing up to escort you out, or someone posting bail, or the police handing you your ticket and saying you are free to leave.
If you're in an airport security section, you're not free to go wherever you like. He wanted to go to the back of the line. They said he could leave the airport. But his bag still needed to be searched. He was free to leave, but he didn't want to leave. He wanted to go catch his flight.
But the fact their guidelines require his bag to be cleared before he could have it back does not mean he was "detained".
There are some pretty goddamn good reasons why the bag of a dude who tests positive for explosives has to be cleared before he's given it and allowed to run around an airport full of people.
> There are some pretty goddamn good reasons why the bag of a dude who tests positive for explosives has to be cleared before he's given it and allowed to run around an airport full of people.
If so, there are some pretty good reason why, if they consider that threat even remotely real, they should clear the area.
A good indication that the actual terrorist threat is absolutely vanishingly small: If there were lots of terrorists around, one of the easiest targets these days that'd maximize the amount of terror, is airport security screening areas. If they get through, they could defuse the bomb and blow it up on a plane instead, if not, they could let it go off on a timer and take out both a lot of passengers and a lot of security people.
I don't know how much faith I'd put into your hypothetical.
I'm not implying the terrorist threat is large – it's really, super small. But just because they haven't done THAT yet, doesn't mean they won't. So far, in the US, what they've done is sneak explosives onto planes.
So far what muslim terrorists have done a couple of times is to sneak explosives onto a few planes and fail miserably (shoebomber etc.), or storm the cockpit, or blow up bomb far away from airports (Boston bomber, '93 WTC bombing etc.). The storming the cockpit scenario was rendered totally pointless to try again after 9/11, and the explosives attempts have been rather weak.
Overall, bombs and shoot-outs not related to planes at all has been responsible for the vast majority of the most lethal terrorist attacks in the US apart from 9/11, both if you look at muslim terrorists separately, and other attacks in recent history.
I guess what I don't understand is why someone didn't just clear the bag then. After reading the original blog post and then this rebuttal, it's not clear why the guy was delayed for a full day. His situation was important enough to warrant repeated interviews by about 12 different people from 3-4 different groups, but not important enough to have someone else clear the bag? Are we supposed to believe that a major NY international airport doesn't have multiple instances of the necessary tools on standby to process this kind of thing quickly and efficiently?
This rebuttal also ignores the allegations of numerous instances of snide, provocative remarks by the various security and administrative officials. I'm sure Mr. Mukerjee was not helping himself with his own behavior, but does that give the TSA and related authorities license to be unprofessional in return? Does it help the situation to take a suspicious person who hasn't actually done anything and agitate them?
I'm sorry, but this rebuttal doesn't restore any confidence in the TSA, DHS, Port Authorities, airports or any other related group. I am so glad I have no cause to travel by air.
It doesn't sound like he actually tried to pursue that. He was told, "You can leave, but the bag stays." He chose to stay. They decided to keep questioning him.
It's total bullshit. If they found bomb residue on the guy and thought he had a bomb, or like say was checking a fucking bomb through security, they would search the bag ASAP with their dozens of TSA people, instead of just letting a potential bomb chillax in the airport terminal while they try for hours to get some guy to trip up on his answers to questions after he's tested positive for BOMBS. They had obviously searched the bag of course and were just making up some shit to trick him into agreeing to stay.
The police force is holding you against your will for the purpose of determining if you are guilty of a crime. But no, you're not being detained.
If there is one line that discredits this entire article, that is it. I mean, why not just call it what it is? He was being detained, and given that there was some evidence (explosive readings) against him, then there was some probable cause to do so. I'm not saying the TSA is justified in that regard... only that the article is completely disingenuous by implying that he wasn't held against his will at the hands of law enforcement.
Reminds me of a scene from a West Wing episode in which the lesson is that good press control means not over-reacting to small points like this.
(One of my favourite scenes for their acting, though I can't find a video.)
SAM
Yes, I hired the guy, but that's not... Legitimate news organizations are going to cover
this to say nothing of the people who hate us who are going to run it over, over, over,
over, over...This guy was here for three minutes and he was fired. He is not credible.
I'm a lawyer, I'm telling you. That has to be made clear. Every time he makes a factual
mistake we got to come out with a press release. Every time he misquotes or misidentifies
anyone we need to have an affidavit swearing to the truth. If there's a comma in the
wrong place he needs to be killed until he is dead and he needs to be killed again or
he is going to keep biting at our ankles and I mean all through the campaign. He needs
to be a joke, or we're going to be.
C.J.
[snapping fingers rhythmically] Boy, boy, crazy boy. Keep cool, boy...
SAM
I'm not screwing around.
C.J.
Me neither. Sit down.
SAM
I'm not going to be a victim of this.
C.J.
Let me tell you something I've learned in my years. There are victims of fires. There
are victims of car accidents. This kind of thing, there are no victims--just volunteers.
Of course we'll get in the game. I'll talk to the editors of the major papers but we're
not going to publicly refute every bogus charge. First of all, there are too many of them.
Second of all, I'm not going to give this guy and his book the weight of the White House.
As far as the press is concerned I've read the book because I had to. You have a vague
recollection of the guy but he wasn't here long enough to make a lasting impression.
Have you read the book? Of course not. You're too busy doing a job.
At the end of the day, nit-picking down to this level just makes you seem desperate to discredit, regardless of how true (or otherwise) your main arguments might be.
The biggest problem with the story is the INSTITUTIONALIZED FEAR. From the account, you could tell just about every agent after the first was wondering who was wasting their time. That's why they kept going back to the test that failed (he didn't leave the room, so why would they get a different result... Institutional insanity)
Ts not enough for the agent to recognize his time was clearly wasted.. There it 0.0001% this guy might really be a terrorist because somebody else said so. They kept pouring resources into trying to prove him "wrong" rather than verifying a threat existed or not.
It's Kaffkaesque at its best... I'm scared of you because of my training, so it's your fault what you did to me that makes me scared. If it wasn't FOR REAL, it's so absurd to be a comedy skit.
"I know many people want to believe in TSA and national security conspiracies."
No, I think most people just believe the TSA to be completely inept and operated without much oversight or coherence. Complaining about (repeated) bad treatment doesn't make it a conspiracy.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] threadWell I'm sold. Serves you right for looking suspicious in front of the Looking-suspicious Detection Officer!
And now they do and you complain anyway. So - what's your preferred method of screening people?
Both times it was portrayed as super amazing (low hassle plus high security) precisely because they used behavioral detection techniques.
The TSA version is a guy walking around the terminal engaging people in conversation and looking for things like "micro-expressions." (which are themselves a farce)
Putting aside the obvious falsehood ("every time") there's obviously a little critical analysis required to differentiate between people who are nervous because they don't like getting airplanes, people who are nervous because they're about to miss their flight, people who are just generally anxious, and people who are nervous because they're about to blow up an airplane.
That's the problem with USA security, against say the one in Europe or the middle east (I think Israel has very good trained anti-terrorist immigration officers): In these other countries, there are a lot of darkish-skin people, so they really have to learn how to profile someone who is up to something. In the USA? I guess the majority of time they just use the skin color... and that's why they get a lot of false positive, and /very/ annoyed people.
This writeup is not only just nit-picking his story - it's using the TSA as witness against itself.
I am most certainly not going to the take TSA's word for what happened. That would be like taking the NSA's word to congress for example. What do you think happens by lesser agencies on non-sworn testimony when they see what their big-brother can get away with?
And the "behavior detection" has already been outed multiple times as a huge pile of poo. It's identical to the signals cops can give their dogs for false positives to search someone anyway just because they want to.
By the way, if he was so dangerous and already being watched YOU LET HIM GET INTO A CROWDED TERMINAL WITH LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE WITH HIS LUGGAGE AND BACKPACK.
Morons. So someone is only dangerous if they get on the plane, not in the crowed terminal eh?
I feel so safe now at your crowded checkpoints.
Prove to me they didn't search his home without serving him a warrant and then we'll talk about the accuracy of this story.
Can't really prove a negative - what would the evidence look like? The reasonable question to ask is "prove to me they did search his home without serving him a warrant."
Edit: P.S. note that I said evidence not proof.
P.P.S. I find it somewhat weird how people are so eager to jump to the defense of law enforcement with shouts of "that evidence proves nothing!" while at the same time supporting the idea that a now known to be false positive explosives test is more than sufficient to justify someone's ill-treatment for hours at the hands of law enforcement.
I'm not saying that Mukerjee's story of missing and tampered items in his apartment is sufficient to convict any law enforcement agent of wrong doing but maybe it's enough to justify an investigation (which could easily be rolled into the investigation into LEO behavior around the entire incident).
None of us on here know exactly what happened but the above seems (to me) just as likely as law enforcement breaking into his apartment. I would think they would also visit the apartment/residence he was vacating.
Let's go through the lines of evidence here.
First off, there were apparently no visible signs that anyone had broken into his apartment. If the FBI or the police had picked the lock or if they had gotten the super to let them in and told him or her to remain silent about it then that would explain such an absence. A thief could also pick the lock but why would they bother if it is so easy to simply break through the door?
Second, this seems like exceptionally odd timing for a random act of thievery.
Third, why would anyone except law enforcement bother to put everything back almost exactly where it was before?
The most logical conclusion that I can come to is that a law enforcement agent searched Mukerjee's apartment and probably took the photo so that it could be scanned or for some other reason but accidentally forgot to put it back. It's certainly not a very high degree of proof that such a thing happened but I think it's the most likely possibility, though it's mostly just a side-show compared to the other more troubling issues in this case.
Have you ever considered that his landlord could have come into the apartment to make sure it had been cleaned up properly by the outgoing tenants (remember, he had moved in the night before his trip). If the landlord had found a poster that had fallen off the wall, he may have thought it was trash left by the other tenants and thrown it away. His landlord would not have had to break in.
I don't think it's impossible that law enforcement searched his apartment; but if they had, wouldn't his bags have been unpacked, rather than just one of them a little out of place?
But really, why doesn't he just ask his landlord or super? If the police came, they probably would have asked the landlord to let them in. I mentioned the landlord idea on the previous thread, but he never responded.
If that's legal in the US, or something one might expect, that's almost more shocking to me than the original story. If any of my past landlords had entered my flat without permission, I would have called the police on them, with good cause.
He was living in NYC, so I'll quote their rules. From http://pubadvocate.nyc.gov/landlord-watchlist/tenant-rights:
> In general in New York City, a landlord may only enter a tenant’s apartment for three reasons: emergency repairs, non-emergency repairs or improvements, and apartment inspections. Emergency repair requires no advance notice to the tenant. However, access for non-emergency repairs and improvements requires a minimum of one week’s advance written notice, and access for inspection requires a minimum of 24 hours advance written notice.
If he was on vacation, then 24 hours written notice for inspection could consist of putting the notice on or under his door, waiting 24 hours, then going in for the inspection and removing the notice.
I've had my landlady enter my apartment without permission or notice before, and it was a little bit creepy, but I let it slide since she was such a nice lady. She wasn't some owner of a big apartment complex or anything, just had a second house down the street that she rented out, I think mostly so she could store all of the extra furniture she picked up at flea markets and couldn't fit into her own house. In fact, the reason she had entered our house was to stash a few lamps that she did't want her sister to sell at a yard sale, so we came back one day and there were extra lamps sitting around.
And if this seems implausible, consider -- how many times have you found yourself saying things like "I could have sworn I left the keys right there", and then finding them somewhere else? Is it more likely that you misremembered, or that they were moved by ninja-like FBI agents?
It sounds like the TSA's actions were excessive and heavy handed. It sounds like perhaps he got a little argumentative, due to being hungry (as he said, he hadn't eaten; I know I get cranky when I go too long without food), thirsty, and upset about missing his trip.
The TSA, and whatever other officers interviewed him, should probably be trained better in dealing with this kind of situation. In particular, using behavioral excuses to detain someone who's been singled out for extra screening is silly. Many people get upset about that kind of thing. And given that none of these TSA agents have ever actually interacted with a terrorist, and most likely never been trained with anyone who has, it's hard to believe that their training is any good at actually distinguishing a terrorist from someone who's just mad that they haven't had food or water in many hours. Heck, if you were a terrorist, you would prefer to blend in and act calm to singling yourself out for more screening by acting angry.
I feel like his article was a bit of an overreaction, but likewise the TSAs screening policies are much bigger, costlier, more painful overreaction.
How do you prove a negative. The key for me is that he got the NYPD & Port Authority mixed up. Innocent on its own, except the bit where the Port Authority has no jurisdiction outside airports.
I don't know if I can believe any official reports. They say the FBI wasn't involved, and I believe them but "they" have proved unreliable in the past. This is the fertile soil for conspiracy theories and it's the governments own fault.
We're left with Occam's razor. Mr. Mukerjee was probably feeling a little hot-headed that day and maybe he mouthed off to the first TSA guard who placed him on some list. He probably doesn't like or trust the TSA since he opted out of their preferred method of scanning. It's pretty believable that the agents don't know much about hinduism since they are not targeting potential hindu terrorist, but extremist muslim terrorist (if you consider terrorists true muslims which I don't). It seems likely that he set off multiple security alarms. Police TSA aren't going to know about venture capital or care about your job. They are just asking to see if you slip up or act nervous. Israeli security simply asks "how are you doing today" not b/c they care but b/c a persons reaction tells them a lot and they will drill down if you get agitated by their questions.
In the end, Mr. Mukerjee did nothing wrong. He got agitated by something that would anger all but the most patient individuals. That's actually the scary part. Al-Qaeda and other terror groups have shown again and again that they are VERY patient and persistent. One of their agents would probably have gone through the main scanner and if detected remain very affable and friendly with the TSA.
I'd like to point out that the TSA's shining example of the effectiveness of their behavior-detection officers has itself turned out to be a sham.
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/TSA-exaggerates-claims-abou...
Man said to have 'explosives' in luggage actually had none, FBI lab report found
The question (and failure) is what happens after that. But false positives in themselves isn't surprising.
Completely skimming it, the test sites had false positive rates of 0.6 - 1.8%.
I'd classify that as "not uncommon".
In other words, the test is almost completely useless. Given how low the base rate of terrorists sneaking through bombs is, a positive test result on one of these machines is >99.9% likely to be a false positive.
Let's do the math. We'll assume there are never any false negatives and just look at the positive results. Let's simplify "0.6-1.8%" and just call that "1%". Out of 100,000 bags, let's assume that ONE contains a bomb being snuck through by a terrorist. 1/100,000 is our postulated base rate of terrorism. 1/100 is our false positive rate on the test.
So let's put 100,000 bags through the machine. There will be 1,000 false positives and one true positive. which means that if some bag "tests positive for explosives" the odds are a-thousand-to-one against that being a valid result.
"But," I hear you cry, "we RUN IT THROUGH AGAIN when we get a positive result!"
Sure, that would work GREAT if false positive results were COMPLETELY RANDOM. But they're not. More likely than not, the false positive is being triggered by something that is or was actually in the bag. So when you run it again, there's a good chance that it'll trigger again. The "false" part of "false positive" is that the thing in the bag that it's triggering on...isn't an explosive. It's just some other chemical.
The combination of those two facts means that getting a hit on explosives gives you almost no increase in information. Any look at plausible numbers makes the test nearly useless at finding explosives, though it's still at least theoretically possible the test could serve as a sort of deterrent, albeit primarily a deterrent against movie-plot threats.
My guess is that the true purpose of this test is to make the people who sell explosives-testing equipment comfortably well off. Any other purpose would be served roughly as well with a box that triggered based on random number selection.
The fallacy doesn't make a value judgement. It points out something counterintuitive about the accuracy of a filter or test. That thing is important, but not dispositive. If the base rate is low and the false positive rate is percentagewise high but the overall number of hits is manageable, low-power statistical tests can have utility as pre-filters.
I have the same thought every time I go through airport security ("whoever designed this probably doesn't know about the base rate fallacy"), but if the system is only ejecting 1-2 candidates per station per hour for expensive "offline" screening, it's not untenable.
(Yes, one could postulate really stupid terrorists who somehow don't realize they'll get caught going through security, but terrorists who are that stupid are likely to have their plans fail without the TSA's help. See also: the shoe bomber.)
What 'unusual behaviors' led to him getting flagged? While maybe Mr. Mukerjee had suspicious behavior I'm skeptical of saying that his looks did not contribute to the heightened harsh treatment. Would a Caucasian male get the same treatment?
I sincerely doubt there's a way to differentiate between someone who is ill and someone who is pale and has the jitters because they're about to do something bad. I moreover call foul on the notion that there are enough of the latter set to build an effective training program to create effective BDOs.
What's actually happening here is probably that BDOs are being used to justify retroactively special treatment given to people for invented reasons. It's sort of like a false alert from a drug dog - it's a claim that you can't really cross-examine, since the supposed microexpressions someone exhibits are too fast or too small to be picked up by a camera.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
The point is that just because a program is thought of as 'famously effective' doesn't mean it actually is.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_profiling
It's been used by Israeli airport security and, if done properly, isn't based on ethnics or appearance. I don't think it's a bad thing as long as it's just used for screening.
However, the original account indicates that the questioning went far beyond "non-intrusive questions".
Not withstanding the original article, the above statement alone should be enough for us to question the pervasive use of the TSA.
please read yesterdays post Detained in the US for “Visiting Thailand Too Much” http://www.richardbarrow.com/2013/08/detained-in-the-us-for-... discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6276939
read the last couple of sentences
"Be careful about what you have on your laptop and memory card in your camera. They could search everything. The pictures of your kids taking a bath maybe interpreted in a different way by immigration officers. .... And certainly don’t buy any porno DVDs here in Thailand to take home. You have been warned. Don’t take this lightly."
edit: removed the context about pirated goods
This is unprecedented in the history of everything!
TSA Officer “You can leave, but I’m keeping your bag.”
Aditha was speechless. My bag had both my work computer and my personal computer in it. The only way for me to get it back from him would be to snatch it back, at which point he could simply claim that I had assaulted him. I was trapped."
the issue faced by Adithya was not too different from what Miranda faced at UK airport last week
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23750289
"Be careful about what you have on your laptop and memory card in your camera. They could search everything. The pictures of your kids taking a bath maybe interpreted in a different way by immigration officers. The same goes for buying fake goods or pirated DVDs while on holiday in Thailand. Many people have said that in America and Europe these items have been confiscated and they were given a big fine. It’s not worth it so don’t buy any fake goods while on holiday in Thailand. And don’t copy any pirated movies onto your laptop. And certainly don’t buy any porno DVDs here in Thailand to take home. You have been warned. Don’t take this lightly."
If your intent was to bait-and-switch from "trying to bring pirated DVDs from Thailand gets you in trouble" (obvious) into this, perhaps you should have been less obvious about it.
Funny how if a stranger on the street infringes on your rights, you're allowed to get agitated and aggressive, but if the government does it, you're supposed to be submissive and cooperative.
EDIT: Oh man. After a bit of searching, it looks like Steven Frischling is exactly the man to represent the TSA's position. He was born to the task.
>Mr. Mukerjee appears to have been flagged by the Behaviour Detection Officer (BDO)
>Mr. Mukerjee became verbally aggressive
>Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag.
I know a lot of you HNs live in America and probably arnt familiar with dictatorial or cold war communist institutions but these kind of articles are classic examples of the publics refusal to acknowledge injustice perpetraded by a power hungry government institution. The sooner people realise that their government is not all good the better. In the meantime articles like these and those who write them continue to facilitate the decline of public freedoms and personal liberties.
Flying Fish should feel ashamed.
As a Mexican, I laughed loud after reading this:
BDO Officer thinks: "Mhmm.. that guy on the line is behaving brown, better check him out".
Every "brown" (Mexican, middle-easter, Indi or person with similar color) can confirm how they get "randomly selected" in a lot of checkpoints.
I appreciate seeing someone else's perspective on the incident that has appalled all my Facebook friends who have seen Mr. Mukerjee's own account
http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/59021412512/dont-fly-...
of his experience at the airport (which was a top post on Hacker News for about a full day). We can all learn something about any incident by hearing a second opinion on it.
That said, if Mr. Mukerjee’s behavior that day was "aggressive," my interpretation of that, never having met him, but knowing his roommate very well indeed, is that he was assertive about claiming the civil rights of an American. (I imagine he was also hungry, tired, and eager to travel to see his family.) It's too bad that people who assert their rights are taken to be acting suspiciously, but let's examine the incident and modify the system in a way that makes it easier, not harder, for a tired and hungry traveler to get straight answers and have factual misimpressions resolved, rather than assuming that every loyal American[1] is a terrorist.
After formal study of the law and work as a judicial clerk in a state supreme court, I find that my bottom line is that I still have to remind myself to be very deferential in the presence of law enforcement officers--especially armed law enforcement officers. Asserting my rights is not something the system makes easy to do, EVEN FOR A LAWYER, once the situational triggers of law-enforcement occur. But this is all the more reason to let the great majority of travelers who are neither terrorists nor lawyers, but just people trying to make a living and spend time with their families, enjoy efficient, friendly travel. Something went awry here, and being just one remove away from directly knowing the victim, I'm inclined not to blame the victim.
[1] I am sure that Mr. Mukerjee has a strong sense of being an American because he met my son in Ireland, where both were as part of a summer program. The Irish kids teased all the Americans in the program for their horrific accents in spoken English [smile]. My son and Mr. Mukerjee forged their friendship through their shared Americanness in a foreign land, and I think the United States ought to treat all its own citizens and all the foreigners who visit America better than current TSA procedures treat air travelers.
AFTER EDIT: Another comment in this thread reminded me to check the background of the author of the blog post kindly submitted here. Wired reported in 2009
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/dhs-threatens-blogg...
that the blogger was questioned by TSA agents after releasing a TSA document on his blog. It seems that at least some of the time he has been most interested in posting an interesting read for frequent travelers, and not necessarily trying to curry favor with TSA. I think he succeeded here, too, agree or disagree, in writing an interesting blog post (as did Mr. Mukerjee in his blog post).
Since it's apparently impossible to prevent the abuse of our rights, it seems the simplest remedy is easy-to-claim compensation after the fact, right out of the department's budget. Unjustly detained for 3 hours? That's a payment of say $500 (professional hourly rate plus extra for emotional distress). Denied your usual food/water/bathroom/medication? Physical distress add-on. Laptop stolen by goons at the border? Replacement value of laptop plus several hundred dollars for setting it up. Court acquittal verdict? Reimbursement of all lawyer fees + payment for your time spent in court and/or jail.
Until these agencies are no longer able to externalize their damages onto the public, they have little reason to lower their false positive rate.
Completely agree. This seems like a completely reasonable course of action (compensation for lost time) but instead they just aggressively search and detain people and the only punishment they get is if someone gets "uppity" and asserts their rights, at which point some low-level nobody will be suspended with pay. Wonderful.
+ lost opportunity + swap out all existing passwords + missed deadlines => $5,000 +/- $500
Now 100 years ago, that guy couldn't write a blog post about it and get worldwide attention. But then again, it's just always been true that when dealing with the authorities, if you rub someone the wrong way, if you act belligerent, if you want to run the other way as soon as the police ask you a question, if you test positive multiple times for explosives... well, it's always been true that you're going to have a bad day that day.
Mr Mukerjee had a bad day. But then again, he tested positive for explosives multiple times!
> These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag.
> However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it.
> While false positives are not unusual for ETD, it is unusual a person and their items could fail so many times using different testing equipment.
What would you have done in a situation like this, when people's lives are at stake and it's your fault if something goes wrong and someone gets hurt?
The agents did several things that escalated the whole deal, things which a cadet would have immediately understood. To quote just a few:
> These events include Mr. Mukerjee becoming further agitated and aggressive after testing positive for explosives, as well as him repeatedly reaching for his not-yet-manually-searched bag.
> However,multiple statements by TSA personnel reference Mr. Mukerjee repeatedly grabbing for his bag after he was told not to touch it.
This is wrong on the following levels:
1. The first fucking thing you do when you detain someone is explain them why they are detained, how long they will be detained and -- if they have not actually broken any law and are there for preventive action, what you are doing in order to prevent it. If you exceed this period by the most infinitely small amount of time, you immediately tell them why it is taking longer (in some civilized countries not doing this is reason enough for the state to start selling politicians' kidneys to pay damages). Basically, what the dudes should have done was say: "Hello Mr. Mukerjee, we have to detain you on the basis of <whatever law they are doing it on> because we have suspicions that you might try to harm the passengers on board. We need to check a few things up, this will take <how much fucking time can it take to check a stupid suitcase and a handbag>. I understand this may sound outrageous to you, but we need to make sure." It's particularly important that you use normal-sounding words and sentences in an active voice. Someone who isn't a regular jail offender will most likely be panicked enough to to understand a word you're saying if you start throwing shit like "we believe you might be a threat to the safety of the crew and the passengers of the vessel".
2. If you don't want people to get agitated, you don't offer them external triggers. If you want to conduct a search, you immediately remove all the bags after conducting a thorough inventory of it in the presence of the guy you're searching. "Mr. Murkjee, we need to search your bag <on the basis of whatever law allows us to do that without a warrant>. Can you please tell me what's inside? We will have to remove all items in another room, we need to make a list of the items inside to make sure you get them all back". Of course people are going to get nervous if they are in danger of losing their work. They kind of depend on it to eat. If you don't remove these belongings, people will naturally keep peeking at them and grabbing them and insisting on touching them because they're afraid. It's a natural reaction.
3. If you detain someone for longer than half an hour, you provide for their needs period. You ask if they need water or a snack. If they're guilty, they'll have a long time to be thirsty and hungry in prison, but there's a long way before that. You do this for two reasons that you hear about in the first six hours of training (if your instructor is slow, it can probably take as little as four...). First, basic sensations of thirst and hunger amplify the sensation of fear. Second, dehydration and low blood sugar levels heighten the symptoms of fear and panic, like anxiety and shaking.
4. When someone tested positive for something, you either don't tell him and get on with it on your own, or you tell him and ask for an explanation. Maybe the dude visited a friend whose kid got a chemistry kit as a present and splashed it all over the table in the living room. Either tell him "Mr. Murkjee, you tested positive for di-hidrogen oxide, a substance we believe may be explosive. We need to conduct a further search through your items -- we have people working on that right away so that you can be back on yo...
Specifically, I think good directions would be:
1. Driving away the "law enforcement" culture. Are members of the TSA staff registered as policemen, assigned to a station, going through police academy and under the rules and discipline of police training? If not, they aren't law enforcement and shouldn't be treated as such, and should either a) be disallowed from conducting any kind of search without the supervision of a policeman or b) covered by the same regulation as a regular policeman. You can't have people do police stuff with non-police discipline, eschewing the checks and balances law enforcement has in order to make sure it enforces, you know, the law.
2. Providing immediate legal counseling as soon as you step into a private room. Large crowds tend to be a good protection against abuse. Once you step into a room, anything more than searching through personal items should be covered by a lawyer, and people should particularly only be questioned only in the presence of a lawyer. This is because a) the lawyer would be able to assert the rights of the person being questioned and b) the lawyer would be able to explain what's happening in layman's terms. When a particularly uptight ex-postal employee who just discovered authority exceeds gets nasty, a third-party reminding him he's stepping outside the law works much better than the person on the receiving end of his newly-discovered authority asserting his rights -- risking to be regarded as "aggressive" and "overly-assertive" by someone whose most important previous responsibility had been making sure stamps are correctly positioned on the envelope.
3. Explicitly encouraging and rewarding correct behaviour from TSA personnel, while at the same time applying serious disciplinary action. Let's be honest here, there's a large enough supply of unemployed people who can search a bag that you can afford discharging abusers, and sufficient public frustration that you can afford offering the occasional bonus to people who go out of their way to clear up misunderstandings.
From what I can tell this has even been emphasized lately, now when I opt out at SFO they have me bin my stuff and wait until they are ready to pat me down before running it through the x-ray. Once it has been x-rayed they put my belongings where I can see them (but are quite clear that I shouldn't reach for them) while they do the pat down.
When I took the course I mentioned in my post above, the explanation was along these lines: when you want to check someone who carries a bag, you need to remember that he has certain expectations about the safety of his belongings. If you're in a public place, it's reasonable that you never remove the belongings without assuring the owner that they are safe and well-guarded. So when you stop a gang of half-drunk teenagers on the street, you don't ask them to drop their backpacks on the sidewalk and then go ten yards further to search them. You ask them to leave the backpacks in a single place, right near them, and while your colleague searches the backpacks, you keep an eye on the dudes.
That's the common-sense thing to do: no one would let their bags two meters away from them in an airport, even if they kept a constant eye on them. You can't just expect someone to be okay with leaving them god knows where.
If you ask people to put their belongings away in a designated area, the correct thing to do is to have that area placed well away from any passers by and a guard near it. That way, you can tell the owner something along the lines of "Please put your bag in that bin over there; don't worry about it, it won't be stolen -- that man staying guard there isn't leaving, he's there to make sure you get it back just as you left it. We need to ask you a few questions, and then we may have to search your bag. we'll search it in front of you to make sure no one steals or breaks anything, and if all checks out okay, you're free to go. Any questions before we start?"
As our instructor mentioned it, it's really important -- especially in places like airports, concert arenas and whatever -- where you might expect one terrorist every two years and ten thousand disoriented folks with a scare of flight who triggered the bomb detector with their cheap after-shave every day -- to treat people without hostility, with an attitude of collaboration, not suspicion. Very few travelers are at fault for the US' foreign policy (and those that are probably don't go through the whole TSA hell), so it's not their fault that some guys from the Middle East want to blow up their planes. In places like these, you want to treat people so that they can say "yeah, I know this is inconvenient, but the guy is only doing his job", and because they are already under a lot of stress, you want to make sure you don't heighten their fear.
Searching the bag in another room has too much abuse potential. If travelers let bags out of their sight even for a few minutes the TSA could easily steal or break anything of value in there with no accountability. So the existing procedures mostly don't allow that - searching has to take place in the presence of the passenger.
That's actually the recommended policy in most cases (not only TSA), for several reasons. One of them is the one you stated; another one is that suspicions related to a particular item can be cleared more quickly by just asking the owner, and if you do it right, you can also get various hints about anything illegal (e.g. the guy is ok until you find the hidden pocket).
There's only one case I know of where searching without the owner's presence would be legitimate -- if the exact testing equipment and procedure must not be divulged, for fear it might reveal vulnerability. This is a form of security by obscurity though, and a sane system shouldn't need that. I'm sure this isn't the TSA's case, but there are cases where it can be an option -- for instance, in an underfunded law-enforcement system that can't afford sufficiently broad testing equipment. In their case, introducing further delay in the obsolescence of their equipment probably ought to be understood. This comes in various other incarnations -- e.g. if you suspect the bag may contain dangerous substances, you typically want to search it in a special, sealed room.
Nonetheless, if searching is done in another room, that's always done according to a procedure that ensures accountability: you ask the owner to tell you what's inside, make a list of everything there, and ask him about the working condition of every gizmo inside. The proper way to do it is with a constructive attitude -- if the bag is stuffed with various items, you assist the owner by taking the items one by one. You don't let him touch them, in case he might sneak up that bag of TNT when you aren't looking, but you help the guy -- if he's got thirty gizmos inside, it's only natural he won't remember them all. But in this case, the search is then conducted by someone else (in order to avoid subjectivity issues -- e.g. the dude has a vintage handheld radio from his grandfather, it's filled with explosive but when you do the search, you test it superficially because it's a vintage radio, what the hell...)
So maybe it's finding something true. BFD. You look in the bag, verify there's no explosive there, and let him through.
Maybe the bag had fireworks in or near it at some point. Or magician's supplies. Or a chemistry set. Or any number of other things. There are a dozens reasons why a bag might actually have been near explosives or chemicals that are similar enough to explosives or explosive precursors that the test would correctly show positive.
Nobody cares whether the test result was an error or a "correct" reading based on something that IS NO LONGER IN THE BAG - either way, you let him through. Why the hell not?
The sad truth is that the terrorists here are us. The primary reason nobody has blown up a plane recently in the US is that nobody is TRYING to blow up a plane in the US. If somebody were seriously trying, they'd have done it already.
Please read some history.
(What? TSA's job isn't to protect marathons? Silly patriot, do you want to let the terrorists win?)
Once I've read about him being "aggressive", my BS detector went off immediately. If he'd indeed be aggressive, he's be tazed, handcuffed and detained. It's not like we haven't read what happens to people that law enforcement considers aggressive. I'm pretty sure "aggressive" here means "didn't kowtow to the TSA workers enough and mumbled something about him having some 'rights'".
The guy makes his money as a consultant to airlines; he here gives the official side of things under cover of perfect anonymity and official deniability. He does it while pretending to be a neutral arbiter of fact, showing no skepticism at all about official claims. And, naturally, he doesn't bother to follow up with the author of the blog post he responded to. I guess he was just too gosh-darned busy writing down what people with nice uniforms told him.
This just in: guy with hand in pocket of airlines believes airlines did just the right thing. What innovative reporting!
Especially with nitpicking like pointing out it was Port Authority police rather than NYPD - it was an irrelevant correction, as the point is he likely saw shields, and most people would have no clue about that kind of distinction and would simply assume NYPD, given that it is one of the best known police forces on the planet.
It's two completely different government enforcement agencies, with two completely different jobs, one of which is to actually care about what goes down at the airport.
The PA's presence isn't weird. The NYPD's would have been.
The point remains that dissecting the blog on that level just reveals Fish for a piece of crap he is taking money to publish whatever they gave him.
FTA (the first paragraph, actually):
I was initially approached by his supporters, and put in touch with him, to help spread his story … however … once I began researching the story, his detailed blog post began to unravel.
Unless you mean that he should have shared with Aditya Mukerjee his article/accusations/assumptions/whatever and allowed him to respond to or rebut it prior to publishing it.
That's typically how journalists try to do things, and it's a reasonable thing to do - that's why you almost always see "We attempted to reach X but received no response" or "X was contacted, but had no comment".
The standard is relaxed somewhat for blog posts, I suppose, but at the very least the thing to do would be to send the original author a link to the post as soon as it was posted, asking for comment, and include a note to that effect in the post.
After an hour and a thorough search of my belonging, I was rescheduled on a different flight (for free) and I got back home.
Something about the original story did seem a little strange to me. I am a text book "random search" person - born in the middle east, Arabic sounding name, frequent trips to the middle east, etc. But I always tend to comply and be honest about what I have been doing. Besides that one detention and "random" screens, I've not been too bothered by the security personal (remember, they are people too). I guess I am just used to more intrusive searches in other countries.
Edit: For the record, I am not a citizen or permanent resident of the US (work visa).
I also have an arabic-sounding last name (though I'm white as a snowflake, and ironically jewish), and I also have to go through "random" searches on occasion (I had four incidents like this in the airport in Israel). Yes, the agents are polite to me, but I don't do very much to assert my rights, mostly because I feel like it would be picking the wrong battle. However, I don't have the confidence that they'd remain polite and professional if I did assert my rights, and many, many people have the same trepidations when they go through border security.
When a U.S. citizen has to feel trepidation upon entering his country when he's done absolutely nothing wrong, there's something very wrong with our system. (At the very least, I'd expect them to post procedures for public scrutiny and allow going through the regular court system when something goes wrong; as of now the whole thing of "being in limbo" just seems completely backwards)
The main point of my post was that I think the original poster could have cooperated a little better with the TSA. But, I take that view because I know I am a 'guest' in this country. I guess being an American would give you different expectations. The US border agent can refuse entry to me. But not to you under any circumstance. In that case, I think it is worth asserting your rights, like Mukherjee.
Under the law you are subject to the same laws and privileges as any citizen - you are expected to obey our criminal laws while on US soil and you are also expected to have the same civil rights while here too.
If tomorrow you got the same treatment as Mukergee did, then all of the tolerable experiences you've had up to that point wouldn't console you all that much.
And please do tell, why is it wrong for one to be agitated or aggressive when being hassled by goons? Any pretense of civilized interaction vanishes the minute they threaten you into complying with their theatre.
Seriously? If my bag has my expensive laptop, iPad and other stuff in it I'm gonna be likely to grab for it as well. I wouldn't want to leave it with the TSA — especially when there have been reports of theft and unprofessional behaviour.
How can they possibly classify his behaviour as "unusual"? It seems pretty normal to me.
Also, regarding:
"There are no independent sources within the TSA or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who can find any record of NYPD involvement – let alone a search of his apartment by federal authorities – and there is no incident report referencing any further action involving Mr. Mukerjee."
Given what we know about NSLs and such, how could we possibly believe that the lack of unclassified records is proof that no search took place?
also, his shilling herein for TSA and Jet Blue smells like a conflict of interest:
Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is... airline emerging media consultant working with large global airlines...
Some articles that caught my eye: http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/p/about-fishfraud.html http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/projectweddingcom-revi... http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/warning-to-national-me... http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/steven-frischling-in-c... http://fishfraud.blogspot.com/2010/11/yelpcom-reviews-in-all...
I've checked the news articles, and it seems like the guy was indeed arrested for forgery and fraud, and ended up in a pre-trial diversion program for first-time offenders.
I had just assumed that this guy was just writing down what officials told him, but if 1/10th of the allegations on the blog are true, then maybe he just made up all of his supposed statements.
Great claims require great evidence. It could be a jilted lover or frmr business partner.... Who knows. Are there any public records which support this counter-blogger's claims?
The other thought is: does the original blogger have any hard evidence beyond nitpicking and counter-claims provided by JetBlue to trash our traveler?
We can't assume that government agents are on the up and up. Their word is open to question if they have no proof of their claims. Since they don't deny the story, I tend to lean to Mr. Mukerjee's perceptions as a more accurate account of the day.
It detects a lot more than bombs. Over the machine's lifetime it will detect hundreds of thousands of things but almost certainly not any bombs.
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/225047/estimate-conf...
Do you really think it is appropriate that such interrogation techniques are used on travellers after they have been cleared of carrying any sort of explosive device?
If they treat people like shit, it's a serious problem, as the vast majority of people who sets off these detectors will be entirely innocent, and will be frustrated and/or scared at being singled out and detained.
I wouldn't. My bag often sets off the bomb detector repeatedly; when that happens they just search it and send me on my way. It's no big deal. If the bag sets off the bomb detector repeatedly, the most likely reason for it is that the bag was at one point in contact with some chemical that is related to an explosives precursor. And that's OKAY. It's no big deal. You check whether the bag has explosives in it RIGHT NOW, and if it doesn't, you send the guy on his way!
(FWIW, I think I've triggered due to (a) flash paper (a magician's supply), (b) fireworks (of the safe-and-sane variety). In both cases the offending material wasn't actually present, but it had been IN the bag or IN my clothes in the prior week)
Where is the presumption of innocence? Where is the protection of the liberties and rights of the individual? Where is the responsibility and accountability of the agents of government and the officers of the law?
Nowhere to be seen here.
These are not the sorts of trends and behaviors on behalf of the state we should be defending.
"This is absolutely correct, at this time he was in limbo, he was not being detained, but he could not leave. A person cannot simply leave the security area of any airport once they are on the airside but have not satisfactorily completed screening. Once a person has passed through security, but is not cleared to fly and then chooses to leave, such as Mr. Mukerjee, s/he must be escorted out of the secure area (and usually the terminal)."
But the fact their guidelines require his bag to be cleared before he could have it back does not mean he was "detained".
There are some pretty goddamn good reasons why the bag of a dude who tests positive for explosives has to be cleared before he's given it and allowed to run around an airport full of people.
If so, there are some pretty good reason why, if they consider that threat even remotely real, they should clear the area.
A good indication that the actual terrorist threat is absolutely vanishingly small: If there were lots of terrorists around, one of the easiest targets these days that'd maximize the amount of terror, is airport security screening areas. If they get through, they could defuse the bomb and blow it up on a plane instead, if not, they could let it go off on a timer and take out both a lot of passengers and a lot of security people.
I'm not implying the terrorist threat is large – it's really, super small. But just because they haven't done THAT yet, doesn't mean they won't. So far, in the US, what they've done is sneak explosives onto planes.
Overall, bombs and shoot-outs not related to planes at all has been responsible for the vast majority of the most lethal terrorist attacks in the US apart from 9/11, both if you look at muslim terrorists separately, and other attacks in recent history.
This rebuttal also ignores the allegations of numerous instances of snide, provocative remarks by the various security and administrative officials. I'm sure Mr. Mukerjee was not helping himself with his own behavior, but does that give the TSA and related authorities license to be unprofessional in return? Does it help the situation to take a suspicious person who hasn't actually done anything and agitate them?
I'm sorry, but this rebuttal doesn't restore any confidence in the TSA, DHS, Port Authorities, airports or any other related group. I am so glad I have no cause to travel by air.
He was free to leave the airport, if escorted, as the article states quite clearly.
If there is one line that discredits this entire article, that is it. I mean, why not just call it what it is? He was being detained, and given that there was some evidence (explosive readings) against him, then there was some probable cause to do so. I'm not saying the TSA is justified in that regard... only that the article is completely disingenuous by implying that he wasn't held against his will at the hands of law enforcement.
(One of my favourite scenes for their acting, though I can't find a video.)
At the end of the day, nit-picking down to this level just makes you seem desperate to discredit, regardless of how true (or otherwise) your main arguments might be.Ts not enough for the agent to recognize his time was clearly wasted.. There it 0.0001% this guy might really be a terrorist because somebody else said so. They kept pouring resources into trying to prove him "wrong" rather than verifying a threat existed or not.
It's Kaffkaesque at its best... I'm scared of you because of my training, so it's your fault what you did to me that makes me scared. If it wasn't FOR REAL, it's so absurd to be a comedy skit.
No, I think most people just believe the TSA to be completely inept and operated without much oversight or coherence. Complaining about (repeated) bad treatment doesn't make it a conspiracy.