Comment by pjc50
1 day ago
The problem with allowing "feels unsafe" to drive policy is that you get this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866201 ; a lot of Americans (and other nationalities) get that "feels unsafe" feeling when they see a visible minority. Or a Muslim. Or someone who isn't a Muslim but (like a Sikh!) is from the same hemisphere as the Middle East.
You get one set of people's rights compromised to salve the feelings of another set, and this is not right.
The worst thing is that indulging it doesn't lessen the fear either. It just means people reach for something else to be "afraid" of.
Oh for sure, as a non-white, bearded person I've had more than my fair share of "random" screenings!
My dad, with similar features, had the additional (mis)fortune of several work trips to the Middle East and China on his passport. He was "randomly" selected pretty much every time on his US trips, until about ~10 years ago.
Hmmm, now I wonder. Like most other people I had suspected that the "random" screenings of people fitting a certain profile were just biases of the agents creeping in. But could it be, given that the whole process is rather public in view of the rest of the people in line, this is also part of that security theater... i.e. maybe the agents are sometimes pandering to the biases of the travellers?
Nah I disagree. A charter plane with 200 Dutch tourists is lower risk than a flight coming out of Bolivia.
You can do the wokeness and treat everyone the same but that's not how policing works.
The moment you encode your biases in policy, you create vulnerabilities.
What I’m hearing is that if I want to get something past your security policy, I need to route it through the Netherlands, possibly via a travel agency.
You don't have to profile people to police, and that's very poor policing. You need to assess actual risk, not fake proxy risk like the color of people's skin.
The problem with profiling is that it sucks both ways. People who are regular degular get fucked for the sake of fake policing, and then real threats are more likely to slip through.
> Nah I disagree. A charter plane with 200 Dutch tourists is lower risk than a flight coming out of Bolivia.
What a weird and random thing to say. There's literally no data that can support for or against and neither have a history of terrorism.
Ironically KLM ('dutch') has had more terrorism per flight than any Bolivian airline. Both minimal (Bolivia 1954, KLM 1973,1994). There's literally no other piece of data between these countries that I could find to support this "lower risk".
Further, the travel advisory for Denmark and Netherlands cite terror risk while Bolivia cites civil unrest.
While being woke is not helpful, neither is 'winging it' based on 'what feels white, ahem, right'. At least do a Google search.
How about a flight coming out of Bolivia with 200 Dutch tourists on board? Is it more or less risky than a flight coming out of the USA with 200 Donald Trumps on board? Is there a list?
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