well there’s the whole “most of the country lacks the disposable income to do it regularly” bit, for one.
Their staffers do, and particularly if you’re within their district and you and other people are threatening to vote for someone else, you can get things done.
They can only COMPLETELY not give a shit about what you think if you’re not one of their voters, if you are they feel obligated to pay lip service if its one of you, and do more if it ends up being, say, a thousand or so.
Where I live, the Airistocrats tend to fly their private or charter jets from one of three smaller airports. Less traffic, fewer peasants.
Improvement in TSA screening (less invasive searching) might result if enough of us decide to stop flying for a year. A passenger strike with a coherent communication strategy might cause the commercial airlines to lobby the federal government to save their business model.
Won’t work. As a rule, people only fly when they need to.
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Most of us don’t have that luxury.
However, you are correct that the airlines will step when they need to. Delta intervened at ATL when the TSA clusterfuck became too much and actually designed infrastructure that worked better than the folding table nylon divider shambles that TSA use.
If you look oversea they have actually tried to make the process efficient, whereas TSA here spend all that energy on shouting at people and stealing things from luggage.
Delta intervened because too many people were missing flights because they were in security liens for hours and delta had to eat that cost and goodwill. I don’t think a strike would work but there must be some way to impress upon airlines that we are their customers and TSA are interfering in their business. Of course while the airlines continue to make money hand over fist and operate at close to 100% capacity there’s no incentive. They’d have a hard time accommodating increased flying business.
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I think this probably isn’t the class of economically oppressed people that @doctorow was expressing concern for, though. It’s all well and good to be friends with faux-impoverished wealthy people who like to think of themselves as poor as a way of being hip, but I think it’s unrelated to the issue of attaching user fees to services to discriminate against the poor.
The point is that Cory correctly predicted that having a paid-for higher class of check-ins would make the unpaid-for ones even worse. Not because he can see the future, but because it’s obvious.
If I only thought of how these procedures directly affected me, I’d say they are wonderful (one more nail in the coffin of a family trip to Disney World I didn’t want to go on). But other people want to or feel the need to travel sometimes, and actual security measures should not have a first-class option for those willing to pay.
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I am easily moved by what used to be standard knowledge in primary school.
/pedants unite
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I just saw that go by, but noticed that none of the proposed cuts seem to affect the groping queue.
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Hipsters? Feh. The person I have in mind, who I’m related to, isn’t oppressed as much as feckless. He has an education and a job and everything, plus a lifetime of poor impulse control. So his job, car, apartment, all suck. Not in a hipster kind of artisinal way, but in a low achievement way, maxed out credit, YOLO, fuck it, another round for my friends, dollar store kind of way. He discriminates against himself.
Of course there are also poor people with discipline and self control. I’m not in favor of my government discriminating against any of them.
But if I fly a lot, and am willing to take the initiative to fill out a 5-minute form, then schedule and actually go to a 10-minute appointment, provide the correct info, let them do a background check, let them take fingerprints, put that all on my permanent record and come up with the $85 instead of vaping it, then I can get a faster, more pleasant security line than my bro who prefers Jell-O shots and ESPN. His choice.
As for the honest-to-jeebus, noble poor, please show me where I can contribute to offsetting their TSA Pre enrollment fee, as I proposed earlier in this thread. I would do it gladly. Would it absolve me?
Anyway, there are well-settled legal principles as to whether an activity such as a government program discriminates. I don’t have time to do the research, but I’ll bet airport security arguably falls into the gray area of the standard. Or else we’d see lawsuits. Fortunately (?), as the original post raises, with TSA reaching deeper into our orifices like this, we may in fact see lawsuits. But even if TSA loses this time, it won’t eliminate intrusive searches entirely, just this particular depth of probe. You think they will come up with something else? You can bet your booty they will.
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I’m thinking my response to you is based on a misunderstanding. If there are two lines and one is the more desirable line to be in, then it’s reasonable to talk about the good fortune of the people in the more desirable line. We can think of that fortune in the abstract, and we can also talk about the specific form that good fortune takes. Since the post talked about the form of the good fortune (wealth and connectedness) there was a space to get into an argument about whether that was really the form of the good fortune (e.g. maybe the real reason a lot of people end up in the “bad line” is because they couldn’t navigate government bureaucracy well).
But some of us see the form of the good fortune as a side issue to issue of there being two lines in the first place (where it’s okay to dehumanize people in one line and less okay to do so to the other). Looking at it through that lens, if someone says, “Hey, I’m not wealthy and well-connected” it looks like they are saying, “I’m not fortunate.” And that puts the person into the group of internet posters who get feel demonized when someone suggests they are fortunate in any way. But sometimes comments actually do paint people as villains, it’s not always in people’s heads.
I hope my comments didn’t demonize people who would rather to end up in the better line. I think tipping at restaurants is an awful tradition that hurts restaurant workers but I still go to restaurants and leave tips when I do.
There are well settled legal principles as to whether an activity such as a government program counts as discrimination for legal purposes, but even then those principles shift over time based on social changes (e.g., right now it’s pretty clear that there are no well settled legal principles as to whether an activity counts against transgender people). But we’re not going to have laws against discrimination on people based on how much money they have. The point of capitalism is that the wealthy are supposed to be better off than the poor.
Being fucked in the ass by an unsympathetic stranger (to borrow from the smbc comic linked by @SheiffFatman, above shouldn’t be part of air travel security. Separating the people going through security into two lines - whether it’s by age, skin colour, who paid a fee, or anything else - is going to create a situation where the line considered less deserving sees their treatment degenerate.
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First, let me say thank you for responding in a way that’s supportive of dialog. I despair for civility sometimes.
If “two lines in the first place” is the crux of this matter, then I believe it is not unique to airport security, as I babbled about above:
I’m trying to think of other examples where frequent users of a government service can pay to bypass the heavy-handed/inconvenient version of a government procedure (legally ; ) but still stay subject to that procedure. Toll roads, maybe. Express mail. Prestige public universities. That said, I also use Clear, which is private. So that’s more like FedEx, Harvard. Are there private toll roads?
By express mail I meant USPS express mail, a better, but still public, service at a higher fee. I can see how being able to watch me sail through security might make someone clench in a way them seeing me receive express mail wouldn’t. But it’s arguably the same difference, is it not?
The other interesting question you raise is whether, for any conceivable public purpose, such an intrusive search crosses the threshold of things the public shouldn’t have to endure. The theory is our policy makers take the public’s temperature and craft policy accordingly. Protests, lawsuits, voting, tweeting and other methods are at our disposal for pushing back against overreach. Clearly our policy makers think a poke in the “eye” is going to be acceptable because terrrists. Is it? When consensus emerges, it will continue or stop.
In the interim, if there’s an option and I can afford it, and if I can manage/stomach the paperwork, I will take it. After this conversation, I will also be more observant, maybe chat with people more about it, think it through, maybe subsidize a poor person. And after I get an “SSSS” with free rectal exam, I’m sure I will be more motivated to complain.
How many Yesses can I give this observation?
I could go round and round the argument circle, but it ultimately comes back to this.
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I sense a business opportunity. It isn’t a rectal exam, it is a “Cost Beneficial Colon Cancer Screening Exam”.
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Yeah, so I think the two-lines thing holds in the private sector too, and you can make an analogy to FedEx. It’s just that the FedEx example is an example where we are looking at what we regard as the normal function of capitalism - you pay more for better service. Presumably FedEx will try to keep the customers in each line happy by allowing them to make their own decisions about balancing price vs. service in order to stay in business. [I’ll leave critiques of capitalism for another thread]
I think there are a few big differences between that and airport security.
First, the entire argument for why the FedEx thing isn’t a problem rests on there being a number of choices available in the market. If the TSA were competing against another security option and people had real choice between them, maybe they’d be less inclined to pat people’s genitals.
Second, the reason why that first point sounds like a farce. Airport security can’t be optional and it can’t offer people the option to paying to circumvent it. The pre-screening option is (supposedly, I have no idea) just that - pre-screening. The same level scrutiny has to be paid, but you submit some forms ahead of time to reduce the scrutiny necessary on the day of the flight. One of the reasons we have the government provide security rather than having private police forces is that it’s necessary to do so for rule of law. Movement towards pay-for-police or pay-for-security is a sort of unique case of dangerous.
Third, if a private business acquired a monopoly and decided to use it to force people to submit to rectal probes to acquire a service, the government would step in an do something about it. Private businesses are all regulated by the public. That’s what this whole article is about. If FedEx went to the local cops and said, “Look, people might start giving you a lot of sexual assault complaints,” the local cops would say, “Okay, we will take them quite seriously (as seriously as we ever take them anyway).” What the hell is prewarning police that they may get a lot of reports of your agents committing crimes? Are they going to be committing crimes?
So I think in principle the two-lines thing is always going to be problematic, but the really big problems it can create are all muted when private enterprise is involved because private businesses have competitors (often), provide services that are less necessary (in some cases), and can’t sexually assault you legally (hopefully?).
I think it’s a good point that the focus should be on the fact that treatment is unacceptable rather than on how the screen process is unfair. I think the screening process is important because it’s part of the system that created the worse treatment, but the big problem is that people are being treated in unacceptable ways.
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FedEx
Let’s be clear I’m referring to US Postal Service Express Mail, which is a public service for fast mail that costs more than USPS first class or priority service, with FedEx being the private competitor. Still, your point holds that there’s no analog in the private sector for TSA Pre… unless you count private jet travel, but that’s not really competitive with even first class commercial flying.
circumvent
TSA Pre is not a total sail-through though. You have to empty your pockets, send your bags through the x-ray, and go through the metal detector. If they see anything, or occasionally at random, you get secondary screened. And you don’t always get Pre either, on the order of 1 time out of 20 or something like that.
pre-screening
I don’t happen to know what they look at for the background check, although that’s possibly posted or standard info. Whatever they are, they’re risk factors figured out by one intelligence agency or another. Unlike the Commander-in-Chief, I’ll assume these people are not monkeys and that the criteria are useful.
rectal probes
As titillating as it may be to deep dive on anal digital action, the posted article was actually only about “pat-downs”, and the relevant posted portion of the article actually only said: “… may involve an officer making more intimate contact than before.” I’m not a choreographer or fluffer or whatever, but I know my own stuff, and I can’t imagine how someone would check for something hidden down there without actually making some kind of contact. I can also imagine many law-abiding citizens don’t get a lot of that kind of contact and may find it confusing. Also, it’s not a precision activity, made even less so by hammer pants, tinfoil-wrapped-cucumbers, vaporous emanations and so forth. It will only take a few outlier events to set off a tweetstorm. Maybe if they ask nicely?
treatment
That gives me an idea. Why don’t they issue a warning, like the FBI bluescreen at the beginning of a movie. A sign, or an audio recording, or hand you a piece of paper when they look at your boarding pass and ID, or saying something like: “This is required. I will try to be gentle, but I have to go quickly. It may not feel nice, and I may jostle you more than you would like. If this troubles you, I can send you over to the priority area, where a supervisor will do the pat-down more slowly and carefully. May I proceed?” This gives people (especially travel noobs) a heads-up, an explanation, and a choice. It would cut the complaints by two orders of magnitude, I’d wager. If I ran the TSA…
They couldn’t find a full tube of toothpaste and a Swiss Army Knife on me. How the hell are they going to find cancer?
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…With a tube of toothpaste and a Swiss army knife?
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MacGyver works for the TSA now?
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We agree on the main point - you can’t circumvent security, you have to do it. If people are paying to actually get reduced security that’s a whole other problem. I’m giving the monkeys running airport security less credit than you are (I kind of think those “background checks” might be more “skin tone checks”), but not so much less that I’ll guess they are actually saying, “$85? I guess you can bring a bomb on the plane, what do we care.”
I know that at this point they aren’t actually doing cavity searches, and use it as more of a metaphor (though a bad one since cavity searches are not sufficiently exaggerated to be obviously a joke). I do think there has to be some thought put to how far would be too far, and if things have already gone too far.
Well, I think the approach is certainly part of the problem. It’s amazing how much good will you can get from people by being polite and showing a little empathy. My memories of airport security and customs are a little more “You will respect my authority!” than “I’m sorry this might be uncomfortable for you.”
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I would pay extra.
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