On that suspicious looking (black) guy ...

Honestly, I have no idea how a black feels day in and day out ... I can only imagine that it ain't always fun.

On a very, very, small scale, the only way I think I can even begin to understand how the skin color and other differences could be viewed as off the norm is whenever I return to the US. 

It has been a different country the past few years, ever since Homeland Security became a monster organization.  The immigration officers ask a whole lot of questions when I am at their counters for processing.  Almost always, I don't get a green light at customs and am directed to go through additional checks.  When the lighter skinned people ahead of me and behind me don't face this, which is a consistent pattern, then I am left with a working hypothesis that my appearance and accent and everything else is viewed with suspicion. 

The conversation with the immigration official, during the latest instance, went something like this:

"How ya doin?"
"Fine, thanks. How are you?"
"Good. What countries did you visit while you were away?"
"Only India"
"How long were you gone?"
"For about three months"
"What did you do in India for three months?"
"Meeting with friends and family. And a whole lot of traveling"
"What work do you do for you to take off for three months?"
"I teach at a university"
"Where do you teach?"
"In Oregon?"
"What subject do you teach?"
"Economic geography"
"Where is your Indian visa?"
"Oh, sorry, it is in my passport that expired. This is a new passport. Here it is"
"Welcome home"
"Thanks"

In the years before Homeland Security, it was merely a quick scan of the documents with a friendly attitude and a parting "welcome home."  Now, it is often the case that I have to deal with so many questions, while it always seems to be the old-style quick processing for the lighter skinned travelers.

And then off to the customs. I hand the customs declaration form, and the officer does not wave me through.  Instead, I have to go through another process.  After scanning my suitcases and carry-on, the officer there asked me, "what do you have in here?"

I was so tempted to tell him that after he scanned it, he ought to have known what was in!  But, no point being smarty-mouthed in these contexts, right?  So, I politely said, "clothes, books, and gifts." 

"What kind of gifts?"

I hid my pissed-off feeling and replied "wood carvings, brass items"

He flagged me through and I was off wondering what the point was!

Woody Allen predicted the TSA scan porn ... kinda :)

In providing this hilarious Woody Allen video clip (from Bananas), Reason notes that all along we had the "solution to the problems posed by the underwear bomber" :)

Photo of the day: not from Playboy :)

The elections ended.  I wondered then where the next source for comedy would come from, and the TSA porn happens.

This meme is like the cops/doughnut and Bill Clinton/sex themed jokes--I will keep laughing away forever :)

The photo on the right is from the Denver Post (ht).  Think again: do you really want to fly, ever?

Have the terrorists exposed America's Achilles heel?

Ever since the incidents of 9/11, the US has been on a warpath in the domestic front--with security.  Looking back, it now seems like the disgusting coinage of "homeland security" was nothing trivial.  It has evolved into an uncontrollable police state, writes Megan McArdle:

It seems to me that the TSA ratchets up the security the way a government in a police state would.  Perhaps there are some public deliberations that I'm missing, but from the perspective of a passenger, there's no attempt to achieve balance.  There's simply a progressive ratcheting of our liberty ever downward.  Did Richard Reid try to put explosives in his shoes?  Then we must have our shoes scanned--even infant shoes too small to blow anything up.  Did someone else attempt to set his underwear on fire?  Well, if you can't strip them down to their skivvies for a check, do the next best thing:  find a machine that does it virtually.

Somehow, this seems like a questionable reaction to two attacks that failed.  Especially since they failed for the same reason that any similar attack is likely to fail:  the amount of explosives you can smuggle in your underwear or shoes is necessarily small, meaning that you need to be in the cabin to detonate them if you want to be sure that you'll bring the plane down.  And it's really hard to set your underwear, or your shoes, on fire without your fellow passengers noticing.  In Asia, I've never been required to have my shoes scanned--not even to get on a US bound flight.  And yet, we have not been confronted with a rash of exploding planes out of Taipei or Saigon.

The TSA seems to have assumed that the ratchet could keep moving downward indefinitely (notice that they never seem to find ways to make searches less invasive and annoying.)  I think that the backscatter/invasive search deployment may finally have gone too far--although I freely admit that this may be wishful thinking.

Yes, it is wishful thinking.  Because, as in police states, we the people comply without protest.

Have the TSA screenings ever resulted in would-be terrorists being apprehended?

Citing national-security concerns, the TSA will not point to any specific cases in which a screener stopped a would-be terrorist at a checkpoint. Nonaffiliated security experts, such as Bruce Schneier (who coined the term "security theater") argue that that's because this has never happened.

Anything else on the efficacy of the TSA?

What's more, the GAO noted that at least 16 individuals later accused of involvement in terrorist plots flew 23 different times through U.S. airports since 2004, but TSA behavior-detection officers didn't sniff out any of them.
What these numbers don't get at is whether the TSA airport screeners prevent terrorist attacks through their very existence—deterring plots by hanging around. This is quite probably the case, but it's not obvious that they prevent any more attacks than the private contractors who handled checkpoints before the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 went into effect.

Cartoon of the day: TSA strip searches

A gift that keeps on giving ... in the cartoon world :)

Colbert analyzes the TSA porn

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
TSA Full-Body Scanners - Jeffrey Goldberg
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

TSA all over on Twitter: very funny :)

I suppose "Don't touch my junk" will be way more viral than "Don't tase me, bro" ... Twitter has been a godsend in how we are able to get our frustrations out, and sometimes in a funny way.  Here are some I came across:

Janet Napolitano's memoirs: The Audacity of Grope
We're having a debate over placing tip buckets next to the groping station
It's not a grope.  It is a freedom pat.
TSA fortune cookie: You will be touched in a special way
Why is TSA like AT&T? They both want to reach out and touch someone
Another false positive: it wasn't a bomb but a bad case of hemorrhoids

Ok. Will stop here.

ACLU has a site up and running, to collect particulars on TSA abuse.  Click here if you want to report your experience.

The geography of top secret America

I would love it if the Association of American Geographers invited the Washington Post journalists, Dana Priest and Williiam Arkin, to be speakers at a plenary session at the next Annual Meeting in Seattle.  It will be fantastic to listen to them talk about their two-year investigation into the geography of the ultra secretive American government since 9/11.  The map and the geographic database they have assembled is bloody frightening--that in a democratic society we could have such a system!

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

The Matrix seems more and more real, and less and less fictional :(

ht

Cartoon of the day: how we confuse terrorists and confuse ourselves!

Homeland (In)Security at Airports

Jeffrey Goldberg has a fantastic piece in The Atlantic on the many, many, holes in airport security crap that we go through. What are the different things that he carried with him and was not stopped or pulled aside? Plenty that you think any fifth grader will know how to stop. And, of course, the fake boarding passes that pretty much the entire world knows about. It is all Bullshit as Professor Harry Frankfurt might say :-)

An excerpt:

And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary
screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a
neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube.