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Fines Terrorize the Terrorists
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The TSA claims to have the power to fine travelers who back out of the security process. What exactly is the purpose of this potential fine?The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says it can fine individuals up to $11,000 for walking away from the airport security process…People in government say the fine is mostly a deterrent so that terrorists cannot back out of a security check once it starts.
Some very stupid things have been said about airport security recently. This is a new low.
“It Gets Better” — Love, Pixar
Taliban Leader in Peace Talks Was an Impostor
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For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.
But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.
“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
There are a couple hundred people in dog kennels in Cuba right now who can attest about the U.S. Government not really giving a shit about fact-checking whether or not someone’s actually a member of the Taliban.
Priest in sex case now charged with trying to hire hitman
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A Catholic priest charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy in 2008 in the rural parish where he worked west of here was rearrested last week in Dallas and charged with trying to hire someone to kill his alleged victim.
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A monetary fine is silly, but does it make sense to allow people to walk away from being picked for special screening and all alternatives? Is the goal solely to keep terrorists off pla es, or also to arrest the ones who try to get on?
Right now the goal seems to be to arrest them – so let’s do a little test and ask all those terrorists who were arrested by the TSA if they would walk away and if a fine would have stopped that.
Surely that’s a large enough sample size, right?
Like I said, I agree the monetary fine is silly. It’s just there to keep the non-terrorists from protesting too much. My question is whether you should allow people to opt out and walk away once they enter the screening area.
If security procedures are applied through random selection and we allow people to opt out and walk away, then the terrorists can just repeatedly get in line, see if they get selected, and walk away until one time they don’t. That seems broken.
I understand there are better ways to fix this, like the “Israeli approach” to screening. But the same thing applies. If you’re interviewing someone and they act shifty and want to walk away from further questioning, should you let them?
My question is whether you should allow people to opt out and walk away once they enter the screening area.
I’m not going to ask that question. Doing so gives legitimacy to the currently utterly broken TSA procedures. I’m perfectly happy to discuss the question in other contexts, of course.