Wow, what a disappointing response. Talking about bombs at the airport is not the same as having literature in your carry-on with the word "bomb" on it. The last novel I brought on a flight talked extensively about bombs, should I have tossed it in the garbage before going through security?
When people like you rationalize every individual curtailment on civil liberties without considering the bigger implications and precedents being set, that's how you wake up to discover you've completely lost freedoms that your parents took for granted.
And you go even further, talking about how citizens should have to consider how their actions are going to be perceived by low-paid, under-educated TSA agents, rather than giving a moment's pause to wonder why low-paid, under-educated TSA agents are handling security for our nation's airports.
Question nothing, blame the victim. Superb critical thinking.
Can you honestly not see the difference between having a book that has the word bomb in it and having a set of 80 hand-written cards with the words "bomb", “terrorist,” “explosion,” “attack,” “battle,” “kill,” “to target,” “to kidnap,” and “to wound" (among others) on them, and handing those cards to security agents?
Any reasonable person knows that those words will cause alarm in security agents. Why chose to handwrite those cards and then hand them over to those agents?
The ACLU articles all make it sound like Arabic language is the problem. But if he had French language flashcards with those words on he'd have got a similar result.
The ACLU does not mention the content of the flashcards in their articles. The ACLU has an illustration with words like "sun" and "dog". This is borderline deceptive. Arabic flashcards without words like "bomb" would have been fine. Any language flashcards with words like "bomb" would not have been fine.
> Question nothing, blame the victim. Superb critical thinking.
Interesting that you accept the ACLU story without question -it obviously appeals to your biases- and are affronted when someone presents the court case. Critical thinking indeed.
Not in carry-on. Passed a stack of cards directly to an agent. Almost comically stupid. TSA's job is to alert on oddities. A stack of cards with Arabic on one side and English words like "bomb" and "terrorist"... This takes the cake.
TSA alerts as they should, they are not qualified to do any more. The police should have called this guy an idiot and told him to get lost but it doesn't surprise me that it was beyond their pay grade and it took a few hours to call in a unit that could actual evaluate this guy.
Read Section I of the court doc and this is actually a reasonable edge-case [1]. Not to mention the recent travel to the middle east!
Is it your critical thinking that equates having a novel about a bomb in your carry-on with handing a stack of Arabic flash cards with "bomb", "to kidnap", and "kill" directly to a security agent? Because I'm not sure how you could possibly think those two are equivalent. Your actions do not happen in a vacuum, and it should be obvious why his actions would raise a red flag for TSA officers. The illegal arrest by the Philadelphia officers certainly wasn't justified, but the TSA officers' actions most definitely were.
It is fairly interesting that the rest of the people replying to you find it suspicious that somebody is carrying flash cards with the words "terrorist" and "bomb". They make no mention that there was no specific threat, and no bomb or other actually illegal possessions. There is no way you cannot criticize their faculties for judgement.
When people like you rationalize every individual curtailment on civil liberties without considering the bigger implications and precedents being set, that's how you wake up to discover you've completely lost freedoms that your parents took for granted.
And you go even further, talking about how citizens should have to consider how their actions are going to be perceived by low-paid, under-educated TSA agents, rather than giving a moment's pause to wonder why low-paid, under-educated TSA agents are handling security for our nation's airports.
Question nothing, blame the victim. Superb critical thinking.