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Comment by ben509 | Hacker News Reader

> Ah yes, the good ol' You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

You haven't got a shred of evidence of malicious intent, so you just toss around accusations of racist conspiracies. That's insane and shameful.

(I happen to think the TSA is misguided and unnecessary, but that's irrelevant to the question of discrimination.)

> If you build discrimination into the system you don't have to explicitly discriminate

There's a problem with people smuggling dangerous items on to aircraft, and the system is trying to address that to prevent people of all races dying.

The system has to find things that are hidden, and that means it has to discern between people who have more places to hide items on their body.

That design of the system is a natural consequence of the parameters of the problem, not some vast conspiracy to oppress minorities.

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You are accidentally correct in saying that there is no conspiracy to oppress minorities. Conspiracy implies that it's hidden. It isn't.

We have mountains of malicious intent established and chronicled to the point where the burden of proof is not on those downstream of that malice to substantiate it. That mountain is conveniently labeled "American policing and jurisprudence relating thereto, 1620-Present".

> There's a problem with people smuggling dangerous items on to aircraft

That problem is a vanishingly small rounding error and the good-faith effort to fix it would be more air marshals. Instead, we get nonsense like this which, because the scanning devices look scary and dehumanize those who go through them, entrench a threat in the minds of the populace--because a threat must be serious, otherwise why would we be putting ourselves through all this?

These tools exist to scare people into seeking solutions to the problem they purport to, and yet do not, solve.

While we can see people disagree if this is discrimination or not, everyone agree that the system employed by the TSA is ineffective, humiliating and security theater. Air marshals are better. Dog patrols are great.

Only in areas which is very close to war would current methods be necessary, but you also need multiple checks which manually going through every single item in luggage and backpacks. This is only really possible in low traffic airports, which destinations close to wars usually is.

> There's a problem with people smuggling dangerous items on to aircraft

We have a lot of evidence that these machines are minimally effective against most terrorist threats.

How many terrorist incidents has TSA credibly prevented? The answer is zero.

How can you count events that never happened? Especially if they were deterred from even being attempted by the existence of TSA alone.

Do you think a government agency would just publicly blast all the unsuccessful attempts that were prevented, without fear that future criminals can look at those attempts and do better next time by learning how to avoid making the same mistakes?

Disclaimer: I agree with most of the posters that TSA is mostly just a security theater. But just because I think so, that doesn't make the flawed parent argument any better.

There's a gulf between publishing some basic statistics and blasting the specific details of all unsuccessful terrorist attacks that were thwarted.

Surely those statistics can be verified by, say, the House Committee on Homeland Security without needing to leak the details of specific attempts.

So can we agree that the system (which I'm taking to mean the combination of tech, people and procedure) is doing a really shit job then, because, beyond not doing what it's supposed to do, it's disproportionately singling out certain races?

Perhaps if it's singling out dense hair vs. actual places where people are hiding something, despite any evidence being presented that it's useful to do so, we should... I dunno, not use it? Definitely not spend millions of dollars on it.

I'm not sure what problem it's solving, when the solution involves humans mindlessly following a procedure, that dictates that a machine that happens to single out black hair and 'turbans' decides someone is suspect.

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