"If the government ever gives you the chance to bribe them, do it immediately and with a smile. Pay double if they'll let you. You'll always come out ahead in the long run."

Precheck/Global entry is clearly unrelated to actual security; instead, it's an obvious shakedown, plain and simple. The TSA has given you a chance to pay them extra to be harassed less. From this perspective the GP is correct in practice - you'd be dumb not to pay up.

It's a difficult decision, one that I've been wrestling with for a while.

Imagine if everyone (and I mean everyone) collectively said "This is bullshit." and refused to pay for PreCheck. The TSA would have no choice but to stop the program. This is probably the only way they would stop it (beyond legislation, ha.).

Unfortunately this will never happen. People don't want to stand in line. Corporations have the money to shell out to give their travelling employees special treatment. Many will refuse step back and see that the only way to stop this shit is to make some personal sacrifices for the eventual reward of getting another lane back for everyone to use.

Perhaps others and I are "dumb" to not want to pay up, but we do so in the hopes that others will follow suit. We refuse to be a single drop in the rain on the TSA's fields. Perhaps one day those fields will dry.

I personally believe that we have the TSA and the pre-check program because the majority of Americans want something like this, just like a near-majority of Americans really think that putting a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration is a good idea.[1]

Pre-check, or some way of harassing "them" without harassing "Us," I think, is rather a lot like what Americans wanted when they gave George W. Bush a second term.

I think we have the government we asked for. I mean, certainly, it's irrational, and of course, the profiling ended up being a lot less race based than expected, and, of course, it's now unionized, so some of the people who originally asked for it are now opposed to it, but that doesn't change the fact that this is what America demanded, that the man who gave us this got two terms.

[1]http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/ques...

(yes, yes, bias. But according to Silvers, we're talking under 5% bias, which still gives us some pretty scary numbers.)

What we're seeing with the hours-long lines right now is that this simply isn't true. The TSA has no particular incentive to reduce the number of hoops you have to jump through: if anything, a summer like this will probably increase their budget.

So, indeed: pay up for PreCheck and smile because they've given you the opportunity.

You miss an important concept (that I used to see all the time from administrators in India): Divide and Conquer. They will target some groups of people individually, and dangle some carrot/stick (Free/ Extra Harassment/ you don't have to stand in line with "them"). That's how "everyone" stops calling bullshit.

I'm not sure if that's true. So much of security is statistical (this is where profiling and stuff comes in, racial or otherwise). If you can spend some time doing a more thorough check beforehand[1], then you can (stochastically) assume that there's a lower chance of them being a threat and thus a lower need for screening each and every trip. The idea being that you're far less likely than average to get radicalized and hijack a plane if you're [insert features like type of job]. Frankly, I find it uncharacteristically intelligent of the TSA.

[1] My global entry interview required me to go in to the airport and show a bunch of documentation proving my place of residence, place of employment, etc.

It's supposed to be within the US, though, just like in Schengen. That's due to law, not some magical "right", though.

edit: what is a "basic right" supposed to be, anyway? I missed that day in philosophy class.

Fundamental rights that are inherent to all humans by birth and cannot be justly alienated. It's a major philosophical topic you've probably seen reflected in the universal declaration of human rights, american declaration of independence, french revolutionary declaration of the rights of man etc .

There's a terrible and anglocentric wikipedia page devoted to this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights

You might think it would be arguable but John Gilmore discovered you can't even argue it -- the law is secret and cannot be discussed in open court, thus he had no standing to sue over it: https://papersplease.org/gilmore/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales

The wikipedia entry is slightly misleading on one point: the ninth circuit said he could travel without ID (this case came about because I had been flying without ID and discussed it with John) -- his suit was that he had no choice due to a law he was not permitted to read (yet ignorance of that law is no defense!) and he argued that that was a violation of free speech + free assembly. Without being able to discuss the law in open court, the justification for the decision was a fig leaf.