So, you get to pay to bypass the theater? Seems like extortion then, since anyone with any actually bad intentions and money will try to pay it.

Why have a "security measure" only to allow bypassing it?

The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval and the reasons for denial are of course obtuse.

You were 100% right until the random racism thing. I'm completely aware I'm paying a bribe for favorable government treatment. Paying the bribe is better individually though. I'd even agree if you said Global Entry is only $30 more because your fingerprints are part of the payment.

Welcome to fascism. In Mussolini’s words “government you can do business with” great if you have money sucks for everyone else.

> anyone with any actually bad intentions and money will try to pay it.

Except it's not gated by the tiny fee, but with the background check. Only those who are statistically very low risk will be approved (which indeed is most people -- by design).

> The answer is probably racism. Not everyone is allowed a pre-approval

Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient.

The fee is quite obviously not material to anyone who can afford air travel anyway. It would be a more serious critique if the fee were say, $1,500 a year. But for a hundred bucks every few years, this is neither extortion, nor a burden. It's just paying the admin costs of the program, which means not using general fund money (everyone's taxes) to pay for background checks for rich business travelers. That's progressive.

And the alternative to this type of program would be the silliness where some random grandma or child gets invasively searched because "we have to be random."

> Is it racist to know the fact that say, zero schoolteachers from Iowa with no history of travel to the Middle East have ever hijacked a plane, but quite a few people from Saudi Arabia and Iran, or who have contacts there, have? And to allow the teacher to bypass the whole mess? I'd say that's efficient.

Iowans have committed significantly more homicides per capita than people from most European countries (or Saudi Arabia, for that matter). I don't think it's problematic if European airports screen Iowans more heavily than Europeans and Saudis. Do you?

If they had a reputation for committing those homicides in Europe, that seems sensible. As stated though, it would be a big waste of their time. I mean, they are free to do their own risk assessments and run their security as they see fit either way, though.

If you really believe the public is kept safe most effectively by pretending to be fully blind to nationality when choosing who to screen at an airport (since you can't intensively screen everyone) I don't know what to tell you.

Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.

You are aware that people from US states with no history of foreign travel have self-radicalized, right?

> If they had a reputation for committing those homicides in Europe, that seems sensible.

Reputation?

Are we deciding security policies by reputation or statistics?

I think I'd win the bet of "Americans have killed more people (per capita) in other countries than Saudis have", so it does seem relevant to be more wary of them. Especially given how widespread the former has been, compared to a few incidents with the latter.

> If you really believe ... I don't know what to tell you.

That does seem evident, yes.

> Although it's interesting that the same people who would take that position seem to also argue that colorblindness is actually a sin if it's done while processing a college application.

Citation?

>Iowans have committed significantly more homicides per capita than people from most European countries

That is true only if you start the count in 1946 or later!

Yeah, so this makes more sense. Even if I accept this statistic about Iowans, which I am fairly dubious of, your position still doesn't make sense. You would be saying that in situations of crimes of passion, gas station robberies, etc that it would be more likely for an Iowan to commit a murder than someone from Saudi Arabia (again, still dubious claim but I will grant it), this doesn't say anything about terrorist acts particularly related to air travel.

It’s mostly a background check. I’d guess that most denials are due to drunken stupidity.

If it was free, I would be more accepting of this answer. Since you have to pay it is just extortion and it incentivizes poor service in the gen pop TSA lanes. Generally you want to avoid incentivizing a public service to be shitty.

So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program, and the program is useful in that adding a fast lane speeds up the lines for everyone, as the fast lane inherently has more capacity per hour. And it also means fewer people to be screened by the primary lanes, which means more attention can be put toward a group statistically more likely to contain a bad actor (because they have had no background checks).

The fee is tiny compared to the costs of a plane ticket. It's $100 for multiple years of validity.

> So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program,

The cost to do security checks on people scales with the number of people. There are plenty of taxes and fees already included with plane tickets; whatever "security fee" is actually necessary to fund reasonable security can be tacked onto the cost of tickets that way, and will automatically charge more from people flying more often (and won't penalize people who don't fly at all).

The only possible economic benefits separating it out into an optional multi-year subscription service provides for any party are 1) overcharging people who misgauge actually "needing" it when they don't end up flying enough to meet whatever your threshold for judging that is, and 2) actually not fully charging super-frequent fliers for the amount of workload they put on the system.

We're supposed to be a country of equals. Not one where the well-heeled can buy better public service.

Flying is not a public service. There has never been anything equal about flying.

If the government is offering special access privileges, it is. Next up, reading exams for voter registration to boost literacy.

I also had to pay a fee to the government for my driver’s license to have access to drive and passport to leave the country. Should those also be free?

Why shouldn't it be free for frequent travelers then? If it has all these benefits, including lower overall cost, surely it makes sense to not disincentive its use by charging for it.

If you are a frequent traveler, you probably have one of the many credit cards that reimburse you.

But who is going to keep up with the “frequent travelers”?

How much cost is avoided by having far fewer people in the lines for deeper searches by even more TSA agents every flight?

Yeah, at the expense of my civil liberties. You do realize that you have to do a background check and an interview to get that, right? Whereas when I was a child you didn't have to do any of that to enjoy the right to keep your belt and your shoes on at the airport.

>You do realize

Yes, because I did the interview. But then I've done the background check and interview for jobs as well. And honestly, there's a ton of that information about you in computers if you travel by air at all. Don't fly (in particular) if you want to be anonymous.

The U.S. used to take pride in freedom of movement. In fiction, demands for papers were a classic sign of a government gone over the line. Now you need ID even for a Greyhound or Amtrak. I guess you can still walk or ride a bicycle.

Funnily enough, a while back (may be different now) I somehow lost my license between the car and the terminal door and didn't have any backup because it was a last minute trip. Guessing it's not the case today post-RealID but I was still able to get through TSA. The kicker though was that I had to go through all sorts of machinations to check into the Travelodge near the airport and pay in cash. Ever since, I use a generally useless global entry ID as identification at the airport and keep my driver's license well secured.

Yeah, similar experiences on both counts in early 2000s. The hotel's refusal to honor a reservation even with cash in advance was part of the new "not the country I grew up in" feeling, those years.

It has more to do with having a credit card on file in case of damages.

And like I said in another reply, the country you grew up in was probably different than the country my still living parents grew up in in the Jim Crow south.

Yes, it was. One thing there seems to be more of is bundling of politics, like "Y is bad" as rejoinder to "X is good" with no necessary link between them.

I think I asked what deposit they would need. It had never been an issue before.

My point isn’t political. But when people wax poetically about how great the US use to be, it definitely wasn’t great even in the 70s for a percentage of people living in the south

I agree that Y is bad, actually.

I think you still have the right to travel without ID. The TSA may demand it, and may tell you it's legally required, but that doesn't make that true. If you show up at the airport without an ID, you'll still be allowed to fly domestically. Of course, how easy that is probably depends on whether you frame it as a "woops!" or as a "fuck you guys!". They'll put you through extra "security" screening and try to confirm your ID other ways.

"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."

https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/05/19/tsa-tries-again-to-im... https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...

Apparently, this is changing: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification...

I think only their definition of ”acceptable ID” is changing. The section for ”Don’t Have Your Acceptable ID?” stays the same.

That reads basically like "if you seem cooperative enough with our extra effort to check your identity, we'll probably let you through". That's just a very different country from "you need greenbacks to buy a ticket over the counter."

Similarly though admittedly more permissive, with Amtrak iirc it's like: you need a credit card and they probably won't check your ID. There were several more years after 9/11 before the "papers please" principle came for the trains and buses too.

E.g. search turned up a claim Greyhound "employees are not allowed to sell a ticket without an official ID" https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/140703/i-have-no-...

If you walk onto the train with a ticket you printed, I don't think I've ever been asked for an ID. I might if I were picking up a ticket at the station.

You definitely need ID for hotels a lot of the time. Not sure the level where the regulations are put in place--probably varies--and Europe is probably more formal than the US in this regard. Was staying with a friend in Europe about a year ago and they had to take our passports to the police station to make us "official."

As I wrote elsewhere, I also had a challenge in the US a few years back but I expect that, had I been at my usual chain, there would have been a discussion with the manager followed by "I see nothing, I hear nothing."

Would that be the same country that had an average of one plane hijacking a day?

Which country was that?

ID is not security.

For planes? Look at the number of hijackings in the 60’s and 70s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking cites two figures for the U.S. rate of hijacking attempts near its peak. The higher one is "Between 1968 and 1977, there were approximately 41 hijackings per year." meaning once per 9 days, an order of magnitude below yours. The other is once per 13.3 days over 1968-72. If both Wikipedia numbers are reliable then the peak must be somewhat higher than 1/9 in 73-77.

Okay, you’re right. So does that mean we should get rid of security measures?

I already said ID is not security. How many 70s hijackers got away unidentified? How many would not have even tried if they also had to show ID? I can think of one case, "D. B. Cooper".

This conversation just doesn't seem promising. Your initial wildly-off claim got me worried I might misunderstand the world by that much (I remember the 70s, fuzzily). I wasted time checking it, wondering if the actual peak might be in a year not mentioned, trying to find the paper Wikipedia cited: it was a non-open-access paper with at least four links to check; one of them did show the first page, which at least gave the figure in question, if not the ultimate source.

They can claim whatever they want, but that doesn't make it true. The law hasn't changed. It sucks to be in this situation, though.

> Now you need ID even for a Greyhound or Amtrak.

I've taken Amtrak quite a bit in the last few years (Emeryville & Truckee in California, and NYC, Philly, BWI, and DC in the east), and I've never been asked for ID to board a train. (In other words, trivially easy for someone to do something nefarious if they wanted to.)

No security checkpoints, no ticket checking before getting on the train, just someone checking tickets on the train itself 10-20 minutes after it gets moving.

You also don't actually need an ID to fly, though if you try that, give yourself plenty of time to get through "extra security".

I’ve never been asked for ID on a greyhound (~10 trips) or amtrak (~25 trips).

I’m sure they both have policies about it on the books, but I’ve never seen them enforced

Are we talking about the same US that didn’t allow my parents to attend certain schools, drink from the same water fountain, forced them to be in the back of a theater, and had separate colleges?

I used to be in the same mindset as you.

Now, I have Global Entry (which includes TSA Pre).

I rationalized it in a few ways:

* "The Government" already has all the information GE wants. Finger prints, photo ID, "interview" (answering the question "Are you a terrorist?"). They got nearly all of this when I got a driver's license. (https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-...)

* With modern corporate surveillance, corps already have a shit ton of "my data" that they will happily sell to anyone, including "The Government". (https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-un...)

* If I'm flying anyway, the airlines already collect (and are legally required to collect) all sorts of personal data that I would rather them not have. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)

> "The Government" already has all the information GE wants.

Yup. The people I've talked to who failed their GE interviews all failed because they lied and didn't admit to something shady that DHS already knew about them.

The (US) government generally does not have fingerprints for the majority of people who have never been arrested.

That's fair since it's technically not the federal government, but when I moved from Missouri to Colorado in 2019, I had to provide fingerprints in order to get my Colorado driver's license. And as a layman, I would generally assume that means anyone working for government in any part of this country could generally access that info one way or another.

> And as a layman, I would generally assume that means anyone working for government in any part of this country could generally access that info one way or another.

I doubt it.

Let me put it this way: I wouldn't choose to leave my fingerprints at a crime scene assuming legal firewalls would prevent me from getting caught that way.

Technically, legally, right now, maybe the Colorado DMV's database isn't accessible to other parties. How strongly are you willing to bet that it's going to stay that way for the rest of your life?

I have never heard of a state drivers license requiring fingerprinting.

I've lived in 5 states in the last 20 years, but none of them were Colorado.

A quick web search suggests that CO requires prints for licensing as an auto or motorsports dealer, but I can't find a requirement for getting a standard DL. I didn't look too hard, and I'm not claiming any authority here, but I remain surprised by the requirement.

From the Colorado DMV's website: https://dmv.colorado.gov/documents

"The information here covers identification and lawful presence requirements for Coloradans seeking a driver license, ID card or instruction permit... Per C.R.S. 42-2-107 and 42-2-302, applications for credentials must contain a fingerprint."

CRS 42-2-107 concerns applications for driver's licenses and learner's permits, and CRS 42-2-302 concerns issuance of driver's licenses and non-driving identification cards.

My friends who were already in the state prior to 2017 never needed to get their prints taken to keep renewing their licenses. But since I moved here in 2019, I needed to provide mine, as do any teenagers getting their permits or licenses for the first time here.

That's shocking. And really too bad, because I could have imagined myself living in Colorado. From a distance, I appreciate what I know about their government.

But compulsory fingerprinting is too authoritarian for my tastes. I can still visit, right? :)

Depends on the type of database used. They have prints for a lot more people than you think.

Funny story for you.

Maybe this was just a GenX thing, and isn't really done anymore, but in elementary school we were all fingerprinted.

They told our parents it was in case we were ever kidnapped it would help them find us.

You might be surprised about how many people's fingerprints the gov't has.