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"Give passengers a way to quickly and discreetly report suspicious activity to officials, both before boarding and during the flight. A button that simply repor
by mattmaroon 17y ago
"Give passengers a way to quickly and discreetly report suspicious activity to officials, both before boarding and during the flight. A button that simply reports suspicious activity within a 3 passenger radius may be all that’s needed."
Yeah, then every time anyone with a thick beard boards a 747 they'll get 200 reports. That will solve the problem.
Also passengers who don't speak English is not cause for suspicion on a flight from Nigeria.
- jcl 17y agoNever mind that the passenger in question attended University College London: He speaks English. And if acting nervous on a plane is reason enough to move a person to the back of the plane to conduct a full-body search... well, let's just say the airlines had better have a significant rubber-glove budget.
- jrockway 17y agoNo, they just reuse the rubber gloves. The security people at LHR doing the body pat-downs are a great example. I watched one sneeze all over his gloves, and then immediately pat someone down. Mmmm, body fluids...
- jcl 17y ago...On further consideration, I can't think of any prominent airline terrorists of recent years who have not spoken English. The shoe bomber and the liquid bomb plot were British, and the 9/11 guys trained at flight schools in the U.S. midwest. So, if history is any measure, a total inability to speak English is actually a great indicator that someone is not a terrorist. If the author's proposed system worked exactly as his example goes, it would not only have failed to catch any past terrorists, but it would add huge amounts of false positives due to the large number of similar-thinking people finding a lack of English suspicious.
- maxklein 17y agoDo you guys even know what the spoken language of Nigeria is? It's english.
- motters 17y agoI also thought of the "panic button" idea, but then thought better of it since it would be comprehensively abused. You'd have kids pressing it, sleeping passengers accidentally knocking it and so on. It would be nearly impossible for the flight attendants to determine whether the button press was genuine, accidental, malicious or simply pressed by someone who was bored on an 8 hour trans-Atlantic flight and wanted the small amusement of watching his neighbour being body searched.