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TSA confirms controversial Amtrak passenger screening program underway

193 points by 8bitsrule 5y ago

daniel-cussen 5y ago
Maybe I'll take Amtrak more often then.
legalcorrection 5y ago
This kills the Amtrak.
quantified 5y ago
Will somebody do something about all the train hijackings?
- galdosdi 5y ago
  In the early 2000s there was a great Ali G sketch where he asked a national security official whether they were worried about "terrorists hijacking driving a train into the white house." The official responded "There are no train tracks leading into the white house". Ali G: "but what if they've been building them at night?"
  - offbynull 5y ago
    Around the 3 minute mark at https://youtu.be/CHD1N9vtPlE https://youtu.be/CHD1N9vtPlE The entire interview is gold.
  - easrng 5y ago
    Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment. I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling. Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours! Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths? A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      That would make a rather interesting SCP.
    - Schroedingersat 5y ago
      You're right. Only way to stop them rammin innocent motorists is to limit all the medium and high speed rail to 80km/hr
- woodruffw 5y ago
  "I'm warnin' you, mister, that's city property you're fooling around with! Why didn't you go grab a goddamn airplane like everybody else?" - Cab Dolowicz https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072251/characters/nm0670017 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072251/characters/nm0670017
- bombcar 5y ago
  Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment. I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling. Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours! Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths? A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
rejor121 5y ago
- bigiain 5y ago
  Remember that time terrorists hijacked a train and drove it into a building and thousands of people died? Yeah, me neither.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Remember when we gave the government all sorts of power to fix the environment, build infrastructure, feed the poor, etc. and then they actually used their power to fix those problems rather than just stomping on dissenters and calling it problem solved? I'm being only a little hyperbolic here. TSA can only do this crap because they have authority to do this crap and they only have that authority because congress lets them because people let them because people keep falling for the same old dumb lies.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  Time for false flag theatre to move pubic opinion in the correct direction?
alyandon 5y ago
"Americans deserve to feel safe when they’re traveling." It'd be better if the .gov was engaging in reasonable security practices that also includes mechanisms for citizens and legal residents to seek redress when the .gov puts them on a watch list mistakenly (or on purpose as a means of retribution) rather than making people "feel safe".
- bliteben 5y ago
  > "Americans must sacrifice their dignity when they're traveling"
- _moof 5y ago
  "Americans have no responsibility to take two seconds to ask themselves if their anxieties are based in reality, and as a consequence, they get to make their irrational fears everyone else's problem"
- euroderf 5y ago
  "Any competitive advantage enjoyed by railway travel must be stamped out."
pressurefree 5y ago
xtian 5y ago
Because Amtrak is still too convenient, right?
- version_five 5y ago
  Serious answer, they hate freedom.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    The TSA is a glorified jobs program. They don't hate (or love) freedom more than anyone else.
    - Schroedingersat 5y ago
      Can they be employed doing something useful? Or just give them the money no strings attached.
widdakay 5y ago
Do we need TSA for interstate highways?
- chitowneats 5y ago
  They're sorely needed at the entrance to my apartment building.
  - vkou 5y ago
    This is an opinion that is unironically held by a lot of people on Nextdoor.
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      South Park had a pretty appropriate episode about something like this [1]. [1] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Toilet_Safety_Administration https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Toilet_Safety_Administrati...
- cbanek 5y ago
  You mean like the random checkpoints set up by border patrol in the southwest where they stop all the freeway traffic? Been around for years.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  They already tried it once in Tennessee. IIRC, it was only for truckers and after a good bit of blowback, they claimed it had been voluntary (though the truckers didn't know that) and strictly informational.
blamazon 5y ago
Note: this is not yet about passenger body and possession screenings like airports. Read the article. However, it is potentially the first step in a slippery slope that leads to that kind of screening. If such invasive screenings are implemented it will impact the already dismal commercial appeal of intercity train travel in USA.
- aqme28 5y ago
  True. But what it does instead is turn the already controversial no-fly list into basically a no-travel list.
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    Sounds a lot like how a certain other large country handles security on their inter city trains.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      Then it sounds like police states copying tricks from one another.
woodruffw 5y ago
"The tests being done in conjunction with TSA are designed to evaluate how a system that has proven to be highly effective in providing safe travel in the airline industry will work most effectively in passenger rail operations." Highly effective, indeed[1]. The US would probably be better off dropping the pretense and paying the 55,000 employees of the TSA to do nearly anything else instead. Even continuing to pay them their entire salaries while eliminating their jobs would save money in the form of increased airport efficiency. [1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-s...
- bliteben 5y ago
  I find it crazy that the US exported this whole system to the world, must be good business for the companies supplying the security theater though.
  - crmd 5y ago
    Israel was doing it before the US. Going through Ben Gurion airport is next-level unpleasant as a business traveler.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Israel was doing it for ~50yr before anyone else was.
    - skeeter2020 5y ago
      You could also argue that Israel has done a lot of it "right", at least compared to the rest of the world.
    - adrian_b 5y ago
      I have been a frequent flyer with El Al (Israeli airline) both before 2001 and some years after that. I have not flied recently to Israel, so I do not know if their methods have changed, becoming more similar with what is typical for USA and Europe. The methods used by Israel and by USA (the USA methods being imitated by most other countries) for checking the flight passengers did not have any resemblance. After 2001, Israel did not make any change in their procedures, because there was no reason, their procedures were much better than what was invented then in USA. While USA has relied on spending much money on improved machines for scanning people and luggage and in harassing the passengers with things like taking off the shoes, Israel did not rely on machines, but on ancient low-tech methods, i.e. well-trained professionals who questioned the passengers. The main test that you had to pass to be allowed boarding were 2 separate discussions with 2 Israeli security agents, to whom you had to explain the purpose of your flight. The 2 agents asked mostly the same questions, but with various variations in content and order, so you had to tell convincingly the same story twice. From the point of view of the traveler, the disadvantage of the Israeli method was that it was slow, a lot of time was needed for the discussions with the agents. Nevertheless, I prefer that method, because it was much less stressful for me than having to do a lot of unpacking, then undressing, and then dressing, and then packing, while having to be very careful to not have something lost or stolen (I usually travel with a very large number of electronic devices, many of them small and easy to loose; I have also seen once how the laptop of another traveler was successfully stolen before entering the scanning machine, without anyone noticing how; I do not know whether the thief could have been identified later, from the security camera recordings). In many hundreds of flights with El Al, I was subjected to a body search only once, while on the airlines embracing the USA model, many travelers now do not remember any more the times when they did not have to pass through a body and personal luggage security check. The only one case when I had to pass through a body search was because I happened too be extremely tired and I wished that the discussions would pass faster, but of course, my noticeable haste had the opposite effect. The flight was late in the evening and all the day I had been extremely busy. I had literally run through the city the entire day, to complete various errands in time from the flight. After much effort, I had succeeded to reach the airport just in time, but I was exhausted and I just wanted to reach the airplane ASAP, to finally be able to rest. However, the security agents noticed that I seem to be in a hurry, and they thought that this is suspicious. Therefore I had to also pass through the body search, but like I have said, they did not do such searches on everyone, but only when they had grounds for suspicion.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I can't think of any way to punish terrorists worse than making them ride Amtrak.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I can't think of any way to punish terrorists worse than making them ride Amtrak. I can. Make them ride the bus instead.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    The bus is like 5 minutes late. Amtrak is more like 5 hours late.
    - nobody9999 5y ago
      >The bus is like 5 minutes late. Amtrak is more like 5 hours late. I haven't experienced that on the train. And I have on the bus. An accident on the road and you're not going anywhere until it's cleared. What's more, have you even ridden on stank Greyhound or Trailways bus? Yuck. I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Many Amtrak victims have been surprised to find their tickets are actually for bus journeys. Amtrak, incredibly, thinks of themselves more like a travel agency that happens to own some trains and buses, and not really as a rail operator.
    - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      Oddly enough, American Airlines has started doing this too for short haul flights that are now bus rides.
yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago
If they start doing security lines for passengers they'll destroy about the only nice thing Amtrak had going for it: being a basic travel option that doesn't involve too much trouble. It's already expensive, slow, and has limited scheduling. The only upshot is that you can walk up 5 minutes before a train pulls in, buy a ticket and hop on without having to take your clothes off and disembowel your luggage.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tonymet 5y ago
  I agree. These people have no sense for beauty, romance or joy. There's nothing quite like walking up to a classic train station like in Los Angeles or Santa Barbara and stepping right onto the train. I swear the authorities who come up with this garbage have been trapped in a fluorescent dungeon for too many decades and forgot what life is about
  - hparadiz 5y ago
    The really dumb thing is we only started doing security for airplanes because the airplane itself can be used as a missile to hit another target. A train can't be used to hurt a third party. If someone wanted to attack a train they wouldn't need to get onboard at all. Simply wait along the track in the middle of nowhere. The whole idea is pointless.
    - rascul 5y ago
      > Simply wait along the track in the middle of nowhere. That seems to be a bit of a meme in plenty of western movies.
    - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      There was the attempt by a train engineer to hit the USNS Mercy when it was docked in New York Harbor to assist with COVID19 treatments. He missed by quite a bit of distance. Edit: Los Angeles, not New York.
hamiltonians 5y ago
the 3 letter agencies need more power. too much freedom
FpUser 5y ago
I curious how long will it take to progress to a full blown social credit system like in China. Of course we would still call it democracy as it will eventually be private companies caring about your "safety".
rascul 5y ago
Abolish the TSA please.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  And Amtrak along with it. Worst excuse for a railroad I have ever experienced. Either fix it (really fix it) or shut it down.
  - noirbot 5y ago
    I mean, Amtrak is pretty cool along the coasts. I'd much rather take it than almost anything else for getting between cities on the coasts. It's not great, but outside of just making the trains better/cheaper/run more often, it's not that much worse than a lot of the EU trains I've taken. You get on quickly and easily, and you get off at the destination with minimal disruption, in about the same time it would have taken to drive, but you don't have to do anything.
    - strken 5y ago
      It's about the same speed as a Greyhound or slower, and costs twice as much or more. For the demographic that would most benefit from a good rail network, which is people without a lot of money, it fails to distinguish itself in any way other than being less dilapidated.
      - noirbot 5y ago
        That definitely depends on the route/city though. There's plenty of routes where the train is a lot faster at otherwise high-traffic times of days. Completely honest question - are trains in, say, Germany that much cheaper for going between cities? Most of the times I've considered traveling to a country where train travel is more common/normal, I've been surprised by how relatively expensive it is compared to my expectations. Checking now, for Coach/Second Class Berlin to Frankfurt on a Friday is about 50 USD and NYC to Boston is 75. It's 50% more expensive on Amtrak, but neither is really "cheap", with both of them being about the same length of trip between similar sized cities. It's certainly not so cheap that "people without a lot of money" would be easily able to take that trip on a budget.
throwaway892238 5y ago
sva_ 5y ago
> Welcome. Welcome to city 17 Honestly, as a European going to the us, it was shocking how bad the train system is. But I get it, places in the us are too far spread apart, so that it is more difficult to connect them. If there are airport like security checks, even less people will use it. Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves. I can't really comment on the article, since it bans EU visitors, but judging by comments here, I'm afraid the system will only get worse.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  US trains were majorly useful and common way to travel before the 1960s. (Only a few miles dropped after WW2.) But in the early 1950s, a plan to build 41,000 miles of Interstate freeways appeared. And Eisenhower selected the Chairman of General Motors to be his Secretary of Defense. The plan was signed into law in 1956, and construction began. It was quite a boon to the auto industry. By 1967 passenger train ridership had plummeted. Most people and a whole lot of freight shifted to the freeways and/or jetliners. Railroads could not compete. In 1952 there were 370 thousand miles of track. By 1992 that had dropped to 190 thousand miles.[0] Much track steel was recycled, and many rural railbeds became 'trailways'. [0]https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/railroad_route_miles.html https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/railroad_route_miles...
  - waqf 5y ago
    The thing is, a lot of this stuff happened in Europe too, at least qualitatively. Train operators were already unprofitable after WWI and were nationalized, and after WWII, funding and infrastructure were lacking and cars were seen as flexible, democratic and increasingly cheap. For example in the UK the famous name is the Beeching Axe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe). I'd be very interested to see a comparative study of the US and Western (and Eastern) European countries' transport infrastructure in this period, but I've never found one.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves. Most of the tracks (in the west at least) are already owned by freight companies and Amtrak just squeezes in usage at their behest. It’s part of why Amtrak sucks as much as it does (no priority).
batisteo 5y ago
> Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Is this an intranet?
kalstone 5y ago
TSA at Amtrak will quickly destroy that business
metacritic12 5y ago
TSA screening in trains make much less sense than in planes. First, planes have a history of hijackings -- trains much less so. Second, TSA got implemented on planes after a very salient failure: 9/11. What's the equivalent for trains? Finally, whatever threat vector could compromise a train could do so in so many different situations: buses, commuter rail, large crowds, etc. Is TSA going to cover those next? It's so ridiculous that I can't help but think cynically of it: either TSA is doing the bureaucratic thing of expanding as much as it can, or some really good airplane lobbyist finally got their payday.
- np_tedious 5y ago
  The idea of a train hijacking kinda made me chuckle. Some angry guy demanding the train go somewhere its tracks do not run
  - vgeek 5y ago
    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113845/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113845/ comes to mind here.
  - xdrosenheim 5y ago
    Even if the tracks go there, surely there would be systems in place to set up a red light that automatically stops the train.
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Polish railways have a auto-stop system that works by radio.
  - arcticfox 5y ago
    Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) posed this hypothetical to a homeland security official. "What if they were laying the tracks during the night - and, God forbid, ran a train into the White House?" https://youtu.be/fNfSQA6ZRsc https://youtu.be/fNfSQA6ZRsc The whole interview is genius.
nobody9999 5y ago
This makes so little sense. Not only because (as several folks suggested) that "hijacking" a train is absurd on its face (although this[0] -- and not the garbage remake comes to mind), but especially because all someone has to do is drive a car (or even "better", a fully loaded 18-wheeler) onto the train tracks on the far side of a curve and blammo. Or, more dramatically, a bomb on a railroad trestle (or just on a track) moments before a train is to arrive (there are, you know, schedules and stuff) would have a similar effect. The whole idea is absurd security theater that needs to be killed with fire. So unless all car purchasers/renters are also screened for "terrorist" impulses, you can't stop folks from wrecking trains. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_Three_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_T... Edit: Added the missing link.
bliteben 5y ago
I would be a single issue voter on any US President or congress person advocating cutting airport security back to pre-9/11.
nobodyandproud 5y ago
Government overreach. We never learn.
drstewart 5y ago
I wonder what the overlap is between people calling the TSA useless security theater that's a violation of rights and the ones who say "what's the big deal about mask and vaccine mandates? It's to keep us safe, stop whining about 'mah freedoms' and grow up like they do in collectivist Asian cultures!"
walrus01 5y ago
The last time I tried to take Amtrak, from Seattle to Vancouver, shortly before covid19 started... It arrived 3+ hours late at 1:20 in the morning, so late that the Vancouver metro system (skytrain )was already shut down, and I ended up taking an additional $90 taxi ride. It was overall quite a miserable experience compared to just using my own car. And the return trip ticket cost was actually more than gas+mileage expenses on an ordinary economy car.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  That's a beautiful route, especially if you are on the west facing side of the train but it sounds like it was dark most of your trip. Quite the pity because during the day the view makes up for the slowness of the trip.
- gcheong 5y ago
  I believe the main reason for the terrible on-time record of Amtrak has to do with prioritizing freight rail over passenger rail as they have to use the same lines.
- wenc 5y ago
  Seattle to Vancouver is a 2.5 hour drive (if you don't count the time spent at the border checkpoint -- but even that is a 5 minute affair if you have NEXUS). Whereas crossing the border by train is miserable because CBSA/CBP have to clear everyone on the train. I once took the train from Toronto to NYC (nominally a 12.5 hour trip). We were stuck the border for 2.5 hours (a bunch of passengers had to go through secondary inspection), which made it a 15 hour trip. I could've flown it in 1.5 hrs total. Lesson: never try to cross a national border by train. We're not Europe -- we have neither a Schengen-like agreement or pre-clearance for trains like we do for airports. Though we theoretically could have pre-clearance for trains (there have been efforts [1]) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_preclearance#Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_precleara...
farmerstan 5y ago
Why is the terrorist activities EXPANDING when there have been not even a single coordinated terrorist attack in over 20 years? This is why people fight against vaccine mandates and I’m about to join them.
muzika 5y ago
TSA has a 2nd duty that many people are not aware of: It empowers the government to prevent potential “terrorists” from traveling. Think Canadian trucker protestor type people. There will be a time when being part of a political group can get you placed on a TSA red list. To make this happen they have to screen trains, and perhaps even create check points on state borders.
- Eiriksmal 5y ago
  https://www.tsa.gov/about/tsa-mission https://www.tsa.gov/about/tsa-mission >Mission: Protect the nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce. >Vision: An agile security agency, embodied by a professional workforce, that engages its partners and the American people to outmatch a dynamic threat. I suppose that is vague enough to prevent anyone the government decides is not a person from using our "transportation system." Hmm...
vmception 5y ago
TSA taking the L train
inkeddeveloper 5y ago
Every time I read that the government says they aren’t doing something, I am instantly convinced that they are. Why else would they bother saying they aren’t doing something? “We’re not sharing names with Amtrak.” Never thought you were. But now I do. The government always tells people exactly what they are doing in the form of overt denials.
Vladimof 5y ago
causasui 5y ago
As someone who has regularly ridden Amtrak trains the past 15 years, I've actually always been surprised at the lack of passenger possession screening before boarding. Anyone can bring anything they want onto a train, at any time. A lot of the comments here are laughing at the absurdity of a train hijacking, but I think the greater threat is someone or some group of people choosing a packed train as the very soft target it is for a domestic terrorist attack or mass shooting. To be clear, most places in America are soft targets for people who want to perpetrate mass casualty events. But while generally people can run and hide, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide on a train. I'm surprised we don't see more of it, being honest. Only a matter of time.
- kortilla 5y ago
  This is ridiculous. There are emergency brakes all over and people are spread between cars and cabins. List of places where people are more exposed with no places to hide: - a TSA line at an airport (bonus because victims very unlikely to have their own fire arms) - a lecture hall at a university - a Walmart - a movie theatre - a Costco on a Saturday > I'm surprised we don't see more of it, being honest. Only a matter of time. You haven’t really thought this through. There isn’t anything special about the train here. The only thing that is special is how obsessed we are with airports.
  - causasui 5y ago
    So ridiculous, in fact, that the very next day after I made the original comment, some psycho shot 10 people on a train in NYC.
    - kortilla 5y ago
      10 people is fewer than you could get on a bus. You didn’t make the point you thought you did.
panick21_ 5y ago
Bureaucracy always want to keep growing.
verisimi 5y ago
Well, for the sake of safety, security and convenience, we will all be required to have green passes, so that we can show id, store our cdbc govcoin, ensure our health info is current. The plan is to track and trace everyone, everything, everywhere. And most people are pretty much on board! Using credit cards, capitulating to govt. requests, shopping at megacorps, splashing their data all over the place, spy phones, coding the future dystopia, etc. Amtrak is actually late to the party, but it did eventually get the memo, it seems. As did lots of other corporations - around here they have upgraded the security gates to access supermarkets.
pizzaknife 5y ago
./insert joke about us passenger rail being so inconvenient terrorists wouldnt even bother with it
mosseater 5y ago
I'd imagine this is about curbing drug trafficking more than anything. Back in my party days, I had quite a few friends that would use Amtrak to move their weight across state lines. I can see why this would be lucrative now a days. Go to a state with cheap recreational marijuana, and then take a train back to a state that is still illegal. You could easily double what you put into it.
frickinLasers 5y ago
Interesting timing... https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/multiple-people-shot-in-brooklyn-subway-sources/3641743/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/multiple-people-shot-i...
foxyv 5y ago
I have to admit, I'm WAY more afraid of the various police in the US than any criminals or terrorists. There are so few restrictions on what they are able to do to people regardless of culpability with very little chance of real repercussions. The fact that some goon is allowed to pat me down at any time in an airport with zero probable cause. They stick their hands in places I wouldn't allow ANYONE else to touch. They remove my shoes showing my bare feet in public. I have to travel without any cash because they can steal it from me for no reason. If they lie, they will be believed automatically. If they arrest me and charge me with a crime I didn't commit I will be required to pay absurd amounts of money for my own defense. If they shoot me, it is trivially easy to justify it as long as there are no witnesses. What do I get in return? Do I really get to feel "Safe?"

193 points by 8bitsrule 5y ago

daniel-cussen 5y ago

Maybe I'll take Amtrak more often then.

legalcorrection 5y ago

This kills the Amtrak.

quantified 5y ago

Will somebody do something about all the train hijackings?

galdosdi 5y ago
In the early 2000s there was a great Ali G sketch where he asked a national security official whether they were worried about "terrorists hijacking driving a train into the white house." The official responded "There are no train tracks leading into the white house". Ali G: "but what if they've been building them at night?"
- offbynull 5y ago
  Around the 3 minute mark at https://youtu.be/CHD1N9vtPlE https://youtu.be/CHD1N9vtPlE The entire interview is gold.
- easrng 5y ago
  Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment. I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling. Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours! Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths? A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    That would make a rather interesting SCP.
  - Schroedingersat 5y ago
    You're right. Only way to stop them rammin innocent motorists is to limit all the medium and high speed rail to 80km/hr
woodruffw 5y ago
"I'm warnin' you, mister, that's city property you're fooling around with! Why didn't you go grab a goddamn airplane like everybody else?" - Cab Dolowicz https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072251/characters/nm0670017 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072251/characters/nm0670017
bombcar 5y ago
Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment. I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling. Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours! Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths? A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

rejor121 5y ago

bigiain 5y ago
Remember that time terrorists hijacked a train and drove it into a building and thousands of people died? Yeah, me neither.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Remember when we gave the government all sorts of power to fix the environment, build infrastructure, feed the poor, etc. and then they actually used their power to fix those problems rather than just stomping on dissenters and calling it problem solved? I'm being only a little hyperbolic here. TSA can only do this crap because they have authority to do this crap and they only have that authority because congress lets them because people let them because people keep falling for the same old dumb lies.
wrycoder 5y ago
Time for false flag theatre to move pubic opinion in the correct direction?

alyandon 5y ago

"Americans deserve to feel safe when they’re traveling." It'd be better if the .gov was engaging in reasonable security practices that also includes mechanisms for citizens and legal residents to seek redress when the .gov puts them on a watch list mistakenly (or on purpose as a means of retribution) rather than making people "feel safe".

bliteben 5y ago
> "Americans must sacrifice their dignity when they're traveling"
_moof 5y ago
"Americans have no responsibility to take two seconds to ask themselves if their anxieties are based in reality, and as a consequence, they get to make their irrational fears everyone else's problem"
euroderf 5y ago
"Any competitive advantage enjoyed by railway travel must be stamped out."

pressurefree 5y ago

xtian 5y ago

Because Amtrak is still too convenient, right?

version_five 5y ago
Serious answer, they hate freedom.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  The TSA is a glorified jobs program. They don't hate (or love) freedom more than anyone else.
  - Schroedingersat 5y ago
    Can they be employed doing something useful? Or just give them the money no strings attached.

widdakay 5y ago

Do we need TSA for interstate highways?

chitowneats 5y ago
They're sorely needed at the entrance to my apartment building.
- vkou 5y ago
  This is an opinion that is unironically held by a lot of people on Nextdoor.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    South Park had a pretty appropriate episode about something like this [1]. [1] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Toilet_Safety_Administration https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Toilet_Safety_Administrati...
cbanek 5y ago
You mean like the random checkpoints set up by border patrol in the southwest where they stop all the freeway traffic? Been around for years.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
They already tried it once in Tennessee. IIRC, it was only for truckers and after a good bit of blowback, they claimed it had been voluntary (though the truckers didn't know that) and strictly informational.

blamazon 5y ago

Note: this is not yet about passenger body and possession screenings like airports. Read the article. However, it is potentially the first step in a slippery slope that leads to that kind of screening. If such invasive screenings are implemented it will impact the already dismal commercial appeal of intercity train travel in USA.

aqme28 5y ago
True. But what it does instead is turn the already controversial no-fly list into basically a no-travel list.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  Sounds a lot like how a certain other large country handles security on their inter city trains.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Then it sounds like police states copying tricks from one another.

woodruffw 5y ago

"The tests being done in conjunction with TSA are designed to evaluate how a system that has proven to be highly effective in providing safe travel in the airline industry will work most effectively in passenger rail operations." Highly effective, indeed[1]. The US would probably be better off dropping the pretense and paying the 55,000 employees of the TSA to do nearly anything else instead. Even continuing to pay them their entire salaries while eliminating their jobs would save money in the form of increased airport efficiency. [1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-s...

bliteben 5y ago
I find it crazy that the US exported this whole system to the world, must be good business for the companies supplying the security theater though.
- crmd 5y ago
  Israel was doing it before the US. Going through Ben Gurion airport is next-level unpleasant as a business traveler.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Israel was doing it for ~50yr before anyone else was.
  - skeeter2020 5y ago
    You could also argue that Israel has done a lot of it "right", at least compared to the rest of the world.
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    I have been a frequent flyer with El Al (Israeli airline) both before 2001 and some years after that. I have not flied recently to Israel, so I do not know if their methods have changed, becoming more similar with what is typical for USA and Europe. The methods used by Israel and by USA (the USA methods being imitated by most other countries) for checking the flight passengers did not have any resemblance. After 2001, Israel did not make any change in their procedures, because there was no reason, their procedures were much better than what was invented then in USA. While USA has relied on spending much money on improved machines for scanning people and luggage and in harassing the passengers with things like taking off the shoes, Israel did not rely on machines, but on ancient low-tech methods, i.e. well-trained professionals who questioned the passengers. The main test that you had to pass to be allowed boarding were 2 separate discussions with 2 Israeli security agents, to whom you had to explain the purpose of your flight. The 2 agents asked mostly the same questions, but with various variations in content and order, so you had to tell convincingly the same story twice. From the point of view of the traveler, the disadvantage of the Israeli method was that it was slow, a lot of time was needed for the discussions with the agents. Nevertheless, I prefer that method, because it was much less stressful for me than having to do a lot of unpacking, then undressing, and then dressing, and then packing, while having to be very careful to not have something lost or stolen (I usually travel with a very large number of electronic devices, many of them small and easy to loose; I have also seen once how the laptop of another traveler was successfully stolen before entering the scanning machine, without anyone noticing how; I do not know whether the thief could have been identified later, from the security camera recordings). In many hundreds of flights with El Al, I was subjected to a body search only once, while on the airlines embracing the USA model, many travelers now do not remember any more the times when they did not have to pass through a body and personal luggage security check. The only one case when I had to pass through a body search was because I happened too be extremely tired and I wished that the discussions would pass faster, but of course, my noticeable haste had the opposite effect. The flight was late in the evening and all the day I had been extremely busy. I had literally run through the city the entire day, to complete various errands in time from the flight. After much effort, I had succeeded to reach the airport just in time, but I was exhausted and I just wanted to reach the airplane ASAP, to finally be able to rest. However, the security agents noticed that I seem to be in a hurry, and they thought that this is suspicious. Therefore I had to also pass through the body search, but like I have said, they did not do such searches on everyone, but only when they had grounds for suspicion.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I can't think of any way to punish terrorists worse than making them ride Amtrak.

nobody9999 5y ago
>I can't think of any way to punish terrorists worse than making them ride Amtrak. I can. Make them ride the bus instead.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  The bus is like 5 minutes late. Amtrak is more like 5 hours late.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >The bus is like 5 minutes late. Amtrak is more like 5 hours late. I haven't experienced that on the train. And I have on the bus. An accident on the road and you're not going anywhere until it's cleared. What's more, have you even ridden on stank Greyhound or Trailways bus? Yuck. I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Many Amtrak victims have been surprised to find their tickets are actually for bus journeys. Amtrak, incredibly, thinks of themselves more like a travel agency that happens to own some trains and buses, and not really as a rail operator.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Oddly enough, American Airlines has started doing this too for short haul flights that are now bus rides.

yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago

If they start doing security lines for passengers they'll destroy about the only nice thing Amtrak had going for it: being a basic travel option that doesn't involve too much trouble. It's already expensive, slow, and has limited scheduling. The only upshot is that you can walk up 5 minutes before a train pulls in, buy a ticket and hop on without having to take your clothes off and disembowel your luggage.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tonymet 5y ago
I agree. These people have no sense for beauty, romance or joy. There's nothing quite like walking up to a classic train station like in Los Angeles or Santa Barbara and stepping right onto the train. I swear the authorities who come up with this garbage have been trapped in a fluorescent dungeon for too many decades and forgot what life is about
- hparadiz 5y ago
  The really dumb thing is we only started doing security for airplanes because the airplane itself can be used as a missile to hit another target. A train can't be used to hurt a third party. If someone wanted to attack a train they wouldn't need to get onboard at all. Simply wait along the track in the middle of nowhere. The whole idea is pointless.
  - rascul 5y ago
    > Simply wait along the track in the middle of nowhere. That seems to be a bit of a meme in plenty of western movies.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    There was the attempt by a train engineer to hit the USNS Mercy when it was docked in New York Harbor to assist with COVID19 treatments. He missed by quite a bit of distance. Edit: Los Angeles, not New York.

hamiltonians 5y ago

the 3 letter agencies need more power. too much freedom

FpUser 5y ago

I curious how long will it take to progress to a full blown social credit system like in China. Of course we would still call it democracy as it will eventually be private companies caring about your "safety".

rascul 5y ago

Abolish the TSA please.

throwawayboise 5y ago
And Amtrak along with it. Worst excuse for a railroad I have ever experienced. Either fix it (really fix it) or shut it down.
- noirbot 5y ago
  I mean, Amtrak is pretty cool along the coasts. I'd much rather take it than almost anything else for getting between cities on the coasts. It's not great, but outside of just making the trains better/cheaper/run more often, it's not that much worse than a lot of the EU trains I've taken. You get on quickly and easily, and you get off at the destination with minimal disruption, in about the same time it would have taken to drive, but you don't have to do anything.
  - strken 5y ago
    It's about the same speed as a Greyhound or slower, and costs twice as much or more. For the demographic that would most benefit from a good rail network, which is people without a lot of money, it fails to distinguish itself in any way other than being less dilapidated.
    - noirbot 5y ago
      That definitely depends on the route/city though. There's plenty of routes where the train is a lot faster at otherwise high-traffic times of days. Completely honest question - are trains in, say, Germany that much cheaper for going between cities? Most of the times I've considered traveling to a country where train travel is more common/normal, I've been surprised by how relatively expensive it is compared to my expectations. Checking now, for Coach/Second Class Berlin to Frankfurt on a Friday is about 50 USD and NYC to Boston is 75. It's 50% more expensive on Amtrak, but neither is really "cheap", with both of them being about the same length of trip between similar sized cities. It's certainly not so cheap that "people without a lot of money" would be easily able to take that trip on a budget.

throwaway892238 5y ago

sva_ 5y ago

> Welcome. Welcome to city 17 Honestly, as a European going to the us, it was shocking how bad the train system is. But I get it, places in the us are too far spread apart, so that it is more difficult to connect them. If there are airport like security checks, even less people will use it. Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves. I can't really comment on the article, since it bans EU visitors, but judging by comments here, I'm afraid the system will only get worse.

8bitsrule 5y ago
US trains were majorly useful and common way to travel before the 1960s. (Only a few miles dropped after WW2.) But in the early 1950s, a plan to build 41,000 miles of Interstate freeways appeared. And Eisenhower selected the Chairman of General Motors to be his Secretary of Defense. The plan was signed into law in 1956, and construction began. It was quite a boon to the auto industry. By 1967 passenger train ridership had plummeted. Most people and a whole lot of freight shifted to the freeways and/or jetliners. Railroads could not compete. In 1952 there were 370 thousand miles of track. By 1992 that had dropped to 190 thousand miles.[0] Much track steel was recycled, and many rural railbeds became 'trailways'. [0]https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/railroad_route_miles.html https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/railroad_route_miles...
- waqf 5y ago
  The thing is, a lot of this stuff happened in Europe too, at least qualitatively. Train operators were already unprofitable after WWI and were nationalized, and after WWII, funding and infrastructure were lacking and cars were seen as flexible, democratic and increasingly cheap. For example in the UK the famous name is the Beeching Axe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe). I'd be very interested to see a comparative study of the US and Western (and Eastern) European countries' transport infrastructure in this period, but I've never found one.
kortilla 5y ago
> Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves. Most of the tracks (in the west at least) are already owned by freight companies and Amtrak just squeezes in usage at their behest. It’s part of why Amtrak sucks as much as it does (no priority).

batisteo 5y ago

> Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Is this an intranet?

kalstone 5y ago

TSA at Amtrak will quickly destroy that business

metacritic12 5y ago

TSA screening in trains make much less sense than in planes. First, planes have a history of hijackings -- trains much less so. Second, TSA got implemented on planes after a very salient failure: 9/11. What's the equivalent for trains? Finally, whatever threat vector could compromise a train could do so in so many different situations: buses, commuter rail, large crowds, etc. Is TSA going to cover those next? It's so ridiculous that I can't help but think cynically of it: either TSA is doing the bureaucratic thing of expanding as much as it can, or some really good airplane lobbyist finally got their payday.

np_tedious 5y ago
The idea of a train hijacking kinda made me chuckle. Some angry guy demanding the train go somewhere its tracks do not run
- vgeek 5y ago
  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113845/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113845/ comes to mind here.
- xdrosenheim 5y ago
  Even if the tracks go there, surely there would be systems in place to set up a red light that automatically stops the train.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Polish railways have a auto-stop system that works by radio.
- arcticfox 5y ago
  Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) posed this hypothetical to a homeland security official. "What if they were laying the tracks during the night - and, God forbid, ran a train into the White House?" https://youtu.be/fNfSQA6ZRsc https://youtu.be/fNfSQA6ZRsc The whole interview is genius.

nobody9999 5y ago

This makes so little sense. Not only because (as several folks suggested) that "hijacking" a train is absurd on its face (although this[0] -- and not the garbage remake comes to mind), but especially because all someone has to do is drive a car (or even "better", a fully loaded 18-wheeler) onto the train tracks on the far side of a curve and blammo. Or, more dramatically, a bomb on a railroad trestle (or just on a track) moments before a train is to arrive (there are, you know, schedules and stuff) would have a similar effect. The whole idea is absurd security theater that needs to be killed with fire. So unless all car purchasers/renters are also screened for "terrorist" impulses, you can't stop folks from wrecking trains. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_Three_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_T... Edit: Added the missing link.

bliteben 5y ago

I would be a single issue voter on any US President or congress person advocating cutting airport security back to pre-9/11.

nobodyandproud 5y ago

Government overreach. We never learn.

drstewart 5y ago

I wonder what the overlap is between people calling the TSA useless security theater that's a violation of rights and the ones who say "what's the big deal about mask and vaccine mandates? It's to keep us safe, stop whining about 'mah freedoms' and grow up like they do in collectivist Asian cultures!"

walrus01 5y ago

The last time I tried to take Amtrak, from Seattle to Vancouver, shortly before covid19 started... It arrived 3+ hours late at 1:20 in the morning, so late that the Vancouver metro system (skytrain )was already shut down, and I ended up taking an additional $90 taxi ride. It was overall quite a miserable experience compared to just using my own car. And the return trip ticket cost was actually more than gas+mileage expenses on an ordinary economy car.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
That's a beautiful route, especially if you are on the west facing side of the train but it sounds like it was dark most of your trip. Quite the pity because during the day the view makes up for the slowness of the trip.
gcheong 5y ago
I believe the main reason for the terrible on-time record of Amtrak has to do with prioritizing freight rail over passenger rail as they have to use the same lines.
wenc 5y ago
Seattle to Vancouver is a 2.5 hour drive (if you don't count the time spent at the border checkpoint -- but even that is a 5 minute affair if you have NEXUS). Whereas crossing the border by train is miserable because CBSA/CBP have to clear everyone on the train. I once took the train from Toronto to NYC (nominally a 12.5 hour trip). We were stuck the border for 2.5 hours (a bunch of passengers had to go through secondary inspection), which made it a 15 hour trip. I could've flown it in 1.5 hrs total. Lesson: never try to cross a national border by train. We're not Europe -- we have neither a Schengen-like agreement or pre-clearance for trains like we do for airports. Though we theoretically could have pre-clearance for trains (there have been efforts [1]) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_preclearance#Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_precleara...

farmerstan 5y ago

Why is the terrorist activities EXPANDING when there have been not even a single coordinated terrorist attack in over 20 years? This is why people fight against vaccine mandates and I’m about to join them.

muzika 5y ago

TSA has a 2nd duty that many people are not aware of: It empowers the government to prevent potential “terrorists” from traveling. Think Canadian trucker protestor type people. There will be a time when being part of a political group can get you placed on a TSA red list. To make this happen they have to screen trains, and perhaps even create check points on state borders.

Eiriksmal 5y ago
https://www.tsa.gov/about/tsa-mission https://www.tsa.gov/about/tsa-mission >Mission: Protect the nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce. >Vision: An agile security agency, embodied by a professional workforce, that engages its partners and the American people to outmatch a dynamic threat. I suppose that is vague enough to prevent anyone the government decides is not a person from using our "transportation system." Hmm...

vmception 5y ago

TSA taking the L train

inkeddeveloper 5y ago

Every time I read that the government says they aren’t doing something, I am instantly convinced that they are. Why else would they bother saying they aren’t doing something? “We’re not sharing names with Amtrak.” Never thought you were. But now I do. The government always tells people exactly what they are doing in the form of overt denials.

Vladimof 5y ago

causasui 5y ago

As someone who has regularly ridden Amtrak trains the past 15 years, I've actually always been surprised at the lack of passenger possession screening before boarding. Anyone can bring anything they want onto a train, at any time. A lot of the comments here are laughing at the absurdity of a train hijacking, but I think the greater threat is someone or some group of people choosing a packed train as the very soft target it is for a domestic terrorist attack or mass shooting. To be clear, most places in America are soft targets for people who want to perpetrate mass casualty events. But while generally people can run and hide, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide on a train. I'm surprised we don't see more of it, being honest. Only a matter of time.

kortilla 5y ago
This is ridiculous. There are emergency brakes all over and people are spread between cars and cabins. List of places where people are more exposed with no places to hide: - a TSA line at an airport (bonus because victims very unlikely to have their own fire arms) - a lecture hall at a university - a Walmart - a movie theatre - a Costco on a Saturday > I'm surprised we don't see more of it, being honest. Only a matter of time. You haven’t really thought this through. There isn’t anything special about the train here. The only thing that is special is how obsessed we are with airports.
- causasui 5y ago
  So ridiculous, in fact, that the very next day after I made the original comment, some psycho shot 10 people on a train in NYC.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    10 people is fewer than you could get on a bus. You didn’t make the point you thought you did.

panick21_ 5y ago

Bureaucracy always want to keep growing.

verisimi 5y ago

Well, for the sake of safety, security and convenience, we will all be required to have green passes, so that we can show id, store our cdbc govcoin, ensure our health info is current. The plan is to track and trace everyone, everything, everywhere. And most people are pretty much on board! Using credit cards, capitulating to govt. requests, shopping at megacorps, splashing their data all over the place, spy phones, coding the future dystopia, etc. Amtrak is actually late to the party, but it did eventually get the memo, it seems. As did lots of other corporations - around here they have upgraded the security gates to access supermarkets.

pizzaknife 5y ago

./insert joke about us passenger rail being so inconvenient terrorists wouldnt even bother with it

mosseater 5y ago

I'd imagine this is about curbing drug trafficking more than anything. Back in my party days, I had quite a few friends that would use Amtrak to move their weight across state lines. I can see why this would be lucrative now a days. Go to a state with cheap recreational marijuana, and then take a train back to a state that is still illegal. You could easily double what you put into it.

frickinLasers 5y ago

Interesting timing... https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/multiple-people-shot-in-brooklyn-subway-sources/3641743/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/multiple-people-shot-i...

foxyv 5y ago

I have to admit, I'm WAY more afraid of the various police in the US than any criminals or terrorists. There are so few restrictions on what they are able to do to people regardless of culpability with very little chance of real repercussions. The fact that some goon is allowed to pat me down at any time in an airport with zero probable cause. They stick their hands in places I wouldn't allow ANYONE else to touch. They remove my shoes showing my bare feet in public. I have to travel without any cash because they can steal it from me for no reason. If they lie, they will be believed automatically. If they arrest me and charge me with a crime I didn't commit I will be required to pay absurd amounts of money for my own defense. If they shoot me, it is trivially easy to justify it as long as there are no witnesses. What do I get in return? Do I really get to feel "Safe?"