4 ms·

I largely agree. But if you're anything like a regular traveler you get TSA-pre for not a lot of cost or effort and that pretty much all goes away.

by ghaff 2y ago

throwway120385 2y ago
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.
- ghaff 2y ago
  >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.
  - abecedarius 2y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      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.
      - abecedarius 2y ago
        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.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        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.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        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.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        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
        abecedarius 2y ago
        I agree that Y is bad, actually.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
      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-impose-an-id-requirement-to-fly/ https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/05/19/tsa-tries-again-to-im... https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-domestic-travel-without-id/ https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_United_States_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Apparently, this is changing: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification#:~:text=Adult%20passengers%2018%20and%20older,checkpoint%20in%20order%20to%20travel.&text=Beginning%20May%207%2C%202025%2C%20if,it%20is%20REAL%20ID%20compliant. https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification...
        alexanderchr 2y ago
        I think only their definition of ”acceptable ID” is changing. The section for ”Don’t Have Your Acceptable ID?” stays the same.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        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-identification-to-get-on-the-bus-how-does-that-work https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/140703/i-have-no-...
    - kelnos 2y ago
      > 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".
    - elijaht 2y ago
      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
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      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?
- mmh0000 2y ago
  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-driver-data/ 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-und-datenhndler-der-massenberwachung-ausliefern#t=661 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)
  - technothrasher 2y ago
    > "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.
  - quesera 2y ago
    The (US) government generally does not have fingerprints for the majority of people who have never been arrested.
    - jacobgkau 2y ago
      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.
      - aorloff 2y ago
AstralStorm 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- renata 2y ago
  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.
  - wizardforhire 2y ago
    Welcome to fascism. In Mussolini’s words “government you can do business with” great if you have money sucks for everyone else.
- xp84 2y ago
  > 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."
digitallis42 2y ago
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.
- xp84 2y ago
  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.
  - jacobgkau 2y ago
    > 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.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    We're supposed to be a country of equals. Not one where the well-heeled can buy better public service.

I largely agree. But if you're anything like a regular traveler you get TSA-pre for not a lot of cost or effort and that pretty much all goes away.

by ghaff 2y ago

I largely agree. But if you're anything like a regular traveler you get TSA-pre for not a lot of cost or effort and that pretty much all goes away.

throwway120385 2y ago

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.

ghaff 2y ago
>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.
- abecedarius 2y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    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.
    - abecedarius 2y ago
      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.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        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.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        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.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        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
        abecedarius 2y ago
        I agree that Y is bad, actually.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
    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-impose-an-id-requirement-to-fly/ https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/05/19/tsa-tries-again-to-im... https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-domestic-travel-without-id/ https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_United_States_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Apparently, this is changing: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification#:~:text=Adult%20passengers%2018%20and%20older,checkpoint%20in%20order%20to%20travel.&text=Beginning%20May%207%2C%202025%2C%20if,it%20is%20REAL%20ID%20compliant. https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification...
      - alexanderchr 2y ago
        I think only their definition of ”acceptable ID” is changing. The section for ”Don’t Have Your Acceptable ID?” stays the same.
        abecedarius 2y ago
        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-identification-to-get-on-the-bus-how-does-that-work https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/140703/i-have-no-...
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > 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".
  - elijaht 2y ago
    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
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    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?
mmh0000 2y ago
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-driver-data/ 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-und-datenhndler-der-massenberwachung-ausliefern#t=661 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_name_record)
- technothrasher 2y ago
  > "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.
- quesera 2y ago
  The (US) government generally does not have fingerprints for the majority of people who have never been arrested.
  - jacobgkau 2y ago
    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.
    - aorloff 2y ago

AstralStorm 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
renata 2y ago
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.
- wizardforhire 2y ago
  Welcome to fascism. In Mussolini’s words “government you can do business with” great if you have money sucks for everyone else.
xp84 2y ago
> 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."

digitallis42 2y ago

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.

xp84 2y ago
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.
- jacobgkau 2y ago
  > 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  We're supposed to be a country of equals. Not one where the well-heeled can buy better public service.