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The racist overtones are also scary.

by will_ 13y ago

Doches 13y ago
Personally I find the racist overtones to be the least scary aspect of this story. I grew up in rural Texas; for police/government officials to conduct their work with a base level of racism is, while frustrating and sickening, pretty much to be expected. Kafka-esque detention, authoritarian abuse of power, and the hinted-at FBI search of the OP's apartment scare me a lot more. Hell, casual racism is basically an (awful) American tradition. Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  "Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't." Anyone who has been investigated for a DWB might disagree. Casual racism and unreasonable search and seizure have been pretty consistently tied together as a common standard in policing, not just in the U.S, but across the world. There is something in the way that police organisations operate that makes them particularly susceptible to treating racist stereotypes as probable cause.
einhverfr 13y ago
Actually I found two things very scary. 1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim? 2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.
- candeira 13y ago
  About the "ignorance" on the part of the FBI guy, I wouldn't believe anything an interrogating officer tells me. Playing dumb is one of the oldest tricks in the book: "So, tell me about the religion you claim to profess and about which I know nothing so you can bullshit me, really".
  - lizardking 13y ago
    Anecdote: my sister in law is in the FBI and I can guarantee she doesn't know the first thing about Hinduism. Or Islam for that matter.
- praptak 13y ago
  The detectors are most certainly cheap ion mobility spectrometers. They ionize the sample and sort the resulting cloud by the speed at which the ions move in an electric field in a low pressure gas. The resulting spectrum is fairly unique to each chemical. The obvious problem is that you get a superposition of spectrums of multiple chemicals from the sample and that the devices being cheap and fast produce "blurry" spectrums, so you get a lot of false positives.
lukifer 13y ago
It isn't a far leap to theorize that a good deal of oppression and aggression comes from an ancient, primal racism: the desire to remove competitive males and tribes from gene pools. Look at the mass number of black males incarcerated in the War on Drugs, and how eagerly we label any military-age males as "enemy combatants" in the War on Terror. You can even read this into Russia's paranoia that the West's "gay propaganda" is a plot to destabilize their collective male fertility. To say that we're the only species to engage in murder and genocide is flat wrong: chimps will happily murder other chimps, even infants [1]. Maybe we're not as civilized as we think we are, and all the narratives and uniforms and laws are just theater to subsume and rationalize our animal savagery. Nothing is ever simple, so I can't imagine this tells the whole story, but it's a big big factor, and it doesn't help anyone to ignore it. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-chimp-warfare-explain-our-sense-of-good-and-evil/58643/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-c...

The racist overtones are also scary.

by will_ 13y ago

The racist overtones are also scary.

Personally I find the racist overtones to be the least scary aspect of this story. I grew up in rural Texas; for police/government officials to conduct their work with a base level of racism is, while frustrating and sickening, pretty much to be expected. Kafka-esque detention, authoritarian abuse of power, and the hinted-at FBI search of the OP's apartment scare me a lot more. Hell, casual racism is basically an (awful) American tradition. Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't.

moocowduckquack 13y ago
"Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't." Anyone who has been investigated for a DWB might disagree. Casual racism and unreasonable search and seizure have been pretty consistently tied together as a common standard in policing, not just in the U.S, but across the world. There is something in the way that police organisations operate that makes them particularly susceptible to treating racist stereotypes as probable cause.

einhverfr 13y ago

Actually I found two things very scary. 1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim? 2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.

candeira 13y ago
About the "ignorance" on the part of the FBI guy, I wouldn't believe anything an interrogating officer tells me. Playing dumb is one of the oldest tricks in the book: "So, tell me about the religion you claim to profess and about which I know nothing so you can bullshit me, really".
- lizardking 13y ago
  Anecdote: my sister in law is in the FBI and I can guarantee she doesn't know the first thing about Hinduism. Or Islam for that matter.
praptak 13y ago
The detectors are most certainly cheap ion mobility spectrometers. They ionize the sample and sort the resulting cloud by the speed at which the ions move in an electric field in a low pressure gas. The resulting spectrum is fairly unique to each chemical. The obvious problem is that you get a superposition of spectrums of multiple chemicals from the sample and that the devices being cheap and fast produce "blurry" spectrums, so you get a lot of false positives.

lukifer 13y ago

It isn't a far leap to theorize that a good deal of oppression and aggression comes from an ancient, primal racism: the desire to remove competitive males and tribes from gene pools. Look at the mass number of black males incarcerated in the War on Drugs, and how eagerly we label any military-age males as "enemy combatants" in the War on Terror. You can even read this into Russia's paranoia that the West's "gay propaganda" is a plot to destabilize their collective male fertility. To say that we're the only species to engage in murder and genocide is flat wrong: chimps will happily murder other chimps, even infants [1]. Maybe we're not as civilized as we think we are, and all the narratives and uniforms and laws are just theater to subsume and rationalize our animal savagery. Nothing is ever simple, so I can't imagine this tells the whole story, but it's a big big factor, and it doesn't help anyone to ignore it. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-chimp-warfare-explain-our-sense-of-good-and-evil/58643/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-c...