[anal_reactor]

It is absolutely astonishing to me that Americans call their country "the land of freedom" while at the same time their society keeps on producing more and more bizarre ways to control the citizens, paralleled only by communist regimes. Usually when I try pointing this out they act confused and explain to me that I'm misunderstanding their idea of freedom. "You know what, no adult can be trusted to be left alone in their own room for 24 hours, the official policy is to make regular inspections" turns into "the hotel has freedom to check on their guests, if you don't like it you're free to go to a different hotel (closest one is 10h drive away)"

[graemep]

Some pretty bizzare things happen at UK airport security.

Our government is currently trying to use the recent riots as an excuse for even more surveillance and censorship.

The arguments include "the rioters used social media". That is one reason its going to be easy to catch them. They themselves were posting photos and videos - self-surveillance.

[sabbaticaldev]

what’s the alternative? treat the use of social media to create a country-wide fascist mob as a normal occurrence?

[flyingfences]

The "alternative" is to arrest people who commit violent crimes, not people who write provocative messages.

[fragmede]

Unfortunately for the recipient of the violence, we can't bring people back from the dead, or unslash their faces with machetes, so not everyone's gonna be on board with your alternative.

[Nextgrid]

Violence actually being followed up on would have a deterrent effect though protecting subsequent would-be victims.

[graemep]

You are framing it to sound very scary when its a short lived breakdown in law and order. A lot of people involved were not motivated by any particular ideology, but were just taking the opportunity to do things like looting. There is nothing that I can see in fascist ideology that motivates people to loot a Greggs.

It is very much what the media are doing: one local news website compared what happened in their town to Kristalnacht when what happened was 12 houses had windows broken and some cars were vandalised. Nasty, but hardly a fascist takeover.

On the other hand, the media do not balance it with equally wide reporting of things such as local builders doing free repairs on mosque in Southport, or the far larger crowds that turned out for counter protests.

Crime IS a normal occurrence. Riots will happen. You should not compromise human rights to deal with it.

There are blatantly racist social media posts - FB is infested, and I agree showing such posts so widely (no doubt because they get high engagement because people feel impelled to disagree with them) shows FB in a bad light.

One alternative is using the huge footprint people have left on social media (to say nothing of phone location data) to catch the people involved.

As a brown British person the riots have not caused me any great concern (contrary to what some posturing politicians may claim). Yes, it might be different if I lived in an area very close to where a riot occurred, but most people do not. I still think the UK is a lot less racist than the other countries I have lived or worked in, or no anything about, and a lot less racist than if was when I was young.

[devinegan]

Check into a hotel room in Idaho and this won't happen. Check in to one of the hotels in the city who makes its money on tourism where the worst shooting in the US occurred and here we are. We are talking about 5 Miles of Las Vegas Blvd.

[kelnos]

The fact that it can happen at all, anywhere, even on just 5 miles of Las Vegas Blvd, is a stark reminder that the US has very little in the way of legally-mandated privacy protections.

Mass shootings happen because the US has one of the most-armed citizenry in the developed world, and because we have ridiculously backward views about how easy it should be to put deadly weapons in the hands of anyone who wants one.

Daily room inspections are not going to stop any mass shooting where the shooter is aware of the inspections. The 2017 case was egregiously bad, certainly, with the shooter able to bring an insane amount of weaponry up to his room. But he could have been just as deadly with the contents of two or three regular-looking suitcases, something that wouldn't have raised any red flags during daily room inspections.

It's security theater, plain and simple.

[devinegan]

There hasn’t been another mass shooting on the strip in the following 7 years and this policy makes the scale much harder to replicate. I don’t know if this policy is responsible or what else is being done but to dismiss it as security theater seems too easy. If it is a deterrent, it is working and if it limits the scale of a future attack as mentioned I understand the policy.

[anal_reactor]

I'm waiting for the introduction of anal cavity checks. Someone could be smuggling a grenade in there!

[sabbaticaldev]

that’s quite the obsession for the word anal, isn't it?

[aeternum]

You sure you're allowed to post this? You better double-check with your department of censorship.

Remember that you're also free to open a hotel that doesn't have this policy and there's plenty of cheap land to be had very near Vegas. If you're right that this is something people want then it should be quite successful, maybe it can host the next DefCon. That's the American way to solve the problem.

Additional regulation generally yields less overall freedom.