[etchalon]

I'm glad to see this posted, if only to provide another perspective.

What's most interesting to me is this line: "However on any given day, the TSA and Port Authority Police at JFK interact with passengers departing on non-stop flights to and from Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, Lagos, Istanbul, Jeddah, Riyadh, Casablanca, Amman, Riga and Tashkent."

Mukerjee’s entire account, and virality, is predicated upon implied racism. And yet, the numbers stack against him pretty heavily. He was not the only "muslim-looking" person to go through the airport that day. Not even close.

He was not singled out just because he was Muslim-looking. He was singled out because, if for no other reason, the dude tested positive for explosives, and, according to both accounts, was clearly agitated about it.

Now, yes, there's a completely logical reason for that. Yes, he has every right to be agitated when falsely accused. But no, it is not unreasonable for any security personal anywhere to throw up massive red flags about a guy who TESTED POSITIVE FOR EXPLOSIVES and was acted incredibly suspicious. Mukerjee is literally case example of what agents are trained to look for.

Everyone is up in arms about this, not because Mukerjee is even remotely worth being up in arms about, but because people just like bashing the TSA, regardless of the facts.

[smsm42]

The agents should be trained not only to look for something, but to handle false positives - which given how few terrorists are out there would be the vast majority of cases they will ever encounter. Moreover, for a random TSA agent false positives are probably all he'd ever encounter. Unlike the police, TSA deals in vastly overwhelming majority with innocent people who they are meant to protect, not harass. They are trained to look for very rare exceptions, but they must know these exceptions are very rare and most their suspicions will be proven unfounded.

They have completely and miserably failed at that. They wasted a lot of time on abusing clearly innocent man, whose innocence could be established much faster with much less inconvenience and much less waste of time.

>>> not because Mukerjee is even remotely worth being up in arms about

Tell me please, why abuse of a citizen is not worth being up in arms about? What makes one worth the concern about being abused?

[etchalon]

Because the "abuse" in this case was utterly reasonable given the circumstances and the person's behavior.

This is pretty rare for the TSA (the number of stories where they had no cause to be idiots is much MUCH higher than cases where they did).

[smsm42]

How is it reasonable? They knew or should have known he's not a terrorist in first 15 minutes. What were they doing for three and a half hours? Why did they ask him about praying and problems with female attendants and such?

[throwaway_yy2Di]

That line also interested me: why did the the author seemingly think Riga (Latvia) is in the Islamic world?

(Possible answer: JFK-Riga is operated by an Uzbek airline. Which is a question of its own.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_International_...

[smsm42]

Thought the same thing. However, assuming if it's Uzbek airline then people flying it to Riga must be Muslims sounds strange. I'm sure there are some Muslims in Riga, but so are in any other random major city.

I just assume whoever wrote this article had little idea of what Riga is and didn't care to check.

[gnoway]

Do you know what the explosives tests are looking for? It occurs to me that people make explosives out of fertilizer, which I think means that almost anything with an ammonia component could cause a positive result.

I also wonder how the tests are typically interpreted. Several 'test strip' type chemical tests require the tester to evaluate a color against a sample spectrum, where different intensity or hue identifies the strength of the result. Is this the kind of testing performed or do they have some sort of machine on site or what?

Edit: there is a link to a sample machine in the rebuttal post. It's this:

http://www.sds.l-3com.com/etd/opt-ex.htm

I don't know anything about these, but my first reaction is skepticism. It has reusable wipes for lower TCO, but the test involves using a wipe and then testing the wipe. Unless the test self-sterilizes or something then it seems like it would be easy to have false positives due to contaminated wipes. Hopefully this machine, if it's the one being used, is just for indicating whether further followup by the "Transportation Security Specialist - Explosives (TSS-E)" is required.