Are you gay? No international travel for you!
|
|
Comments |
Mail to a Friend
Tags: civil liberties, GLBT, homeland security, privacy, Religious Right
Tags: civil liberties, GLBT, homeland security, privacy, Religious Right
The Bush Administration recently demanded that air carriers collect broad personal information, including a traveler's sexual orientation, by threatening to turn planes away from Europe, and the European Union caved in.
That's right. Micheal Chertoff just said that the 9/11 hijackers were gay. Or at least that if we had known conclusively if they were gay or not, we would have been able to prevent 9/11. Or something.
The government will retain information on your sexual orientation for at least 15 years (but they leave the door open to keeping it forever):
The data is only supposed to be used for counter-terrorism and law enforcement. Which means that if the army of lawyers at Focus on the Family are successful in overturning Lawrence v. Texas, the government will have a huge forever database of gay people it can arrest en masse. One and only one protection exists to prevent the government from arresting and jailing gay people, and it is in the hands of the likes of John Roberts and Sam Alito.
Even if Lawrence is never challenged, Bush and Chertoff could right now black list gay people from traveling, because there is no federal law that protects gay people from profiling or discrimination.
If you think I'm being alarmist, ask yourself why the government would be collecting information about someone's sexual orientation if they had no intention of ever using it.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff praised the pact as an "essential screening tool for detecting potentially dangerous transatlantic travelers." If available at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Chertoff said, such information would have, "within a matter of moments, helped to identify many of the 19 hijackers by linking their methods of payment, phone numbers and seat assignments."
That's right. Micheal Chertoff just said that the 9/11 hijackers were gay. Or at least that if we had known conclusively if they were gay or not, we would have been able to prevent 9/11. Or something.
The government will retain information on your sexual orientation for at least 15 years (but they leave the door open to keeping it forever):
Although Homeland Security has said it will move passenger information to "dormant" status after seven years and "expects" to erase it after 15 years, it notified the E.U. that expiration of data will be subject to "further discussions."
The data is only supposed to be used for counter-terrorism and law enforcement. Which means that if the army of lawyers at Focus on the Family are successful in overturning Lawrence v. Texas, the government will have a huge forever database of gay people it can arrest en masse. One and only one protection exists to prevent the government from arresting and jailing gay people, and it is in the hands of the likes of John Roberts and Sam Alito.
Even if Lawrence is never challenged, Bush and Chertoff could right now black list gay people from traveling, because there is no federal law that protects gay people from profiling or discrimination.
If you think I'm being alarmist, ask yourself why the government would be collecting information about someone's sexual orientation if they had no intention of ever using it.
you've taken it out of context. How the fuck is the government going to know my sexual orientation when I take a plane flight anyway? Its one of the many many characteristics that the government wants to record, stop pretending its the only one. Yes, its stupid, but stop making shit up.
chris
How will they know? Read the article. Apart from asking flat out, they'll triangulate it based on who you are traveling with and how many beds your hotel room has. Which means you (assuming you are straight) could be forever labeled in a government database as being gay just for traveling with a male friend and sharing a hotel room.
Think that's far-fetched? They already determine whether your name is on the terrorist no-fly list by using an algorithm called Soundex that was invented in 1918 and only works with European names. That's how we end up with 8 year-old boys on the no-fly list ( Link ). The level of incompetence in this administration when it comes to collecting and using data knows no bounds.
But their problem was not being gay. Their problem was homophobia.
At least this is a theory that is out there, and it seems like a pretty convincing one.
We should let all potential terrorists know that we believe they will reveal their gayness by committing suicide attacks. Doing this might deter some attacks, if it is in fact true that their willingness to commit suicide stems in part from their own homophobic desire to escape what they see as their tortured lives.
Suicide attackers are gay. Spread the meme.
Again, being gay is not a problem. I'm a card-carrying member of PFLAG. Homophobia is the problem.
Also it just makes sense, if you think about it. FBI profilers believed this too.
Don't imagine for a second that gays in Saudi Arabia have anything like the comfort level or self-esteem of gays here in the west.
A knee-jerk reaction to my comments would think I was being homophobic. No. I'm being homophobia-phobic. Homophobia drives people to do sick, sick things.
I am simply not willing to concede or even entertain the idea that any of the 19 hijackers were gay without *conclusive* evidence. I see zero evidence. I just combed through Google for half an hour to find even conspiracy theorists talking about it, and I can't even find a mention, let alone anecdotal evidence from the FBI.
Quite the contrary, they hung out in strip clubs and frequented female prostitutes.
So they turn to suicide. No surprise there.
The really dumb thing is for the US government to expect that these people would self-report being gay. Of course they would never do that! They come from a culture where natural impulses are a source of shame.
As for Europeans in general, I suggest everyone who flies with an airline, asserts their rights under the Data Protection Act to obtain all information held on them and sue if any is held without due cause. In Europe people do hang on to a few vestiges of human rights. I imagine that like any corporations, airlines are far more afraid of law suits than of regulation.