TSA is fighting a request for no-fly-list information
On January 2, 2005, Rahinah Ibrahim, a mother of four children and a PhD student at Stanford University, was prohibited from boarding an aircraft departing from the San Francisco International Airport. She was told that she was on the No-Fly List and arrested. She is not a terrorist, nor does she have any link or relation to any terrorist. She was just a foreign student here in the United States trying to fly home. Her earlier legal odyssey is detailed in www.papersplease.org. Now some recent changes give her a fighting chance against the Department of Homeland Security.
She sued, claiming she’d been wrongfully included on the no-fly list.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, but the 9th Circuit reversed on a 2-1 vote.
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski said passengers have a right to demand information and present evidence on why they should not be on the list.
“Just how would an appellate court review the agency’s decision to put a particular name on the list?” Kozinski asked. “There was no hearing before an administrative law judge; there was no notice-and-comment procedure. For all we know, there is no administrative record of any sort for us to review. So if any court is going to review the government’s decision to put Ibrahim’s name on the No-Fly List, it makes sense that it be a court with the ability to take evidence.”
Basically, TSA must release some of their supposedly “secret” records.
Perfect for Christmas: Gadget problems divide the sexes
It seems that men don’t read the directions as much as women do.
Like we need surveys to tell us this?
The service found that 64% of its male callers and 24% of its female callers had not read the instruction manual before ringing up.
12% of male and 7% of female customers simply needed to plug in or turn on their appliance.
The company, Gadget Helpline, surveyed 75,000 calls received between 25 September and 23 October 2009.
The helpline has 120,000 subscribers in the UK, most of whom are over the age of 35. The average age of helpline staff is 21.
Airport food is uninspected and unsafe
Even though many don’t feel that airport food receives enough scrutiny in terms of terrorism, perhaps a bigger danger is to our health. USAToday exposes dangers of poor food storage at our airport food outlets.
A USA TODAY review of inspection records for nearly 800 restaurants at 10 airports found items such as tuna salad and turkey sandwiches stored at dangerously warm temperatures, raw meat contaminating ready-to-eat foods, rat droppings and kitchens lacking soap for workers to wash hands.
Serious violations, which can increase the risk of illness, are common. On the most recent inspections available online, 42% of 57 restaurants reviewed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport had at least one “critical” violation. So did 77% of 35 restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport.
Grab-and-go coolers often don’t keep sandwiches and salads cold enough to stop dangerous pathogens, reports show.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
