Here's a tip for travelers. Once you go to the airport, you become a prisoner of the system until they "release you" at your final destination. You have no expectation of privacy, security in your person or belongings, and they can and will do ugly things to you if you piss them off. Even if you don't piss them off.
That's why I hate commercial air travel.
I exaggerate, but for a reason. If you have this attitude, you will not be surprised at the random hassles you have to go through. If, however, you expect some kind of "fair deal", you're guaranteed to be disappointed.
So yes, they can remove you from a flight for polite disagreement. They can remove you for just about any reason they choose -- especially once you're in the air.
If you do anything that anyone employed by an airline, airport, or relevant Federal agency doesn't like, you're gonna have a bad time. They can and will irritate, inconvenience and humiliate you. Flying in a plane or being in an airport is not a right and they can pretty much do whatever they want to whomever they want.
This is why if it's less than 12-14 hours, I'll just drive.
Driving is substantially more dangerous to your physical person than the various infringements upon your rights to privacy and such incurred by dealing with the TSA. While abhorrent, they are generally not physically harmful (unless you're sufficiently attractive to warrant sexual assault at the hands of the TSA piglets).
Furthermore, this assumes that you can burn a day or two to make a meeting a few states over. I'm not sure if you have that sort of time to spare, but I don't.
You could always just remove yourself from the TSA's jurisdiction. They're doing checkpoint stops to search vehicles without probable cause or warrants on the highways now, too. Bonus points for not paying the TSA salaries through contribution to US federal tax income and add-on ticket fees, too.
The safety assumption isn't exactly a given. The statistics cited represent passenger miles, not events. The formula is basically (passengers * trip miles)/deaths
Comparing automobile-related fatalities is challenging.
The standard comparisons given do not distinguish between passenger deaths and automobile-related deaths. 15-20% of all auto-related deaths are pedestrians and bicyclists. It also doesn't differentiate between trip types. Is there a difference between 24 hours driving from NYC to Miami via I-95 and 24 hours of driving within NYC? The published statistics do not speak to that.
I would conjecture if you were able to compare the relative dangers of inter-city interstate/freeway driving to a similar flight (including getting to/from the airport), you'd find that the safety gap was far narrower.
Also, lots of automobile fatalities are due to intoxicated drivers driving off the road, so if you don't drink and drive your odds get a whole lot better than the quoted statistics. And if I remember correctly, a large percentage of fatalities occur at intersections (especially left turns), so if you drive on highways you avoid those too.
The intoxication thing is another real issue with the stats.
Deaths get labeled as "alcohol related" and double counted all of the time. If I'm walking down the street drunk or riding in a cab drunk, that is tallied as an "alcohol related" crash.
I think in the uk the injury and fatality lists include those killed by a car not in it. Also the drunk drivers and drinkers hit by cars are not separated.
I was referring to personal travel as I don't travel much for my 9-5 or contract work.
I've thought of the later option, although not specifically due to the TSA, just generally. If my income was 100% contract and could survive the time zone shift I might actually test it out for a few months, but there are too many positives in the US that outweigh the negatives.
On the other hand, if on 9/11 somebody had acted on their unsettling response to the suicide hijackers, it would have come out differently. The final filter for good security is a person looking at a person and deciding. I recall a post citing this as the best-performing filter.
Unfortunately it ends in profiling. So, profiling, or mass death?
Reinforced cockpit doors and the new assumption that hijacking = death already prevent another 9/11 from ever happening.
Justifying every little bit of paranoia because you're very very scared of some unknown threat is deeply irrational. Proportional responses are fine - unusual behavior merits further observation or inquiry, not pushing a big red button.
This the classic argument for a police state. Increased police powers, surveillance, suspicion, etc. are virtually guaranteed to reduce crime. Does that make them a good idea? How many false positives are you willing to endure to avoid a false negative?
Also, for what it's worth, the false positives (profiling) are much more "mass" in nature than the false negatives (death).
While certainly a strong negative, I don't think profiling can be considered a false positive. If a false negative is a terrorist getting onto a plane, wouldn't a false positive be a non-terrorist being blocked from getting on a plane (or removed) because the FA/pilot/FAA/DHS/FBI/twitchy passenger two rows back thought they were a terrorist?
Making everyone darker that a given paint swatch go through additional screening is abhorrent, but I don't think it's a false positive.
I subscribe to Blackstone's formulation[1] that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". However, I can imagine someone with young kids might have a different outlook. Profiling or mass death is a difficult question.
I am not a psychopath. I refuse to hurt one person to save the lives of a hundred.
Edit: I fully support the stance of the airline and its employees in this case. Why should they go through the trouble to turn the movie off just because I made some bs rules on what my brats can or cannot watch? Blindfold them if you must. This shows how customer demands go beyond absurd.
I disagree, in principle. I'd rather one innocent suffer such that 10 guilty men do not escape justice (and likely cause greater suffering in the long run). Even were the innocent to be me, i objectively say it is better that way for society as a whole.
Note - this doesn't mean i would be happy, or wouldn't attempt to rectify, or generally complain were I punished in innocence. Merely that I would agree it is better on average.
Where this all falls to pieces, is with numbers. how about 50 innocent punished such that 51 guilty do not escape justice and so on and so forth. Where is the line drawn? How do you enforce it? For this I have no robust argument, if one can even be made.
Society is worse off if Blackstone's Ratio is not followed. The harm caused by a criminal act is not equivalent to the harm caused by a wrongful conviction: the former is unambiguously illegitimate whereas the latter is legitimate and supported by the government in the name of the people. Society has many ways of mitigating the effects of crime: we have insurance, victim support groups, etc. But if you're wrongly convicted, you have nothing. After all, you're a "criminal" not a victim and that's how you'll always be remembered.
The exact number of guilty people in the ratio doesn't matter. No one can agree on it, and it's impossible to quantify the harm anyways. It's really more about the idea of fair trials and the presumption of innocence, which is a handbrake against tyranny. It's a warning that the fear of letting guilty people go must not be used to justify diminishing the presumption of innocence. This is why Blackstone's Ratio was supported by people like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams whereas a "reverse" Blackstone's Ratio (better to let X innocent people suffer than let one guilty person escape) was embraced by such delightful people as Otto von Bismarck, Feliks Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Soviet secret police), and Pol Pot.
Most of the cases where Blackstone's forumulation comes in are where the justice system thinks its job done after the innocent is punished. Texas, for instance, has resisted the checking of DNA evidence because (in part) it would bring up the emotional wounds to the victim. In that case, however, you are not punishing one innocent and ten guilty men; you are punishing one innocent and letting the guilty go free.
They can remove you for just about any reason they choose
All sorts of businesses can freely refuse service, right? Certainly if they do it in grounds of things like race they will get sued, but generally speaking no business is required to serve you. Airlines are businesses.
Except in this case, they're refusing you service after they already took your money and your luggage. Plus, calling the cops on somebody goes way beyond refusing them service.
That's why I hate commercial air travel.
I exaggerate, but for a reason. If you have this attitude, you will not be surprised at the random hassles you have to go through. If, however, you expect some kind of "fair deal", you're guaranteed to be disappointed.
So yes, they can remove you from a flight for polite disagreement. They can remove you for just about any reason they choose -- especially once you're in the air.