xxChrisxx said:
For all those people moaning about their rights. As mentioned above flights are conditional. They agree to let you on, after you agree to jump through whatever hoops they want.
Like I said before, you can buy your own plane and not have the hassle of searches before boarding.
So your rights aren't in anyway touched by this. Noones forcing you to be searched becuase you don't have to board a charter or plublic flight, and noones stopping you flying becuase there is always the option of going private with your own lovely jet.
jarednjames said:
No one can force you to fly. If you choose to have a job that requires you to fly to visit employers / customers than you accept the fact you are going to have to submit to security checks to do so.
If you don't like it, don't have a job that requires you to fly.
I don't buy the argument that modern travel is a privilege, not a right.
Air travel has become so intertwined into modern commerce that you can't consider it a private enterprise even if the particular airport you're using is privately owned. It's become similar to the role rivers used to play in travel and commerce, and, in the case of rivers, travel and commerce trumped personal property rights. In other words, a property owner may own the property on both sides of the river, but he doesn't own the water, the river or the river bed (rivers tend to fluctuate in their beds if they're not constrained by massive levee systems).
One key indicator that air travel can't be considered a private enterprise in the traditional sense - a privately owned airport couldn't opt to eliminate security checks for passengers. The security checks are mandatory for all commercial air transport - it's not an option that all airport owners and airline owners just happened to agree upon.
Just because a form of transportation or a form of communication is a recent development not envisioned by the authors of the Constitution doesn't mean that people don't have a right to use those modern developments. One of the phrases that bug me the most is "Driving is a privilege, not a right". Driving is a right; however the skills necessary to do it safely warrant some infringements on people's rights - so in that sense, it's not quite a right as unlimited as the right to free speech (we let people say what they want even if they don't know how to spell).
Likewise, people have an implied right to fly; but it, too, warrants some limitations on those rights in some situations just because of the nature of the technology.
Whether you're talking about metal detectors, baggage X-ray machines, backscatter imagers, or pat downs, you're infringing on people's rights to be free of random searches. The debate is about whether the infringements are reasonable compared to the threat. The less intrusive the infringement, the smaller the risk needed to make the infringement reasonable.
In other words, whether the measures are reasonable or not is a topic worthy of debate, where as, the idea that travelers have no right to modern travel dismisses the topic entirely on false grounds - it's not a free market choice that consumers can pick and choose between (the private companies involved don't have a choice about the safety measures either).
for you - just saying.