The n-Category Café

It’s true that the phrase “secret police” can carry connotations of clandestine interrogation sites and extralegal renditions, associations which I suppose Tom didn’t intend.

However, if it’s true that whoever this law enforcement agent was, he didn’t identify himself or his department or have an identification badge, shouldn’t that raise an eyebrow? If a law enforcement agent is part of say an undercover operation, then I understand, but in ordinary dealings with the public, I’d think that such identification would be expected. Is that naive?

The guy [the “FBI looking man-in-black”] was probably working for the TSA

I don’t know about “probably”, but yeah, he could have been. A large airport like Philadelphia presumably has a whole alphabet soup of agencies on hand: FBI, CIA, DHS (including TSA), border and customs agents, regular police, military, …. When someone raises a suspicion of a terrorist on board a plane, who knows which agency gets called? You’re guessing TSA; the guy who this actually happened to suggested FBI. We don’t know. Whoever it was who questioned him gave the strong impression of being in law enforcement but apparently didn’t identify himself (and as Todd asks, why not?)

I think “secret police” is a bit tendentious

I had to look up “tendentious” in the dictionary, but I agree that it’s a provocative word — my first association is with states like Ceauşescu’s Romania rather than nice countries like yours and mine.

However, I’m having trouble seeing how the term “secret police” is inaccurate when applied to the whole collection of US state security agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DHS. Can you give me an example of a commonly understood property of “secret police” that doesn’t hold for them?

Let’s try Wikipedia: “intelligence services or police and law enforcement agencies which operate in secrecy. Therefore, they have little to no transparency, accountability or oversight.” Does that fit? For the FBI and CIA, well, nothing needs to be said. As far as the TSA is concerned, sure, they might be those doofuses who make you take your toothpaste out of your bag, but they also have the unilateral power to stop you flying, and you don’t need me to tell you about the many complaints of their unaccountability (e.g. “The TSA and the No-Fly List Lack Accountability, Transparency”). The no-fly list itself is massively opaque, e.g. see this Malaysian architecture professor’s eight-year legal battle to get herself removed from it (and the judge’s eventual ruling that her being on it in the first place was “an error by the government”).

And of course Todd’s description:

the phrase “secret police” can carry connotations of clandestine interrogation sites and extralegal renditions, associations which I suppose Tom didn’t intend

is famously applicable to the CIA, and less famously to the FBI. (I did in fact intend those associations.) More extreme qualities of “secret police” listed on the Wikipedia page are

kidnapping, coercive interrogation, torture, internal exile, forced disappearance, and assassination

and again, all of those except perhaps internal exile have recently been done by the CIA. So it seems to me that “secret police” is a fair description of the US state security apparatus as a whole. Am I missing some dimension of this?

It’s true, the title states only the most dramatic part of the story. I think that’s OK.

If you gave a student a failing grade on a test but then realized you had made a mistake in grading and corrected the grade to a passing one, wouldn’t you be annoyed if the student continued to go around telling his friends “Professor Leinster failed me!”?

It depends on the context. In Cambridge, they used to announce all degree results in public. (Maybe they still do.) If I mistakenly failed someone, and their failure was announced in public in front of the student and all their friends and peers, then I’d expect the student to be upset and humiliated at the time. I’d also expect them to be aggrieved with me later after I’d corrected the mistake. And that’s fair: I’d be to blame for putting them through an unnecessary traumatic experience.

This differential-equation-solving economist seems to have been fairly relaxed about the whole thing, at least judging by what I’ve read that he’s said in public. He has the good luck not to be middle eastern, or have an Arabic name, or (as far as I know) to be Muslim, and he knew that the whole thing was ridiculous. But for more vulnerable people, even those for whom the accusation is equally ridiculous, it can evidently be a deeply humiliating experience. Regarding the Somali woman taken off a flight after requesting a change of seats:

When police asked the flight attendant at the gate if there was any reason why Ms Abdulle had been taken off the plane, the flight attendant replied “No” and that she “not feel comfortable” with the passenger.

and of the passenger herself:

“She suffered acute distress and anxiety as a result of this experience. She was publicly humiliated before a plane full of passengers” […] “She was crying in front of everybody”

So evidently being removed or ejected from a plane by security can be extremely distressing, even if the passenger is eventually allowed back on. That’s one reason why I think the ejection is important in itself, regardless of what came next.