So last year this kind-of happened to me.

Except I was flying home from Bali with my boyfriend. (I'm a guy). And the person next to us in our row of three was a tiny, Italian, catholic nun, who spoke absolutely no English whatsoever and prayed A LOT during the entire flight, and was not pleased at all to be seated next to us. Oh, and we were flying Qatari Airways, so all messages from the captain were in Arabic, and only sometimes English. And the majority of the passengers were muslims. And the loudest group on board were a bunch of Chinese christians from Singapore. They also prayed a lot for a safe flight.

I would assume the mainstream paranoid American attitude would have set off hundreds of alarm bells in that situation, but what do you know, everything worked out fine. I mostly slept during that flight.

You really should do the math on risks instead of acting irrationally and afraid. The risk of dying in a terrorist attack is way less than being struck by lightning, and way, WAY less than being killed in a car accident. If you take the car every day, and still avoid people leaving bags behind, you're not doing the math right, you're acting irrationally. You're modifying your behaviour to avoid the 1:10000000 risk, but don't do anything about the 1:10000 risk. It should be the other way around.

The idea isn't to shrug off what you perceive to be dangerous situations. The recent attempts at US attacks were thwarted because people were correctly suspicious. Level of suspicion also depends on where you're at. In your second instance with the coffee shop, if I'm in Vancouver, Canada I'd think "He probably just forgot it, I should go after him." If I'm in London, then yeah, I'd probably be suspicious since from my perspective there seem to be a lot more successful attacks there.

The idea is in how you respond to those sorts of things. Do you really consider the plane scenario a strong possibility for you, with the guy actually carrying a bomb? If you do, that shows two things. One, you're (statistically) over-paranoid and have been "terrorized". Two, you've basically admitted that you think all the current security measures designed to make you feel safer are basically crap, in which case you should agree with removing them and potentially designing better methods that actually work.

Ironically enough the only time I walked out of public place over a left behind bag was in Vancouver. A hippy-looking Jesus person marched into a Starbucks, dropped his canvas bag on an empty chair, paused for a second and marched out. He was completely spaced out, not focusing on anything, and it all looked as odd as it sounds. It was on Robson street around lunch time. So I got up and left, and do tell me that it was not reasonable thing to do. The guy was outside, just outside the entrance, yelling at someone over a cellphone, and that explained his behavior. But without knowing that it could've been something else.

And, yes, I am familiar with the term "security theater".

If you're freaking out at something as harmless as this, the problem isn't the other guy.

This is the same kind of overinflated danger mentality that bars men from playing chess in a park near a playground on suspicion that they are child molesters.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/kiddie_pawn_sho...

Meanwhile, things that are orders of magnitude more likely to cause harm are ignored.

Yeah, typically when I sit down on a plane next to some stranger who doesn't talk to me or interact with me I guess you could say I "ignore this and refuse to be terrorized."

If there is a sliver of probability that I can be killed due to my inaction, I will act and I will do my best to avoid that risk. If it takes de-boarding someone from a plane, so be it.

Fuck you for thinking you have the right to screw over other people's lives with your paranoia. Do you understand that "someone" is a human being like you?

Yes. He's most likely just scared of flying. The remote chance of him being a terrorist is nicely balanced by the zero chance of anyone hijacking a plane these days without being piled on by angry passengers.

That depends. Are his prayers Christian prayers, or Muslim prayers?

Just because you disagree is no reason to downvote, especially since HN fades the text until it's near impossible to read, making discussion harder.

An honest opinion need not be an opinion worth reading. I want to read honest, informed, insightful, and justified opinions especially when I disagree, not honest, but knee-jerk opinions, even if I agree.

You can highlight the text to make it readable.

It seems obvious to me that the following would occur more: 1) Mentally impaired people would attempt to hijack, bomb, or otherwise cause problems on planes with weapons. 2) Drunk or impaired by drugs (meth, coke, etc.) would attempt to hijack, bomb, or otherwise cause problems on planes. 3) Rouge individual terrorists would target planes rather than simply shoot up an office etc. 4) Organized terrorist organizations would target planes more often.

With the level of security we have today, it is still important to report what could be a terrorist attack in process. The person who reported the shoe bomber saved an entire plane full of people.

It is terrible that we live in a world where terrorism exists, but it does exist, and it will exist forever. The examples the author gave are described to make incidents involved seem ridiculous, but maybe there were other factors at play.

If you see something suspicious and you do nothing and a terrorist attack occurs that you could have prevented you are a coward who is responsible for the death of whatever number of people died in that attack.

You keep terrorists from winning by preventing successful implantation of their plans.

Yes! You are very astute! Everyone here believes that we should eliminate all airport security (even though none of us were brazen enough to actually write it)! Now that you have identified that fact, you may write 200 words arguing against it and proving how silly we all are.