October 03, 2006
Inconveniently foreign part 2 ...
Another heartwarming story of one person's suspicion inconveniencing a fellow traveller. This time, someone speaking in Tamil on their mobile phone is delayed at Sea-Tac for questioning (and misses their flight) because a nosy parker who was earwigging couldn't understand the conversation. How paranoid and stupid do you have to be to grass someone up because you can't understand the conversation you're overhearing? What if it was Danish or German or French? The airport spokesman, one Bob Parker, doesn't exactly instil confidence either:
Parker said it is incumbent on airport officials to investigate reports of suspicious activity."It's hard to triage over the phone," he said.
But Parker had no explanation as to why a man speaking Tamil, which is spoken worldwide, would be considered suspicious.
80 million people speak Tamil around the World, according to Wikipedia. Except in Seattle, where apparently it's close to a Federal offence to Not Speak English:
Parker said the man was cooperative and boarded a later flight to Texas. He told officials that he would not speak in a foreign language on his cell phone at an airport in the future.
Just stunning.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit that must have genuine terrorists just rolling about. How about if reporting false cases of suspected terrorism carried the same penalties as bomb hoaxes? I'm sure we'd see a sharp decline in these kind of news stories.
Posted by daen at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)