Woman in strop strip for Bermuda airport customs
A 36-year-old woman faced with a customs search at Bermuda's LF Wade International Airport rather brilliantly responded by instantly shedding her clothes and telling officers: “If you want to see me naked, you can do it right fucking here.” Loukai Phillips, a Bermudian native now living abroad, had just flown in from London on …
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RE: The question is, what to do about it?
My favorite is repeated shocks to the nutz with a taser.
The saying can become "Taze that MoFo".
Run and run
Heres to hoping this one will run and run and run... hopefully with much jubbly bouncing!
George Orwell
And, as per the previous poster - the Standford experiment.
Don't want to go thru customs ?
That's a no-brainer: just buy a boat. You can go to almost any minor harbour without meeting customs.
You can also buy a plane or better yet a helicopter and go wherever you want, minor airports do not have customs.
Both solutions do have a minor drawback: if customs get interested in you they can order a full control of you, your boat/plane/helicopter and you will stay until they are finished.
Great!
I'll just go and buy a private jet to help exercise my basic human rights... oh.
No-brainer for the mega-rich, maybe.
Using an alternative airstrip
In Bermuda there is a small issue with that plan.
It's about 21 square miles, and over 600 miles from anywhere else. Easy to protect.
The Police there routinely pick up smuggled items by sea, even if the smuggler uses a fishing boat to pop out and meet the big boat from the Drugs Baron. There is one airport, and it takes up a surprising amount of the land.
As for a helicopter, as I recall there are none there, so it would be a bit of a spectacle to land by one. Do they have the required range?
Bermuda makes most of its tax income on import taxes. As a result Customs are pretty hot on things. I used to live there, and true to form was stopped every time. You have to produce a little yellow receipt for every item in your case (or if its new a duty paid slip) or it is assumed you are smuggling it, and avoiding tax.
Also, it's strapline used to be "feel the love" which is exactly what you never get at LF Wade airport. Queues, yes. A walk across the tarmac, yes. Sometimes a bloke singing calypso tunes, yes. No cabs, yes. I could go on...
@YAC
>>"Also, it's strapline used to be "feel the love" which is exactly what you never get at LF Wade airport. "
Maybe they should change it to "love the feel"?
Knew someone who took advantage of that
He only got caught because he was so flakey he left a car parked with a bootful of puff for too long at a small French airport (until someone reported it)
12 months suspended
She should have had a prize not a fine. Nothing like this happens in Cardiff airport. And as for kids seeing ? All I tried to do as a young boy was look at naked women, brilliant.
Wait, wait. What did the magistrates say?
"If you don’t want to be searched, don't come through customs."
That's an invitation to try and bypass customs on every occasion possible, any way I look at it. That or it's a very cynical take on freedom. Time to don some rosy glasses and begin a new career as smuggler.
And yes, there's the point about her having been branded apparently forever by some "past association". Terrocriminals colour-coded for your convenience, as INTERPOL wants, already here to stay courtesy the lists-of-badness approach to "security". Aren't we all safe now, eh.
or just maybe...
some bored and underpaid civil servant somewhere mistakenly selected the wrong entry from a drop down list pre populated with categorisation terms defined by some highly paid consultant based on the information from some obscure and poorly researched study peddled by some two-bit politician resulting in this woman's 'associate' being labelled as an 'individual of interest' to the State. Or maybe such a mistaken entry was made on her own records and the systems devised to enforce the law don't have adequate provisions for citizens to indicate such mistakes on their permanent records and have them corrected without an overly obfuscated administrative process.
either way, citizen X is now treated differently (or perhaps you prefer the term harassed?) for the rest of their life through either no fault of their own.
it happens. the systems are there to catch the bad guys but there's not nearly enough done to prevent the not-bad guys from being caught up in it.
CHILDREN
There were children present! Dear God think of the children. They may never see boobs or a vagoo again!
Bah!
I quite agree. I haven't flown anywhere since these stupid and pointless searches were instigated - and flying is considered the only way to travel any distance here in the land of the free (upgrade with 25000 air miles).
If enough people put their money where their mouth is perhaps the Airlines, in a bid to become not bankrupt (again), will get things changed.
As we all know, the actual holes in any airport's security are behind the scenes, despite assurances of "background checks" on all concerned. Would anyone reading this put anything valuable in checked luggage voluntarily?
Bread and circuses.
Land of the Freeways
If you're patient, the "Land of the Free" is also the "Land of the Freeways". Since the searches, scanners, and no liquids restrictions were instigated, flying has become so painful that we've started driving the 1000 miles to visit my brothers every other year.
Pain in the rear? Yes!
But with the ridiculously cheap gas in the U.S. (that's 'petrol' to you furriners), even with a night in a hotel we just about break even monetarily with driving vs. flying, and we don't have to deal with the TSA, the airports, the lines, the security guards threatening our kids for having the audacity to be kids at an airport, etc.
But the notion that I'd rather drive 2000 miles round trip with kids in the car than fly says something about how painful flying has become.
Ironic, isn't it?
Due to security concerns, they increase security personel, but it is (and likely always was) the security personel - with their back-corridor access - that represent the biggest potential hole in the security.
Next time...
she should just have asked to be searched where she was standing, rather than going to some other room. Surely that is within her rights. Wait to strip off until they ask, and it then becomes the problem of the searchers to make sure that she is not seen by small children. After all, small children are deeply affected by nakedness...
Or else, wear a tiny bikini under her clothes on the plane, she could immediately strip down to that in public without a problem. She could even strip down to it before entering customs...
Harassment
A few years ago I was commuting year round on a motorcycle, to a job that generally finishes from 11pm to 2am in the downtown area. This led to frequently going through police drinking/driving roadblocks on the way home. Due to being on a motorcycle I was pulled over every time to produce my license, from under three layers of clothing, so they could check for a motorcycle endorsement. It quickly begins to feel like harassment, and it soon produces frustration.
It gets better. Around the same time my car and two others were rear-ended by a drunk while waiting at a light. Cops would not attend -- no one injured. The drunk simply moved over to the passenger seat, and when no cops came, walked away from the car, which was a rental.
It can get difficult at times to keep you mouth shut, or your clothes on, when dealing with mindless authority.
title
Same thing here in the states.
What forth amendment?
What constitution?
You don't want searched don't fly. That's the response.
LOL
I absolutely love this freakin' forum, Very intelligent jokes here.
Hat is off to you lot here. ;)
Simple
Scratch Bermuda from my list of possible destinations.
In other news...
There were lots of false alarms reported for men carrying batons...
Missed the point!
I read "If you don’t want to be searched, don't come through customs" as a rather subtle way of saying, don't come back to our country!
Anybody notice..
the bit in the article where it says she was only going back to close her bank accounts, seems like she's had enough of US control and is leaving for good. Don't blame her, I'd do the same, it's probably only draconian rules saying he has to be there to close it. Most times you can sent a letter in to close an account - but the US always has been a bit backwards on its banking.
Personally I no longer have anything to do with them (despite being 50% US by birth) - they're all tits at the moment so if the while world decides this (probably not too far away) they can all rot in their own mess. (they'd probably not even notice, which is the depressing part).
</rant>
paris for obvious reasons
@rototype
>>"Anybody notice the bit in the article where it say she was only going back to close her bank accounts, seems like she's had enough of US control and is leaving for good. "
Did /you/ notice the bit where it pointed out that the whole story is about Bermuda, and nothing to do with the USA?
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