Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

How Safe Can a Marathon Be?

April 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
boston-marathon-smoke

The marathon-as-spectacle is, more than any other sporting event, built on the responsibility and rationality and general non-wickedness of other human beings. You’re at this long, winding, sweeping thing—event really is the best way to put it. It’s a stadium 26.2 miles long. And you’re allowed to be up close to the competitors—cheering them on, handing them water, sneaking onto the course and claiming you've won—at any point. Marathon Day was Boston’s day to not be Boston. That is, the day that all the stereotypes of the city—loud, belligerent, belligerently drunk fans ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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The Culture War of National Security

November 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
"Cicero Denounces Catiline," a painting by Cesare Maccari

Why is Guantanamo still open? Why has there been no public accounting for the Bush Administration's use of torture? Why does President Obama successfully claim the right to kill American citizens living abroad accused of terrorism, with only the flimsiest of “due process” protections? And why do civil libertarians lose arguments of this sort time and again?  In 2008, Obama ran as a civil liberties candidate against the Bush legacy; today, his policies on drone strikes, indefinite detention, and executive power have given that legacy a bipartisan sheen. True, Obama has disavowed ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Politics
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High-Speed Rail’s Weak Link Is Security

May 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One of Germany's busiest high-speed rail routes is the link between Hamburg and Berlin. I've been using it for months. On the days when I need to be in Hamburg, I roll out of bed around dawn, shuffle through Berlin before traffic starts and find a seat on the train just in time to scowl out the window over a cup of mediocre coffee. Ninety minutes later I'm in Hamburg. The trip takes three hours by car. When Deutsche Bahn renovated the 160-mile stretch in 2004 to allow the current speeds, it wiped out the market for business flights, just as a good high-speed rail corridor in California ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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Hey TSA, Racial Profiling Doesn’t Work

November 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Arguments over racial profiling at the airport security line typically turn around the assumption that such screening, at least to some extent, works. The idea may be unsavory, but it sounds logical: If we target people with a higher probability of being terrorists — whether they have Saudi passports, beards or headscarves — we'd have a better chance of catching real terrorists in the process. The question becomes one of morals. Is this the right thing to do? Does the societal benefit (catching more terrorists) outweigh the cost (compromising our ethics)? William Press, a professor ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, The Idea Lobby
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Data Seizure at the Airport

May 12, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

Two years ago a freelance journalist named Bill Hogan returned home to Virginia from a trip to Germany and had his laptop seized at Dulles International Airport. U.S. Customs agents reportedly told him he'd been selected for a random investigation. The agents went through photos on his digital camera, he said, and impounded the computer for two weeks. He was especially angry because "they knew I was a reporter," he said at the time. "They did not seem to give a rat's patootie." One underreported aspect of border security in America since 9/11 is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Legal Affairs, Politics
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Why Does Government Need Your Passenger Data?

April 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

When former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff came to Berlin a couple of years ago to celebrate the ratification of a data-sharing deal between the United States and the European Union, he said a revealing thing. At a press conference in the posh Hotel Adlon he was asked about the threat of European "retaliation" against the new American effort to gather information on foreign visitors since 9/11. European tourists were already being asked to give up more and more details about themselves, like fingerprints, at U.S. airports, for trying to visit the United States. What if ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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Taming Suicide-Bomber City

April 8, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Col. Rade Asedeh, commander of the Jenin branch of the new National Security Force. (Vince Beiser)

The streets of Jenin are still plastered with posters commemorating Palestinian "martyrs" killed fighting Israel. Buildings are still pocked with bullet holes from the fighting when Israeli troops stormed this West Bank city several years ago. That's hardly surprising in a place long notorious as one of the fiercest hotbeds of Palestinian militancy, home to at least 30 suicide bombers and site of the bloodiest battle of the last intifada. Today, however, Jenin is gaining attention in an unexpected way: as a model of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. Suicide attacks have stopped. Militant ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Politics
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