I asked for a lot of £5 (smallest denomination note in UK) at the bank once because I was going to a music festival (before mobile card payment was routine). They asked me casually why I wanted them and I explained. Seems to be a Know Your Customer thing.

No, don't try to tell me how the secret service agent and the casino employees were victims and how this somehow ties into white privilege or some crap like that. Try spending some time off the internet and return to real life.

Outside of one rare occurrence where I received change in golden dollars and $2 bills, the only time I've seen $2 bills was when my father would buy them to tip with.

BTW the basic facts might be true but the details reek of bullshit.

Same attitude paid off in his little Apple computer hobby.

Can still fly in USA without ID. The checkpoint "agents" have you sign a special form. Last summer I "Scotch" taped the crap out of the barcode and picture on my passport. Checkpoint person asked me why and I mumbled because the real answer was "to see what happens." She called supervisor and he quickly waved me through. May be different effect at immigration.

The main issue is that he's not at the Department of Defense HQ presenting his Department of Defiance ID, claiming to be with the government but intending to present the joke as an excuse if it fails. In this case he wasn't trying to claim to be government to get out of anything so it's pretty obvious that it's a joke.

> 18 U.S. Code § 1028 (4)knowingly possesses an identification document (other than one issued lawfully for the use of the possessor), authentication feature, or a false identification document, with the intent such document or feature be used to defraud the United States;

He wasn't using the fake part of the ID, just his real name, and it's obvious that it wouldn't have done him any good to do so because there's no legal exemption for laser safety officers. It's pretty obvious that there was intent, this was a conscious act, but also that there was not intent to defraud.

I'm curious if you are old enough to remember the 80s, although I'm not going to bet any precious precious donuts about it.

How state violence and repression was in the 80s isn't good enough, agreed. But things actually do change, get better and worse in different dimensions. If we insist that things have always been exactly as they are, then it seems fatalistic, they can't possibly change, this is the way it's always been and always will be. But things do change. If they were better in some ways 30 years ago, then this isn't inevitable.

Woz was a prankster, including against those in authority. Look up some of the pranks the MIT "hackers" pulled back in the day. Today, some of them would probably get you arrested on domestic terrorism charges. This is not an improvement, even if it's true that the police of course have always been brutal in some times and places, especially depending on social position of the victims. But nobody (I hope) is looking for equality of brutal discipline, equally oppressive to all.

Berghuis v. Thompkins in 2010[0] made it so that the suspect has to explicitly invoke their own right to remain silent – simply remaining silent is not enough. And just last year in Vega v. Tekoh[1] the Court decided that it is not a violation of your civil rights if you are not Mirandized, and you therefore cannot sue over it.

Together, this basically means that its incumbent on every single citizen to be aware of their Miranda rights, and to know the magic words to say. And you should really, really keep track of if your rights are read to you while you're in custody – police will certainly try to admit un-Mirandized evidence, even after all of that.

> Those magic words, legal experts told USA TODAY, must be affirmatively and explicitly stated as, for example, "I want my lawyer and I want to remain silent" or "I want my lawyer and am invoking my right to remain silent." And then you should stay silent.

[0] http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/20...

[1] https://archive.ph/kvKaB

But they were convinced my goal was to go there to live. they tore my car apart, took everything out of luggage. They let me go but thought I was never coming back.

All I was doing was going to a Thanksgiving dinner in Scranton.

You cannot buy perforated currency booklets.

It's reasonable to be suspicious about the latter, especially as I suspect Woz didn't start the interview with "I bought the currency sheets then had them turned into this" - and anyways, by that time the agent had a checklist to run through, likely including the passport numbers etc. as mentioned in the article.

Even knowing that the bills are being sold in sheets, you wouldn't want to be the agent who let someone go who was doing everything exactly as Woz did except for getting the currency sheets from the guy printing the North Korean superbills...

2. It seems like the police officer has to be able to state what crime they suspect has been committed. Standing around looking suspicious is what usually draws attention but it isn't a crime so they just say no when the police ask for ID.

But that's for local police in some states. So again, is it different when you refuse ID to a federal officer? I think the answer is no, that there is no federal statute that requires you to identify yourself to a federal officer unless you are suspected of a committing a crime. But IANAL nor a member of law enforcement nor one of those ornery people who like to challenge the police and even hope they will be arrested on false pretenses so they can have fun suing the police.

And if they had apprehended Woz he would probably had a lawyer to bail him out and smooth things over. So coming from these two directions the argument that fooling around was somehow traitorous behaviour towards his wife sounded really odd.

edit: 2 downvotes? seriously? here's a source https://toofab.com/2020/06/19/white-cops-handed-a-dying-14-y...

And at some early points when you did, it was more just like kind of informally showing you were the ticket-holder, not really about security. His "fake ID" saying he was a "laser inspector" is really just an employee ID for a very unsuccesful business he started, right? If they take an employee ID, what's the difference. it just... wasn't actually a big deal back then.

But yeah, in general... it's kind of painful to remember how much less we interacted with security checkpoints 30 years ago, and how much we've gotten used to living in a security state. The phrase "show me your papers" used to be a kind of shorthand for the idea that in a "fascist" state threatening law enforcement is always asking you for ID, but in "America" we can live our lives without interacting with such security apparatus. I doubt people think about it like that, as we live it now too, it's totally normalized.

that the reader may find it hard to believe that you didn't really have to show official ID to get on a plane, or that you could use a homemade employee ID... just demonstrates how normalized and forever-seeming the security state has become.

Although last I checked, you could actually still fly without ID, you need to fill out a form and get extra screening/pat down. Don't know if the "Real ID" stuff has changed that or what.

This is true regardless of whether or not non-criminals like Woz can.

A non-criminal using a fake ID is a victimless "crime", and as it is harmless, there is no moral issue with the performance of the act.

There is no harm in it. You may argue, "what if he was a terrorist!" But he wasn't. He caused no harm here.

Showing fake IDs is harmless.

If the material information he provided was true then all the other silliness is just silliness. I mean, the agent is going to search on the name, probably find a photo in a license database, and confirm the guy is who he says he is, and that is the only point of asking for ID. They are hardly strong authenticators, and no professional is going to take some random bit of ID and use the non-identifying data on it to make decisions. What do you think they are going to do with the data anyway?

The fact is also that Woz did nothing wrong. So why does he have to automatically cowtow to an authority figure? He provided the materially important information in a humorous way. He didn’t do anything wrong. He poked the bear, but only a little bit.

Finally - not every citizen has a passport or even a drivers license. So even if requested, it’s not always possible to produce it.

Honestly - I admire Woz, but I will admit that I find his pranks to be a bit self indulgent. So what? He literally did nothing wrong and poked a bit of fun at the state.

I would hope we're not in such a world though.

American exceptionalism is a thing to believe in which satisfies all of the needs of a believer. It's part of the belief triad "god-family-country".

The military is an extension of the country. There is very little visible military presence in the US, and the military has no role in civilian affairs except in cases of temporary callup for natural disasters etc.

And yet it's a very big military, so everyone has some adjacency to present or historical members of the military.

In short, it's the perfect object of optimistic belief. The military is consistently the "most trusted" part of American society -- perhaps because all the things it does, it does elsewhere.

And for the most part, American foreign policy is pretty similar across political lines, so there's no inherent partisan rift, making it an easy and safe thing for everyone to agree on.

A foreigner might argue that that is a flimsy basis for belief. They might point to some tragic events visited upon the world by the US military. They might say that Normandy was a long time ago and it doesn't justify everything that's happened since then.

Many Americans would agree with that. But that's the outsider's view. First and foremost, internally, the military is a jobs program. And it's very very good at that! Tons of training and education, incredible amounts of commerce and technology, genuine personal development, and on the whole very little international malfeasance.

Americans are optimistic people.

The sentiment for the military and first responders is that they either have already, or could at any moment, be called upon to put their health and life at risk on behalf of the rest of us citizens and allies - so that the rest of us can live a free and peaceful life in pursuit of happiness. The sentiment is one of sincere gratitude of the deepest variety.

I personally don't think the existence of this ID card mocking the DoD is anything but harmless fun. In fact, the freedom to make such content is a part of the freedom of speech the DoD works to protect. However, as much as I enjoy Woz, I agree that giving a false ID to someone a law enforcement agent who is simply trying to do their job, isn't smart or too funny, it's intentionally obfuscating a process and stealing time (tax payer dollars) from the agent trying to do their potentially deangerous job and prosecute true bad actors.

Law enforcement in the US is far from perfect, and trust me, there's a place and value to peaceful civil dissobedience. However, there's also a psychological and monetary cost. The costs of Woz's act seem very benign to me, but I can see how others could easily get spun-up about it - especially if your job is law enforcement.

It's a job, like any other job. People do it because they want to get paid and military worship is ridiculous.

1. Although military people are paid, it's not enough to compensate the amount of time, health risks, and loss of normal rights and freedoms experienced by young people.

2. Are we better off or worse off if people think of service as just a job to pay the bills? I'm not naiive about this, but we want people to take it seriously, not treat it like a retail job at the mall.

3. A small number will ultimately die. I think you would be a foolish leader/government to give those people who died for you anything but respect if you hope for similar sacrifice in the future.

I think implicit in your comment is the assumption that people with different backgrounds are somehow defacto strangers. But what makes it all work on a university campus, imo, is that everyone has a purpose; there are no scary strangers because everyone's motivations are well-understood, since everyone on campus has a job to do. No one is really a stranger.

It doesn't matter if you are of a different color or gender, or that you come from a place I've never been to, or that you speak a language I've never heard, or that you eat food I've never tasted. My lizard brain doesn't kick in when I interact with you because you are just here to study and learn, or to help in that process.

As an example, I am a professor and I have a new colleague. He is from the other side of the world, he was born a decade before me, he eats food different from mine, he worships a different God than I do. But we get along just fine, and that's because despite all those differences, we still have more in common than not. And even if we didn't, we still have to rely on one another and work as a team to achieve a common goal.

Is it? I reject this wholesale. Do you have evidence?

If you do, why have you set definitions of "otherness" at skin color? I feel quite comfortably "among my own" alongside basically any human, because they're humans just like me. Don't you?

For example, a white American of Slavic descent is more comfortable in a room of non-white Americans who also smell of Budweiser than they would be in a room of Russians in Russia speaking Russian and smelling of vodka. Get it?

Nordic countries is a well defined collection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_countries - Greenland/Nuuk is part of them given it is a region of Denmark.

I don't think the racism can be helped short term - nordics have been isolated polities that only in past decades have had large flows of migrants from different cultures. (Well, apart from Sweden attempting to conquer Europe in the 17th century but it did not end well).

If it's any consolation nordic people can be quite xenophobic even toward each other so it's not as if they would be uniquely harsh towards specific ethnicity. Every non-native will be discriminated against pretty much equally, regardless of origin or complexion. They abhor anything unfamiliar regardless of complexion. The general narrative of historical racism in these areas is quite different as compared to more cosmopolitan western countries such as UK, France or US.

Law of Jante is a pretty good framework for understanding the nordic mindset (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante) - the baseline response even towards in-group members that are different will be severe.

It's changing, but change will take time.

Counterpoint; why do city folk hold their police deparments in such low regard and scream for their defunding yet somehow hold the federal enforcement agencies in some do-no-wrong-holier-than-thou limelight?

There's a straight line between that argument - which again, almost always gets through around with out any kind of citations or research support - and ethnic cleansing. It's directly attached to racist ideas. Similar to social darwinism, it's something that seems like relatively harmless common sense on the surface, but leads to horrific implications when followed to its logical conclusion.

In most countries that are ethnically diverse, that diversity was created through various forms of colonialism. Often with racial imperialism deeply ingrained in it. Which means those countries have long running strains of racist ideas and ideologies that forms the foundations of the ethnic "in group" and "out group".

Which is not to say that ethnic strife doesn't exist in non-colonial countries as well, but that this line of thinking and examination is a) extremely complex, b) inextricable from the history of the systems under examination, c) inextricable from deep histories of racist thought - often imposed by colonnial or imperialist powers, and d) similar to social darwinism in that it is often presented as common sense, but leads to some very dark places when taken, unexamined, to its logical conclusion.

The degree of ethnic homogeneity did not increase during that time, if anything it slightly decreased (or significantly in some major cities).

One possible explanation is that people willing to engage in low level crime simply moved to richer western countries because well they were (and still are) richer... e.g. in Norway Lithuanians are the second largest group of people who are imprisoned (after local Norwegians). The situation is similar in some other Western European countries. I'm not an expert but if I wanted to rob/steal from people and businesses I'd probably do that in Norway, Germany, or Switzerland rather than Romania or Lithuania. The risk versus reward ratio seems much better there. Also there prisons are way nicer (especially in Norway).

Then again crime rates in Belarus for instance don't seem to be much higher than in Poland or Lithuania.

For anybody unfamiliar with Europe, I just want to add that there aren't any checkpoints or border crossings, you just drive through or walk over. Half the time you won't even notice you're doing it. You're just supposed to have your ID on your person when you do.

Ireland (and previously the UK) is the only major exception to this, as it's part of the common travel area alongside the UK. In practice, this doesn't make a huge difference when you're an Irish or EU citizen (it does if you're a tourist who needs a different visa to visit), as it's an island, and airlines require a form of ID to board anyway. When travelling from Ireland to Schengen, I usually have a passport in my carry on luggage as a backup, and take my passport-card (similar to a national ID card) in my wallet.

Lost in translation I think. You could cross the border to Canada with just your state issued ID/drivers license as well back then.

What OP is saying is that it was even more lax than that. OP brought a piece of paper that is trivially forged, no photo on it, that basically just said in writing who they were with no additional ID needed.

I get what you’re getting at, but in Canada birth certificates from the 80s had a wallet sized version that had no more information than a drivers license, but it didn’t even have a photo on it. It was just a little pice of paper. I remember that’s very different from modern birth certificates.

I also crossed into the U.S. with my health card that only had my name on it and a number that is meaningless to the US boarder agency, also no photo.

Within Schengen you can get away with just a drivers license since there are no checks, but that doesn’t make it allowed.

It also makes me think of my uncle who is a very proud labor union member. He gets upset if anyone says anything disparaging about labor unions.

My point is, it sounds to me like people taking honor in being a member of an exclusive club, and they don't like it if other people do things to belittle their club membership, like by pretending to be a member.

I wonder if there is some psychological term for that behavior.

But psychologically, the drive to be a part of something important is very strong, especially in young men.

The military has a rich mythology that plays into, and perpetuates, this.

This is not bad or unhealthy! But it is also not inherently good. There are other groups which use the same tactics to recruit people for bad services. It very very much depends.

Or walk to the other side of the room. The border cuts through a number of houses and businesses as far as I'm aware.

Wearing a band shirt and an army shirt are not comparable at all. The default thought when someone sees someone wearing a military shirt is “oh they were in the military”. The thought when wearing a band shirt certainly wasn’t “oh they must be in the who”.

It feels good and honorable to say, just like defending a member of your family. That is a goal of the mythology, and it works! It's a hell of a drug.

I don't intend to criticize the military -- combat or non.

But the psychology of it is fascinating.

I agree with the GP that this kind of thing should be celebrated on HN and we should encourage the next generation to continue hacking.

You know who's really wasting peoples time? Secret Service and a casino security guard because he tipped with legal tender that they haven't seen before, so they think he's some counterfeiter or something.

I'd fuck with authority who was too stupid to realize that $2 bills are very much legal tender.

When it's the Secret Service, that's not "normal people", and their job is to figuratively or literally stomp anyone who doesn't sufficiently respect the immensely powerful people they insulate. Portraying them as regular Joe victim here is nonsense.

Don't try to be too curious then, or you will be prosecuted.

I agree that what you are talking about applies to scrappy startup types, the same people that eventually stop breaking the rules once they have enough power not to need to.

> But I had got a big point on him and I was quite satisfied in that

Like, I can sort of understand the humor value of giving away $2 bills as a tip since they're rare and some people don't know about it. But there is literally no value in baiting people as to whether this is legit money or counterfeit, except for Woz to feel superior to them. And it's not an isolated occurence! He clearly does this all the time, so often that he has multiple variants of the script.

This is not a story to celebrate. It is not challenging the status quo, it is not rebelling against authority, it is not a smart hack, or whatever y'all are describing it as. It is an ugly story of a man with a lot of wealth punching down, playing games using the little people as a prop purely for his own amusement, repeatedly, and then bragging about it.

You can argue that 'well it was a joke!!' but if you were to joke around to your nearest FBI officer about how you have a bomb in your home and you're going to use it I imagine they wouldn't find it very funny.

If someone's ego is tweaked when they find they're wrong then perhaps that's a helpful thing to do.

> Look, if you think that the bound booklet of $2 bills is a fun gag, there's a humane and lighthearted way to do it. ... if somebody seems even a bit uncomfortable

They're for tips. If someone is uncomfortable they don't have to take them.

> It was all about showing his superiority over this sad loser working a 10-hour shift in a suit, who thought he knew a thing or two about counterfeit money. Well, he wasn't all that, and Woz sure showed him who the smartest guy in the room was.

That guy had already tested the bills and knew they were legit. If he was honestly curious how Woz got the bills he could have just asked. Instead he decided to fish around for anything he could try to rat out an innocent person for.

> No unsuspecting person would have this interaction in the first place.

But their cases would be identical from the PoV of the security guy. Some thing would "seem off" and the employee would follow them around or harass them over some legit thing that he didn't like and maybe even call the police about it.

If they think that some customers are playing games they might be a bit more on their toes and think about what they're doing, so as to not be caught in a prank. That will have a good impact on innocent people they interact with.

> [Scenario with fake bug report] then finally the customer smugly says that there never was a bug. ... made everything up. ... It's a hilarious gag, what a prankster!

That's nothing like this scenario. To try to correct it, Woz was happily using their app on his phone when an employee noticed what looked like an error. They stopped him and called him a hacker, tried to trick him into admissions, and when they finally reported and tracked down what he was doing it was just hitting back at the right time to avoid an interstitial, or whatever. The joke is that he was trying to say "it's fine" the whole time and everyone assumes he's a hacker so nobody listens, finally ending up with egg on their face when they wasted their own time.

> And you were paid for this work, no harm done, right?

Well, some to the company. I assume they'd say "maybe in the future, don't go wasting time pestering customers for something that we already knew didn't impact us." It's a teaching moment. It could save them from a lawsuit in the future if that guard thought he had the right to detain people.

> No. Fuck that. I would be furious at having my time wasted like that. And this is what Woz did. Not just once, but probably dozens of times. That's just outright sociopathic behavior,

You're overreacting. This is a perfect example of someone I'd feel needed to be pranked, because it sounds like you're ready to snap on anyone you think is mocking you and you're vastly more likely to do it to someone innocent than either a criminal or a prankster.