Is it illegal to alter your boarding pass? So the problem is my legal gender on my id is non-binary (&quot;X&quot;), but the airline (Frontier) only allows you to choose male or female. I went around in circles with their customer support and their supervisor on this for hours and got nowhere with them. As a result my boarding pass gender and my ID gender are not going to match. I'm worried that TSA either A) won't let me through or B) will demand a free grope patdown because my gender information won't match. Would it be illegal for me to simply pre-print my boarding pass to PDF, edit the gender to match my ID, and then print it out to bring with me?
I recognize your difficulty, and I'm not sure about the formal legality of it (which would go to the materiality of the alteration, which if material would probably be a presentation of a false document to a TSA officer). But more practically, when you present your boarding pass and ID to the TSA officer before going through security, their system checks your boarding pass against the boarding pass in the computer system. If those don't match, you are sent back to the ticketing desk. My wife and I had to do this on a recent trip simply because folding up our boarding passes to put them in my wallet caused smudging that was enough to cause the TSA system to conclude that our boarding passes weren't in the system. This also triggered heightened bag searches and pat down searches for both of us going through security the second time around. In your shoes, I'd try my chances with a TSA officer accepting the ID v. boarding pass mismatch with your brief explanation instead. Due to the limitations of airline software, discrepancies between IDs and boarding passes are common enough for reasons like the inability of airline software to handle two word surnames, very short surnames, hyphens, and apostrophes.
There are several plausible possibilities. This is a scam and isn't actually from the public transit authorities, in which case paying them hasn't helped you, and has contributed to this being a problem in the future for others. The payment information may have some subtle differences from the correct information and may actually go to the fraudster. The EBE number discrepancy makes this the most likely scenario in my opinion. There was a technical error. Maybe someone with a name similar to your was really cited, but due to a typo, your name was entered instead and the street address and corrected name were entered via some sort of autocorrect function. Somebody got lucky and avoided the ticket that should have gone to them. Maybe somebody went into the wrong field in the ticket entry system which could also explain the EBE number error. Someone has stolen your identity (perhaps a refugee) and is going around with a fake ID using your name and address. This doesn't explain the EBE number discrepancy, however. I've also heard of cases in some big cities where two people have the same name and birthdate and are constantly getting tickets meant for the other person but don't discover this fact for many years. Maybe someone like that recently moved into your town. This also doesn't explain the EBE number error. The bottom line is that even though it would perhaps be cheaper and less time consuming in the short run to just pay the fine, I would not recommend doing that in this case. In scenario 1, you really have a moral civic duty to take a little extra effort to identify a fraudster who is preying on lots of people in your community. In scenario 2, you again, have something of a moral civic duty to help the transit system get this problem fixed, and who knows, it might be a technical problem that is prone to recur and if you don't address it the first time, people will assume that your "confession" of fault by paying the first ticket undermines your credibility if it happens again. In scenarios 3 and 4, the problem is likely to recur and so you have an interest beyond this transaction in sorting out the situation. While your bare assertions that this didn't happen might fall on somewhat deaf ears as potentially self-serving, when corroborated by the fact that you have a monthly pass, I think that the likelihood that you would be found to be credible and beat the ticket is great in your case. Germany is less corrupt in bureaucratic matters like this than most countries on Earth. If this is a scenario 1 situation, the legitimate transit agency wouldn't even have a record of the existence of a ticket in the system, so you could be reassured that you would be at no risk if you didn't pay it. Given the EBE number problem, it is quite possible that even if you did try to pay it and it was simply a human data entry problem or something (or maybe your ex or a high school bully you defied and forgot about is now a transit cop and trying to inflict revenge) that you might not get proper credit for it anyway, so talking to a person at the agency is probably necessary anyway. So, my advice would be to talk to a human being in their office, ideally by telephone (without using the ticket to determine the proper telephone number as the number on the ticket would be a scam in scenario 1), but in person, if necessary, to get to the bottom of this. If this didn't work, I would write a letter or email with a copy of the ticket enclosed. If this falls on deaf ears, I would even consider making a police report of a suspected fraud, or even enlisting a local newspaper reporter or television news reporter in pursuing this situation because it is odd and would resonate with the general public. All of this will be a pain and won't necessary make narrow economic sense, but we don't always have a choice about when duty calls to fix a problem or what problem that will end up being.
Yes and No Selling your own body for sex is legal. Buying sex is illegal. Therefore the transaction as a whole is legal on the part of the seller and illegal on the part of the buyer. See Prostitution in Canada and Prostitution law in Canada. If you think this is odd, you are not alone '... one judge referring to the laws as "Alice-in-Wonderland" and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court referred to the situation as "bizarre"'. In the circumstances, although I know of no case law on this, it would appear that any contract for prostitution would be void for illegality. Presumably, to enforce payment for services rendered the service provider would need to pursue a quantum meruit claim in equity.
It could be the passenger's problem or the taxi's problem When these sorts of breakdowns in communications happen in specifying contract terms then either or both parties can be at fault. If the passenger specified the wrong address then it is clearly the passenger at fault. Similarly, if the driver drove to a different address from what the passenger said, it would clearly be the driver at fault. However, if the passenger was imprecise and the driver made an assumption then who bears responsibility depends on whether that assumption is reasonable or not. For example, the main street in the Sydney, Australia CBD is George Street. Even though George Street is an extremely common name with literally dozens in the Greater Sydney area, a taxi driver would reasonably assume that a passenger at the airport asking for &quot;George Street&quot; means the one in the city, not any of the others. In such a circumstance, the onus is on the passenger to specify exactly where they want to go. Whether the driver is an employee or a contractor is irrelevant - they are the representative of the organisation with whom the passenger has a contract.
Can I refuse, turn around, and just not enter the USA ,get back on a plane, turn around and drive back, or do I have to give over my devices just because I showed up? In theory you can refuse and turn around. At a highway check point or in a private boat disembarking context, that is fairly feasible. If you turn around before you are searched and get back across the border, the border control officers can't pursue you. In a commercial airplane or commercial boat disembarking context, this is as a practical matter, not a very feasible thing to do, because you can't as a practical matter, turn around and even if you plan to return, the only way you can make it to a return trip without passing through customs is if the border control officer refuses to admit you. The law is that non-probable cause searches are permitted at border checkpoints (and indeed even near a border checkpoint on the in country side), but this isn't much clarity about when that authority ends (short of returning across an international boundary) when deciding not to enter at a border checkpoint. Also, there is also a split of authority over whether a cell phone search is allowed in the first place. The Second Circuit in the U.S. has held that it is not, but the law is unresolved in many U.S. states at this time.
First of all, to clarify some numbering, HR 4635 (107th Congress) was not actually passed. The language was passed as part of HR 5005, becoming Public Law 107-296, and this provision now appears at 49 USC 44921. The exact text of this provision is: A Federal flight deck officer shall not be liable for damages in any action brought in a Federal or State court arising out of the acts or omissions of the officer in defending the flight deck of an aircraft against acts of criminal violence or air piracy unless the officer is guilty of gross negligence or willful misconduct. The language makes it clear that this is only referring to civil liability. So, if the officer is defending the flight deck, and they are sued for damages resulting from their actions, the plaintiff will not win (assuming the law is correctly applied). But this law says nothing about whether or not they can be prosecuted for a crime. In any case, the officer in your example does not appear to have been defending the flight deck, so this law wouldn't apply at all. In your example, the officer's defense against a murder charge would probably be based on defense of others. There is a discussion on Justia. It seems that a key question would be whether shooting the unruly passenger was proportional - was there a reasonable fear that the passenger was actually going to kill someone?
As far as I know, airline crew members have to pass through US immigration on arrival, just like everyone else. So they'd need a visa. Airline crews are eligible for a D visa which is specifically for crew members on layovers. Under the current version of the travel ban, citizens of the designated countries are allowed to enter if they already have a valid visa, which current crew members presumably would. However, if they don't, or if it expires, they might be refused a new visa. This would effectively prevent them from working on flights to the US.
Might depend on where you are. I think it's illegal in North Korea. In the US, it is legally encouraged, by the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, especially the part that says "Congress declares that the general welfare of the United States requires that the Administration seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space". Previously, Congress passed the Communications Satellite Act of 1962, which first expressed an interest in allowing commercial flights, but there was substantial opposition to non-government entities in space. There are a number of legal private space adventures from numerous countries. As Nate Eldridge points out, you still need government (FAA) permission. So it's legal to blast yourself into space in the same sense that it's legal to drive or to open a business.