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Feds Undertaking Massive Passenger Profiling Plan
Logic Bomb writes: "The Washington Post is running an overview of a rather big-brother-ish airline passenger screening system the government is proposing. Keeping track of people's ticket purchases is one thing, but correlating people's addresses and living arrangements...! This attempt seems closer to completion and implementation than any other that's been proposed so far."
I hope this isn't the start of what could turn into an internal visa that will apply to all forms of mass transit.
With a little accountability (i.e.: assurances that the data doesn't fall into the wrong hands or is abused) I really don't think this is a bad thing. Look at El Al in Israel -- they have massive amounts of data on passengers and participate in profiling unlike any other airline. Why? Because they HAVE to. After September 11th I feel like we have the same responsability.
As I understand it, several of the terrorists of 911 fame used their real names and were living here legitimately. They had no reason to use false id since there was no reason for the feds to look for them.
Spending money on whatever isn't going to bring about better security. It will just bring a better false sense of security.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
All of these draconian rules will simply drive more and more people away from flying.
It's already a pain in the ass to board a plane two hours before takeoff, strip down to your underwear for the security screeners, and then wait on the tarmac for three more hours when the airport gets evacuated because the minimum-wage security screener was napping when somebody snuck through.
All this while the terrorists will do what they've always done: they'll case the airport, a little bit at a time, probing for every weakness. Then, when they're ready, they'll strike. And all we can ever do is play catch-up, closing the barn door after the horses are gone.
Now, I'm all for making the skies safe, but at some point the burdens outweigh the benefits. People already put up with a hell of a lot to fly somewhere. Add any more hassle and those planes will be flying empty.
This is why Europe should have never backed down with the US over data protection. It would be illegal to do this in Europe without the express permission of everybody who they take the data from. Europe will not allow companies to export data to countries that do not have any form of data protection legislature (like the US). However, as far as I'm aware they bowed to US pressure to make it a special case. Great. I can't think of any country with companies that are more likely to abuse that information.
>And what the hell's wrong with that?
Due process?
Read what happened to Microsoft Chief Architect Charles Simonyi when he got profiled at an airport.
That's called racism, fool. That's what's wrong.
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
I don't normally bother posting here but I'll make an exception.
Have you ever dealt with the effects of incorrect information in your credit report? Well, it really is hard to remove errors, and unless and until you do, you may as well be the person portrayed in the credit report. And your cost of living will be ridiculously high as long as that is the case. Your mortgage will be at 11 or 12 percent instead of 6 percent. And your car loan will be at 22 percent instead of 6 percent.
Now, when they implement this national database, you will have lots of WRONG and DAMAGING information about you in the database, and you will be treated as if you are that other person. And you will not be allowed to travel freely because you will BE THAT OTHER PERSON, for all intents and purposes, as long as the information is not corrected. So, what will be your recourse to correct it? Well, damn near none.
It isn't just a lack of freedom that is coming - it's the replacement of reality with a virtual reality that is laced through and through with a surrealistic and pernicious spin. When reality is less important than somebody's version of it then we are all in big trouble. And that is exactly where we are headed with shit like this.
Not only that, but after so many false hits the screeners stop believing the results. If 99 out of 100 hits is a false positive, you can bet that screeners are going to be just waving people through. So again, we have only the illusion of security, and possibly even less real security than before.
Systems like this don't work, and can't work.
Constitutionally Correct
You think? Hey, here comes Joe. We have every conceivable record on Joe. We know Joe made $40,000 last year, but we can only account for $30,000 of it. What did Joe spend that other $10,000 on? We don't know. Did he spend it in cash? What on? What has Joe got to hide?
Let's understand this clearly. Get enough information on anyone, and you can start looking for the holes. This database is about how the government views your actions. If this thing actually gets off the ground, the question won't be "Can they prove I'm guilty", but "Have I proved my innocence?" Remember, at first it will be used to fight the good fight. It's for your own safety. You might be cuffed and locked up for hours, but once you get enough innocent Americans to vouch for your patriotism and loyalty, you'll be released. Whoopee.
This has the potential to make the McCarthy witch hunts look like a friendly tea party. I don't think I'm exaggerating. Our best hope is that it provides so many false positives that it becomes impractical to use. Specifically, let's hope some Senator spends a lot of cash while vacationing incognito with his "niece", and receives a tazering and an anal probe on his return flight as a reward. That should kill this thing pretty quickly.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Right. Except when it comes to the treatment of our 'prisoners of war'. Then, we are suddenly not at war.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I see this is the beginning of the end. Like so many other posts quoting Ben Franklin, it may be truer than many believe. The second people start to believe this is a good idea, that's when it becomes acceptable for the government to do away with whatever they please. At least in their eyes.
The day of 911, when my teachers began talking about how everything was going to change from here on out, I knew that we were in for trouble. My biggest concern wasn't so much that they were changing laws, and making new ones that take away freedom. No, it was when I was hearing people saying it was okay, that it was for the better...
Can't anyone see that they are blatantly using 9/11 as a cover for doing WHATEVER they want to do. They have called it a war so that they can use whatever powers necessary to do whatever they have the slightest inclination to do.
We can't just sit back and say this is okay. Write your congressmen!!! I don't even put much stock in this action, but if enough of us do, we can pray that somehow it changes things.
Remember this?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world." -- Declaration of Independence
"That, sir, would go against every tenet upon which slashdot is built"
This form of public discussion is, in fact, a better medium for the broadcast of bad ideas then public speaking if for no other reason then they will immediately, and often logically, be shot down in flames thus helping to clear some wrong headed ideas that tend to flow all too easily into the public mind.
The problem with massive screening systems like these the reverend Thomas Bayes (of Bayes's theorem) is not the detection part, i.e. being able to actually detect all the bad guys, but not drowning in false alarms when doing so. And the base-rate fallacy says that there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
I've developed the argument further in an intrusion detection context see for example The base rate-fallacy and it's implications for the difficulty of intrusion detection, and it's directly applicable here. The article has an introductory example, that explains that under certain conditions a 99% accurate medical test, won't work at all. The references lists a few other papers by Matthews that are well worth a read also.
In short, since there are precious few passengers that are actually "terrorists" for any real definition of the world, the system must be several (perhaps 1x10^5 -- 1x10^6) times better at suppressing false alarms, than at detecting actual terrorist, to avoid the situation where "all" alarms (from a practical standpoint) are false alarms, i.e. the fact that you were flagged says nothing about you being a danger or not.
What's worse of course is that people when faced with such systems start to ignore their output sooner rather than later, and then the system becomes completely useless even from a narrow security perspective.
So, no, it won't work. It could have worked against the "casual" threat, its very existence could have served as a deterrent, but there are hardly any spur-of-the-moment suicide bombers, so, no, scrap that to. It can't work, because Bayes says so.
Stefan Axelsson
http://www.supersphere.com/FrontPage/Politic/Artic le.html?ID=911&NAME=1984 or read it below. The worst of it, he's getting more right by the minute. War is Peace? Iran now, and then... Freedom is Slavery? Watch your privacy disappear before your eyes. Ignorance is Strength. Yes, by keeping the people ignorant the government gains strength.
Bush's Orwellian Address
Happy New Year: It's 1984
by Jacob Levich
Seventeen years later than expected, 1984 has arrived. In his address to Congress Thursday, George Bush effectively declared permanent war -- war without temporal or geographic limits; war without clear goals; war against a vaguely defined and constantly shifting enemy. Today it's Al-Qaida; tomorrow it may be Afghanistan; next year, it could be Iraq or Cuba or Chechnya.
No one who was forced to read 1984 in high school could fail to hear a faint bell tinkling. In George Orwell's dreary classic, the totalitarian state of Oceania is perpetually at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. Although the enemy changes periodically, the war is permanent; its true purpose is to control dissent and sustain dictatorship by nurturing popular fear and hatred.
The permanent war undergirds every aspect of Big Brother's authoritarian program, excusing censorship, propaganda, secret police, and privation. In other words, it's terribly convenient.
And conveniently terrible. Bush's alarming speech pointed to a shadowy enemy that lurks in more 60 countries, including the US. He announced a policy of using maximum force against any individuals or nations he designates as our enemies, without color of international law, due process, or democratic debate.
He explicitly warned that much of the war will be conducted in secret. He rejected negotiation as a tool of diplomacy. He announced starkly that any country that doesn't knuckle under to US demands will be regarded as an enemy. He heralded the creation of a powerful new cabinet-level police agency called the "Office of Homeland Security." Orwell couldn't have named it better.
By turns folksy ("Ya know what?") and chillingly bellicose ("Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"), Bush stepped comfortably into the role of Big Brother, who needs to be loved as well as feared. Meanwhile, his administration acted swiftly to realize the governing principles of Oceania:
WAR IS PEACE. A reckless war that will likely bring about a deadly cycle of retaliation is being sold to us as the means to guarantee our safety. Meanwhile, we've been instructed to accept the permanent war as a fact of daily life. As the inevitable slaughter of innocents unfolds overseas, we are to "live our lives and hug our children."
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. "Freedom itself is under attack," Bush said, and he's right. Americans are about to lose many of their most cherished liberties in a frenzy of paranoid legislation. The government proposes to tap our phones, read our email and seize our credit card records without court order. It seeks authority to detain and deport immigrants without cause or trial. It proposes to use foreign agents to spy on American citizens. To save freedom, the warmongers intend to destroy it.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. America's "new war" against terrorism will be fought with unprecedented secrecy, including heavy press restrictions not seen for years, the Pentagon has advised. Meanwhile, the sorry history of American imperialism -- collaboration with terrorists, bloody proxy wars against civilians, forcible replacement of democratic governments with corrupt dictatorships -- is strictly off-limits to mainstream media. Lest it weaken our resolve, we are not to be allowed to understand the reasons underlying the horrifying crimes of September 11.
The defining speech of Bush's presidency points toward an Orwellian future of endless war, expedient lies, and ubiquitous social control. But unlike 1984's doomed protagonist, we've still got plenty of space to maneuver and plenty of ways to resist.
It's time to speak and to act. It falls on us now to take to the streets, bearing a clear message for the warmongers: We don't love Big Brother.
Jacob Levich (jlevich@earthlink.net) is an writer, editor, and activist living in Queens, New York.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The screening plans reflect a growing faith among aviation and government leaders that information technology can solve some of the nation's most vexing security problems by rooting out and snaring people who intend to commit terrorist acts.
Information technology is not some kind of magical spell that will allow telepathic scanning of what goes on in a person's head before the fact. All the data processed by a computer will be configured to respond to specific clues, which people will always manage to go around.
Computers will never replace the judgement of a human being, and will never be able to determine what the intentions of a person are because of a very simple reason: computers measure actions, and the same action by different individuals does not imply that they have the same motives.
Despite what many politicians and officials seem to think, computers will not solve all of the world's problems. Their "faith" is just that: a belief in something based on no rational grounds.
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
Given the recently passed laws in the USA this development was inevitable.
Just how many databases are they planning to put together for this profiling? The US government already has granted its law enforcement agencies the right to trawl through email and other web traffic. Is that information going to be used too?
I would be suprised if it were not. From what I gather they now have the legal right to do this.
It strikes me that it could be incredibly easy to get a "dangerous" profile. Just write some emails/articles that are harshly critical about Bush's approach to the war on terrorism. Send too many attachments with your emails and you may be sending stenographic info. Send a random binary file as an attachment, or even just a corrupt file, and you must be sending cryptographic communications (of course you cannot prove otherwise). Hell, just use crypto. Buy plane tickets for a couple of friends and check in at different times from them, or not at all. Exchange emails with Muslim friends expressing anger and disgust about the racist abuse they're suffering from redneck idiots and offer your support and you must be a danger. The possibilities are almost endless.
By the sounds of it, if you were to do all of these things you would guarantee yourself a strip-search every time you fly in the USA.
Do you know who all your friends friends are? Can you really guarantee that you have no link to a terrorist organisation, or organised crime?
Of course not, and nor should you have to. However in a country where even the government has supported terrorism in the past it would not be all that unlikely for a data mining system to find such a link.
I thank God that I'm not an American.
Unless you buy your tickets at the ticket window or do your own complete reservations, usually your whole itinerary is published, sold and marketed. What is wrong with throwing some security behind it?
It isn't racial profiling or segmenting out certain people, just tracking patterns of who does what.
Hell, even in small as Lancaster PA of a population of 300,000 at most, they profile. They profile segments of town to track population, growth, crime and variations in all of the segments. If they see a crime "Wave" moving through they have an idea of where it originates and they can attack it from the source.
You aren't aware of it, you aren't being racially profile or magically segmented out, people are just using what is known to track, monitor and predict many fascets of normal everyday life which just so happens to include the threat of terrorism.
Your aren't loosing any liberties when people use information already available. They're not going to do anything unless your being suspicious.
If you fly 3 different airlines across the us constantly scoping out different airports and have the abilities to rackup miles, rewards, points and member benifits, but don't then that should raise a flag, especially if your paying cash for tickets or full price. As the typical person no matter if a business or personall trip will try and get all the benifets and perks of flying including saving money on advanced purchases, hotel rewards, point sharing rewards and predicting and scheduling their plans.
The people being evavisive for a reason will have another reason to fear flying. Either way you won't loose your liberties unless your TRYING TO.
The US has laws and rules to protect your rights, you don't loose them unless you express through actions or words you understanding of the loss of these rights.
I don't see a single legit american being held, all the people being held without release right now are people overstaying visa's or using education visa's for other purposes. The country they come from can get them extradited, but they don't. Is it wrong for Americans to protect themselves because other countries could care less about there own citizens?
These aren't people who merely stole a candy bar from 711 who are going to be held, and i'm sorry but a visa infraction is a SERIOUS crime. Your over staying your legal visit in a country and your stated purpose is no longer binding. Your going to pay the price and you were told simply the cost of your actions when you came to this country.
So don't consider it PROFILING, consider it being rational and using the numbers just like everything else is done. If you county has a high traffic accident rate you pay a higher insurance premium because they came up with a rational way of handling the problems of that area, they profiled the population and didn't hand all the expenses to black people, white people, chinese or japanese, but you know if that WHOLE DAMN AREA IS BLACK, WHITE OR CHINESE THEN IT IS THAT POPULATION THAT HAS TO ACCEPT THAT PROBLEM AND FIX IT. There are plenty of other BLACK, WHITE, CHINESE,INDIAN areas that DON'T have that problem.
This kind of a boondoggle is a sales guy dream. It will take years to build and prove to be unable to perform the task. By that time, the guy who sold it will be long gone, after he pockets his commision.
Systems that build a big pile of data and "try to find patterns" sound good, but never seem to work in real life.
They always seem to degrade into a very simple rule of thumb like "If you paid late before, you might pay late again." Duh.
So is the new rule "If you hijacked a plane before, you might hijack another one?" You dont need to track who I live with/sleep with to keep a list of people that hijack planes.
These systems that "find subtle patterns" usally find data artifacts that have little or no predictive power with lots of false positives.
In the mean time, it will be more useful for divorce lawyers if they can get their hands on the data. Ever want to hide from an ex wife? Never fly on a plane. Ever.
This reminded me of an interesting quote of Bin Laden on the BBC this morning:
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The US Government will lead the American people - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_ea st /newsid_1795000/1795531.stm
Lies about crimes
From CNN's report on the mid-October bin Laden tape just released:
Sounds about right, eh?
-ben
(only slightly more glad that I'm Canadian...)
myselfmusic
q. Why are Anonymous Cowards like Muslims?
a. They all look the same, they stink, and all they can talk about is hatred.
first off, hatred is everywhere- from the middle east to your backyard...coincidentally it sounds like you got some hatred there yourself. secondly, every single religion has fundamentalists that plague it, from the christians to the jews. summing up this rant, in one disorganized sentence: anyone who generalizes is doing the same as "those stinking, hate filled muslims" (to put it in your words)
I'm sorry, but who invaded whose country here? Yes, the Taliban are shitty people, but our whole reason for attacking them was to 'get Bin Laden'. If an army invaded your country, would you fight it or just let it roll through? How can you be an 'unlawful combatant' when you are defending your home? If there any *better* reason for fighting?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Orwell would be chagrined that a bunch of whiny, priviledged citizens of the United States are complaining about how not being able to burn leaves and having to fill out a census.
Glad you can read his dead mind. I'll ignore the brainless insults.
First of all, leaf burning laws are local, not federal laws.
So? The parent post said terrorism was ending the idea that a man's home is his castle. I said that the idea has long been under attack, terrorism or no.
Second of all, censuses have been in existence in the US since 1790. 2 years after the adoption of the Constitution.
Did they threaten fines and criminal penalties for not filling it out in 1790? Also, it is supposed to be a simple enumeration, it has been expanded way, way beyond that.
I can't bear to reply to the idea that federal standards on toilet flush capacity is Orwellian...
Didn't say it was. But it relates to my house being my castle. There is no reason for the federal government to be regulating this.
"We don't like the looks of you, you can't live in our neighborhood."
"We don't like the looks of you, you can't fly on our airplane."
Boy, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
-Thomas
The problem is not that they are making more rules. The problem is that they are making the *wrong* rules.
For example, there is now a pretty good chance that I will have to take my shoes off and have someone search them before I can get on a plane. However, I can, if I have purchased a domestic airline ticket, check a bag onto an airplane, then leave the airport and that bag will fly without me to its destination.
So on one hand you have a stupid little rule that inconveniences a lot of innocent people (there are so many better ways to get stuff onto an airplane than in one's shoes). But at the same time, there are huge security holes that are being ignored.
It would seem that the new "tighter" security is all about the perception of security in order to encourage people to fly. They don't seem to care whether that perception reflects reality at all.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
1. Consider the amount of data that needs to be collected and mined for each individual. Is all of this data going to be stored in one place and updated continuously, or gathered per individual on request? Since associations are going to be traced, they'll want to gather all of this information up front. This is going to require a hell of a lot of storage space and some ungodly bandwidth to maintain.
The level of detail they want to put into your dossier is considerably more than a private investigator could come up with, and PIs charge hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars for such a report. These guys are going to keep the price down around $2 per ticket. Yeah. Sure.
2. A background check on one prospective passenger will be rather intensive. They're talking about using phone records here, which alone could bind the average person to several dozen other people. Let's call this number "a". Now, they're going to explore seven degrees of association. This means that 1+a**7 people need to be checked to vet one passenger. (Current population of Earth: about 6*10**9). How far in advance do I need to make my reservation?
3. Remember Kevin Bacon? I remember reading a couple of years ago that between any two people on Earth chosen at random there are on the average LESS THAN SIX degrees of separation. Yep, that applies to Ashcroft and Bin Laden as well.
4. Bad data is worse than no data, and it won't take much pollution to render the whole thing completely useless. The Feds will need to tamper with the data to allow their agents to work undercover and to operate the Witness Protection programs. This database will be an irresistable cracker target. And where would we get data on non-citizens?
Both major (and probably some of the minor) political parties will have their private cracks into the database and neither will hesitate very long to use those cracks to find or create dirt on their opponents and to try to clean their own candidates' records. It won't take long for them to dispel anyone's delusion that this thing is in any way accurate.
In short, it's just not going to work. I suspect someone's looking for free publicity or maybe some "venture capital".
Heh, I have almost the same story, but totally different.
I always carry a swiss army knife in my briefcase. It has tweezers, a screw driver, etc. Useful little tool for emergencies.
When I flew from LAX to Japan, I put my briefcase through the XRAY machine and had no problem.
When I was leaving Japan, I put my briefcase through XRAY and the operator stopped me, asking "do you have a knife in your briefcase?"
"Yes", I replied.
All hell did not break loose.
She politely informed me that I would have to check the knife as a security item. No alarms went off. They didn't quarantine me. No body-cavity searches. I just opened my briefcase, gave her my knife, and she gave me a claim check.
So my end result was the same as yours, but my experience was different.
So what's the moral of my non-story? Maybe it's the attitude of the person behind the machine that makes the difference?
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Um, no you cannot check your bag, leave the airport and have it fly to the destination. That changed a few weeks ago. All bags are matched with the manifest. You, obviously don't fly frequently. I hear all of the time folks being paged because the flight is about to leave. Why do you think that is? It's because if those dumbasses don't show up, they are going to have to offload their luggage.
I agree, it is the clueless jerk who is messing up air travel. I would like to have a frequent traveler card, so I can bypass the clueless idiots and get on to my next consulting engagement.
Should the US be invaded, make sure you put on a uniform before you pick up a gun.
--
E_NOSIG