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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."
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.
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
You're making the same mistake that the US media tends to make when reporting on this issue: tying two unrelated problems together. The government keeping and correlating more information about an individual, and requirements to show ID more often, are entirely separate topics despite how the press - and the civil liberties lobby, sadly - portray them. Every single place that takes a credit card could demand to see a driver's license starting today, without any new laws or any need for the government to gather more data. Or, the gov't could gather more data, without ever having a national ID or requiring anyone to identify themselves at any point. Two entirely distinct issues.
As an example, France. The French do have national ID papers, but as with most European nations, they strongly limit data gathering by statute. (Of course, given what an amazingly high percentage of the French population works for the gov't in one form or another, any belief that they don't actually go ahead and collect that data anyway is charmingly innocent, but that's another matter.)
Treating these issues as a unit weakens the arguments against them, to me at least. Most folks in the US don't mind the idea of a national ID card, or even a national driver's license. They'd be annoyed if they had to show it all the time, but the simple combination of the ID's into one system doesn't bother them. Most folks who move between states would be strongly in favor of not having to go through the grief of changing their DL to the new locale. And, sadly, most of the folks in the US are sheep as regards protecting their personal data, so that argument doesn't do much either. I know that the civil liberties folks hope to tie in the idea of gov't lackeys demanding ID checks in hopes of getting the public to get angry with the other issues, too, but I think it's working the other way. Since everyone sees all of these topics tied together, their favor or apathy for some of the issues is becoming favor or apathy for the whole set. Lets keep separate issues separate, and clearly show why each is separately a bad idea. Didn't we all favor suing M$ to get *them* to stop bundling?
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
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!
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"
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.
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!
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!"
Should the US be invaded, make sure you put on a uniform before you pick up a gun.
--
E_NOSIG