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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."
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.
Assurances from whom? The government? Trust us, we're from the government and we're here to help you. Not!
The often quoted (and probably inaccurate) statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin applies here : He that would trade liberty for security deserves and would receive neither.
It's all too easy to become complacent about trading away liberties until finally you have none. It's not that I think this particular issue is the end of the world, it's the principle of retaining and defending your right to privacy. All liberties must be defended vigorously, lest we allow the systematic elimination of them all.
Just my $.05 (inflation, you know).
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
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.
Read what happened to Microsoft Chief Architect Charles Simonyi when he got profiled at an airport.
As an Israeli citizen, I can tell you we are less a police state than what the US has become.
Yes we have national IDs and soldiers and security guards everywhere, but we have freedom of speech (at least to some extent). I can buy/rent a zone 1 DVD at any video store. I can publish code to decrypt DVDs without any limitation. I can practice cryptography without being targeted. In Israel, the policial and social pressure groups rule and not the corporations. Here we have strict laws limiting campaign contributions.
Now, which country is more free?
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
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*
It's not necessarily racist. With so many countries being mostly or all of one ethnic and/or religious group (which usually indicates that the country has its own racist and exclusionary practices or else they'd have a more visible minority), its easy for singling out persons from one country to be perceived as, or actually be, racist, but it isn't necessarily so. It often is racist, but it doesn't have to be. Are the many groups around the world who hate Americans racist? If so, what race are they against?
Besides, most of the anti-profiling arguments just piss me off. Most of the profiles are based on dry, boring math, just probabilities churned out by a computer somewhere. The best way for communities to not be harassed by profiling isn't to complain and demand that profiling not be used, its to demand that the members of their community stop the offensive behavior so that the profile is no longer accurate. If some agency only has the resources to check one of two people, one is an Arab man in his mid-twenties with a one way ticket and the other is an elderly black women on the return leg of a round trip, it's just good sense to check the young man. If they had the time and resources they could and should check both, but with limited options you go with the probabilities. No eldery black women have blown up anything big recently, sorry. Want to avoid that profiling? Make it so that young Arab men haven't blown up anything recently, either.
Frankly, I'll get upset about the unfair treatment right after I get back from my trip to Mecca. Oh, that's right, I'm not allowed to go there, I'm not a member of the right group.
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Is it racism to point out the simple fact that 20 out of 20 9-11 terrorists and the famed Shoe-Bomber were those fellas with more consonants than vowels?
Suposing that by the "more consonants..." thingie you mean they had "funny sounding names".. It's not racism to point that fact out. It's just a simple fact. But to harass people because of appearences ONLY is prejudice and racism.
Why do you think bil Laden hates Americans. Do you think he hates them because he has met all of them had a nice talk to each and every one of them and come to the conclussion that Amercans suck and should be killed? I can assure you that he most probably has not made such a thorough investigation! He's being the same kind of fool like every other racist who judges all by the knowledge he has over a few. He probably has a problem with some imperialistic pricks but does the stupid mistake on blaming everyone in the same group. That's prejudice and racism and it's especially common in times of uncertainty.
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
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"
Should the US be invaded, make sure you put on a uniform before you pick up a gun.
--
E_NOSIG