Slashdot Mirror
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."
...just buy Doubleclick's database? Those bastards already have most everyone's data. If the gov't is going to collect data like that, they can at least have the decency to do it on the cheap and not add insult to injury by spending huge amounts of my tax money on it.
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
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.
Do what I do and use cash whenever possible.
Obviously, it wouldn't be sensible to buy your air tickets with cash, but the airline knows who you are anyway so you don't lose anything by paying by card on this occasion.
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 will solve all of our problems! Hurah for the FBI and other organizations. they've seriously cleaned everything up.
Now that we've weeded out that large portion of the terrorist world that runs around conspicuously advertising the fact that they're terrorists, using their real names and all kinds of paper-trail leaving items like credit cards, real id's and such, all we have to worry about now is that tremendously tiny segment of the criminal population that uses devious means to achieve their goals.
Thank god the vast majority of criminals and terrorist won't be able to circumvent this measure! Otherwise, it would just be a burden on the American public. And the government would never do something that shortsighted and dumb! Right?
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
It sounds like the system that is being described in the article is programmatically doing the type of data analysis that is performed manually by current intelligence agencies. This just speeds it up to where it would provide useful realitime data correllations.
The disadvantage is that it could potentially intrude on the public's privacy. Because it is so much easier to dig up unrelated facts, it would encourage law enforcement agencies to use such a system to go on "treasure hunts", just to see what dirt they could dig up.
What could get nasty though, is if the system could be tweaked by an unscroupulous operator to "plant" facts about someone they wanted to go after. It occasionally happens already, using physical evidence or data. This system could make it easier.
As Big Brother starts to collate that data I expect some interesting patterns will emerge. The famous "bought incubus CD -->probable anachristDO NOT issue that speeding ticket, you'll be embarassed on court!--"
It will be interesting to see what type of metric this data produces. Now if the data is flawed then it's not much use to anyone. I can't wait! I guess I have to start living with 2 Iranian women, purchase lots of ski gear (here in sunny FL) and start reading more ancient druid text.
The next TRUE geek test. Just how far away from the curve can you get. Just how confusing is it for Big Brother to pigeon hole you?
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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.
The checks would be against perceived security "flags", and each passenger would be given a "threat assessment" score: for example, someone who purchased four tickets for four passengers on a single flight on the same credit card would have a higher threat rating than you or I would. Yes, before slashdroids go apeshit over this, we can assume a family going to Disneyworld would not be flagged, but four guys with more consonants than vowels in their name sitting in different parts of the plane probably would. And what the hell's wrong with that?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What about the thousands of business travellers every year who attend a weeks worth of meetings and
a) Don't buy their own ticket
b) Don't book their hotel
c) Give the address they are staying at as the company they are visiting.
Or even crazier....
DIDN'T BUY THEIR TICKETS IN THE US!
For pities sake linking all of the reservations systems in the US to try and catch terrorists based in the middle east ? I hate to break it to the muppets out there who thought of this but I can go to a website outside of the US (e.g. This one) and book tickets.
The first thing such a system would find is things like
"Hey look IBMs corporate card has booked 4 people onto this flight, 1 in first class, 1 in business and 2 in coach. We'd better check it out"
or
"Some guy in Redmond is booking hundreds of flights a week going all over the world... including to the middle east"
This wins two awards
1) Brain dead of the year
and
2) Failure to recognise the world outside of the US
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Read what happened to Microsoft Chief Architect Charles Simonyi when he got profiled at an airport.
if ($passenger =~ /leftist|non-conformist|muslim|CowboyNeal|ain\'t\s right/gi) {
warn "Potential Threat\n";
jerkknee();
}
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
That's called racism, fool. That's what's wrong.
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Just used your friendly neighborhood travel agent and pay them in cash. Travel agents are very handy and underrated anyway. They're happy to play what-if scenarios to try to find you a less expensive rate and have access to multiple means of getting you to your destination, so if those last minute air tickets cost too much, they can try Amtrack or Greyhound for you.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Unfortunately, most of my long distance trips are visits to family in Utah. That's about 36 hours driving time, not including stops for such luxuries as sleep. Damn.
Best Slashdot Co
"She's got something against Microsoft, Intel, the Dee-Emm-See-Aye, stupidly awarded patents."
"Yeah, sounds like a radical alright, anything else?"
"She loves something called Linux, processors from a company called Aye-Emm-Dee, and open source something or other."
"Damn, sounds like one to monitor carefully."
"Oh, and she reads something called Slash-Dot."
"!!!"
Klaxons blare, national guard soldiers flood the concourse, passengers witness a woman dragged away in irons with the needles of many stunguns still embedded in her arms and legs.
Yeah, good thing we have people like Ashcroft looking out for us... excuse me, time to feed the pitbulls.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And yet in the face if this story, Michael still feels the need to rock the boat. Guess who's going to get the "Random" body cavity search next time he flies. Yep, the ticket agent will check his ID in the computer and the computer will go *BOOP* Dissident! This of course putting him on the fast track to all the unpleasant "random" security measures.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I like the "7 levels" of association. I'm pretty sure that somewhere no more than 3 levels away, the FBI is watching someone who could limit my travel...
I'm a Slashdot reader.
One of the million(s) of other slashdot readers may know a (god forbid) hacker.. Maybe even a hacker who reads a forbidden list such as (gasp) BugTraq! Now I'm an elite underground hacker by association. Who knows what evil plots I may be up to..
Guess what.. That makes all of you guilty by association too.
I'm thinking this may slightly change my plans on attending future DefCon conventions.. I may have to drive instead of fly. I'm sure previous con's will definately flag my name for years to come.
I've been expecting the mysterious 4am knock on my door from the FBI. Now they won't have to bother, they can just wait for me at the mass transit terminal of their choice. I'll just sweep my newly designated Federal identification (my good ol' drivers license) to get into the subway or through an airport checkpoint, and the stormtroopers will be there.
I'm not sure I like the government's new found power.. We all know perfectly well the aren't just going to use it for this set of terrorists, they'll use it for anyone they deem a criminal element.
I wonder how long it will take to explain the items in my normal carry-on bag..
- Laptop (Linux, of course)
- Hand tools (4-tip screwdriver, cutters, cat5 crimper, phone crimper, tone tester, etc)
- various wires (network, power, etc)
- small unidentifyable electronic components.
- small personal messaging device (Motorola "Communicator")
- technical documentation and diagrams (oh my)
Previous to Sept 11th, it was checked over twice before every trip. They'd do the swab test, look at it as if they knew what anything in it was, and then ask "do you have a knife in there?" I say no. They'd ask me various questions regarding my trip to see if I would trip up. It's hard to trip up with "Flying out to fix a client's network, coming back tommorrow."
Frequently my checked luggage is a large bag with various non-descript boxes inside (servers, components, etc).
Thank goodness I haven't had to travel since Sept 11th. I've been watched at airports just waiting to pick people up.. You can entertain yourself for hours when you're waiting for a delayed flight. Just keep walking around, and identify the undercover security agents.
Anonymous
Sadly true. The thing about terrorism is that there is no way the terrorists can't win. Any security can be circumvented. So we protect against any given types of attacks, what's to prevent them from using a different means. I could drive my pickup truck head-on into a school-bus this afternoon and nobody could stop me. (trust me, I won't) What are we going to do about that possible terrorist threat, build seperate roads for school busses to travel on? Yes, that's a bad examble, but the point is the same. That's why Bin Laden won the war on terrism the moment his pawns rammed those planes into the WTC and the Pentagon. America changed at that point. Americans became more paranoid. The government got an excuse to impose pretty much anything they want. Tilting at windmills in the guise of increasing security. But what else could have happened? We couldn't just pretend that nothing happened. If we'd have done that, that plane that dropped in Pennsylvania would have hit its target.
America is changing, and you're right... one day we'll wake up and realise it is no longer the USA. Maybe one day we'll wake up and this will all be a bad dream, but that possibility is so remote as to be, well, a dream. The reality of the future is starting to settle in around us and it all seems so...
inevitable.
At Christmas, I took the wife and kids back to Grandma's house.
As we came to the gate at boarding time, they were conducting the 'random search' on a bearded male who looked to be in his early 20's. A little later, they pulled me aside for the 'random search'. I guess the fact that I was travelling with a wife and two kids doesn't matter, nor does being in my mid-40s. I'm a bearded male.
I have a friend who has the same name as a porno producer, and he's gotten terrible hassles coming back into the US, over mistaken identity.
Somehow I doubt adding computers to the profiling scheme will improve things much. Imagine kids cracking the things to get their friends searched on family vacations. Or their enemies.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
--
Graceland tour guide: "Elvis has the left building."
"Racial profiling" has become one of the shibboleths of our time. Anyone who wants a public career in the United States must place himself on record as being against it. Thus, ex-senator John Ashcroft, on the eve of his confirmation hearings: "It's wrong, inappropriate, shouldn't be done." During the vice-presidential debate last October, moderator Bernard Shaw invited the candidates to imagine themselves black victims of racial profiling. Both made the required ritual protestations of outrage. Lieberman: "I have a few African-American friends who have gone through this horror, and you know, it makes me want to kind of hit the wall, because it is such an assault on their humanity and their citizenship." Cheney: "It's the sense of anger and frustration and rage that would go with knowing that the only reason you were stopped...was because of the color of your skin..." In the strange, rather depressing, pattern these things always follow nowadays, the American public has speedily swung into line behind the Pied Pipers: Gallup reports that 81 percent of the public disapproves of racial profiling.
All of which represents an extraordinary level of awareness of, and hostility to, and even passion against ("hit the wall...") a practice that, up to about five years ago, practically nobody had heard of. It is, in fact, instructive to begin by looking at the history of this shibboleth.
To people who follow politics, the term "racial profiling" probably first registered when Al Gore debated Bill Bradley at New York's Apollo Theatre in February 2000. Here is Bradley, speaking of the 1999 shooting of African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York City police: "I...think it reflects...racial profiling that seeps into the mind of someone so that he sees a wallet in the hand of a white man as a wallet, but a wallet in the hand of a black man as a gun. And we -- we have to change that. I would issue an executive order that would eliminate racial profiling at the federal level."
Nobody was unkind enough to ask Sen. Bradley how an executive order would change what a policeman sees in a dark lobby in a dangerous neighborhood at night. Nor was anyone so tactless as to ask him about the case of LaTanya Haggerty, shot dead in June 1999 by a Chicago policewoman who mistook her cell phone for a handgun. The policewoman was, like Ms. Haggerty, black.
Al Gore, in that debate at the Apollo, did successfully, and famously, ambush Bradley by remarking that: "You know, racial profiling practically began in New Jersey, Senator Bradley." In true Clinton-Gore fashion, this is not true, but it is sort of true. "Racial profiling" the thing has been around for as long as police work, and is practiced everywhere. "Racial profiling" the term did indeed have its origins on the New Jersey Turnpike in the early 1990s. The reason for the prominence of this rather unappealing stretch of expressway in the history of the phenomenon is simple: The turnpike is the main conduit for the shipment of illegal drugs and other contraband to the great criminal marts of the Northeast.
The career of the term "racial profiling" seems to have begun in 1994, but did not really take off until April 1998, when two white New Jersey state troopers pulled over a van for speeding. As they approached the van from behind, it suddenly reversed towards them. The troopers fired eleven shots from their handguns, wounding three of the van's four occupants, who were all black or Hispanic. The troopers, James Kenna and John Hogan, subsequently became poster boys for the "racial profiling" lobbies, facing the same indignities, though so far with less serious consequences, as were endured by the Los Angeles policemen in the Rodney King case: endless investigations, double jeopardy, and so on.
And a shibboleth was born. News-media databases list only a scattering of instances of the term "racial profiling" from 1994 to 1998. In that latter year, the number hit double digits, and thereafter rose quickly into the hundreds and thousands. Now we all know about it, and we are, of course, all against it.
Well, not quite all. American courts -- including (see below) the U.S. Supreme Court -- are not against it. Jurisprudence on the matter is pretty clear: So long as race is only one factor in a generalized approach to the questioning of suspects, it may be considered. And of course, pace Candidate Cheney, it always is only one factor. I have been unable to locate any statistics on the point, but I feel sure that elderly black women are stopped by the police much less often than are young white men.
Even in the political sphere, where truth-telling and independent thinking on matters of race have long been liabilities, there are those who refuse to mouth the required pieties. Alan Keyes, when asked by Larry King if he would be angry with a police officer who pulled him over for being black, replied: "I was raised that everything I did represented my family, my race, and my country. I would be angry with the people giving me a bad reputation."
GOODBYE TO COMMON SENSE Practically all law-enforcement professionals believe in the need for racial profiling. In an article on the topic for The New York Times Magazine in June 1999, Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Bernard Parks, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. Parks, who is black, asked rhetorically of racial profiling: "Should we play the percentages?...It's common sense." Note that date, though. This was pretty much the latest time at which it was possible for a public official to speak truthfully about racial profiling. Law-enforcement professionals were learning the importance of keeping their thoughts to themselves. Four months before the Goldberg piece saw print, New Jersey state-police superintendent Carl Williams, in an interview, said that certain crimes were associated with certain ethnic groups, and that it was naïve to think that race was not an issue in policing -- both statements, of course, perfectly true. Supt. Williams was fired the same day by Gov. Christie Todd Whitman.
Like other race issues in the U.S., racial profiling is a "tadpole," with an enormous black head and a long but comparatively inconsequential brown, yellow, and red tail. While Hispanic, "Asian-American," and other lesser groups have taken up the "racial profiling" chant with gusto, the crux of the matter is the resentment that black Americans feel toward the attentions of white policemen. By far the largest number of Americans angry about racial profiling are law-abiding black people who feel that they are stopped and questioned because the police regard all black people with undue suspicion. They feel that they are the victims of a negative stereotype.
They are. Unfortunately, a negative stereotype can be correct, and even useful. I was surprised to find, when researching this article, that within the academic field of social psychology there is a large literature on stereotypes, and that much of it -- an entire school of thought -- holds that stereotypes are essential life tools. On the scientific evidence, the primary function of stereotypes is what researchers call "the reality function." That is, stereotypes are useful tools for dealing with the world. Confronted with a snake or a fawn, our immediate behavior is determined by generalized beliefs -- stereotypes -- about snakes and fawns. Stereotypes are, in fact, merely one aspect of the mind's ability to make generalizations, without which science and mathematics, not to mention, as the snake/fawn example shows, much of everyday life, would be impossible.
At some level, everybody knows this stuff, even the guardians of the "racial profiling" flame. Jesse Jackson famously, in 1993, confessed that: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." Here is Sandra Seegars of the Washington, D.C., Taxicab Commission:
Late at night, if I saw young black men dressed in a slovenly way, I wouldn't pick them up.... And during the day, I'd think twice about it.
Pressed to define "slovenly," Ms. Seegars elaborated thus: "A young black guy with his hat on backwards, shirttail hanging down longer than his coat, baggy pants down below his underwear, and unlaced tennis shoes." Now there's a stereotype for you! Ms. Seegars is, of course, black.
Law-enforcement officials are simply employing the same stereotypes as you, me, Jesse, and Sandra, but taking the opposite course of action. What we seek to avoid, they pursue. They do this for reasons of simple efficiency. A policeman who concentrates a disproportionate amount of his limited time and resources on young black men is going to uncover far more crimes -- and therefore be far more successful in his career -- than one who biases his attention toward, say, middle-aged Asian women. It is, as Chief Parks said, common sense.
Similarly with the tail of the tadpole -- racial-profiling issues that do not involve black people. China is known to have obtained a top-secret warhead design. Among those with clearance to work on that design are people from various kinds of national and racial background. Which ones should investigators concentrate on? The Swedes? The answer surely is: They should first check out anyone who has family or friends in China, who has made trips to China, or who has met with Chinese officials. This would include me, for example -- my father-in-law is an official of the Chinese Communist Party. Would I then have been "racially profiled"?
It is not very surprising to learn that the main fruit of the "racial profiling" hysteria has been a decline in the efficiency of police work. In Philadelphia, a federal court order now re quires police to fill out both sides of an 8½-by-11 sheet on every citizen contact. Law-enforcement agencies nationwide are engaged in similar statistics-gathering exercises, under pressure from federal lawmakers like U.S. Rep. John Conyers, who has announced that he will introduce a bill to force police agencies to keep detailed information about traffic stops. ("The struggle goes on," declared Rep. Conyers. The struggle that is going on, it sometimes seems, is a struggle to prevent our police forces from accomplishing any useful work at all.)
The mountain of statistics that is being brought forth by all this panic does not, on the evidence so far, seem likely to shed much light on what is happening. The numbers have a way of leading off into infinite regresses of uncertainty. The city of San Jose, Calif., for example, discovered that, yes, the percentage of blacks being stopped was higher than their representation in the city's population. Ah, but patrol cars were computer-assigned to high-crime districts, which are mainly inhabited by minorities. So that over-representation might actually be an under-representation! But then, minorities have fewer cars....
THE CORE ARGUMENTS
Notwithstanding the extreme difficulty of finding out what is actually happening, we can at least seek some moral and philosophical grounds on which to take a stand either for or against racial profiling. I am going to take it as a given that most readers of this article will be of a conservative inclination, and shall offer only those arguments likely to appeal to persons so inclined. If you seek arguments of other kinds, they are not hard to find -- just pick up your newspaper or turn on your TV.
Of arguments against racial profiling, probably the ones most persuasive to a conservative are the ones from libertarianism. Many of the stop-and-search cases that brought this matter into the headlines were part of the so-called war on drugs. The police procedures behind them were ratified by court decisions of the 1980s, themselves mostly responding to the rising tide of illegal narcotics. In U.S. vs. Montoya De Hernandez (1985) for example, Chief Justice Rehnquist validated the detention of a suspected "balloon swallowing" drug courier until the material had passed through her system, by noting previous invasions upheld by the Court:
[F]irst class mail may be opened without a warrant on less than probable cause.... Automotive travellers may be stopped...near the border without individualized suspicion even if the stop is based largely on ethnicity...
(My italics.) The Chief Justice further noted that these incursions are in response to "the veritable national crisis in law enforcement caused by smuggling of illegal narcotics."
Many on the political Right feel that the war on drugs is at best misguided, at worst a moral and constitutional disaster. Yet it is naïve to imagine that the "racial profiling" hubbub would go away, or even much diminish, if all state and federal drug laws were repealed tomorrow. Black and Hispanic Americans would still be committing crimes at rates higher than citizens of other races. The differential criminality of various ethnic groups is not only, or even mainly, located in drug crimes. In 1997, for example, blacks, who are 13 percent of the U.S. population, comprised 35 percent of those arrested for embezzlement. (It is not generally appreciated that black Americans commit higher levels not only of "street crime," but also of white-collar crime.)
Even without the drug war, diligent police officers would still, therefore, be correct to regard black and Hispanic citizens -- other factors duly considered -- as more likely to be breaking the law. The Chinese government would still be trying to recruit spies exclusively from among Chinese-born Americans. (The Chinese Communist Party is, in this respect, the keenest "racial profiler" of all.) The Amadou Diallo case -- the police were looking for a rapist -- would still have happened.
The best non-libertarian argument against racial profiling is the one from equality before the law. This has been most cogently presented by Prof. Randall Kennedy of Harvard. Kennedy concedes most of the points I have made. Yes, he says:
Statistics abundantly confirm that African Americans -- and particularly young black men -- commit a dramatically disproportionate share of street crime in the United States. This is a sociological fact, not a figment of the media's (or the police's) racist imagination. In recent years, for example, victims of crime report blacks as the perpetrators in around 25 per cent of the violent crimes suffered, although blacks constitute only about twelve percent of the nation's population.
And yes, says Prof. Kennedy, outlawing racial profiling will reduce the efficiency of police work. Nonetheless, for constitutional and moral reasons we should outlaw the practice. If this places extra burdens on law enforcement, well, "racial equality, like all good things in life, costs something; it does not come for free."
There are two problems with this. The first is that Kennedy has minimized the black-white difference in criminality, and therefore that "cost." I don't know where his 25 percent comes from, or what "recent years" means, but I do know that in Department of Justice figures for 1997, victims report 60 percent of robberies as having been committed by black persons. In that same year, a black American was eight times more likely than a non-black to commit homicide -- and "non-black" here includes Hispanics, not broken out separately in these figures. A racial-profiling ban, under which police officers were required to stop and question suspects in precise proportion to their demographic representation (in what? the precinct population? the state population? the national population?), would lead to massive inefficiencies in police work. Which is to say, massive declines in the apprehension of criminals.
The other problem is with the special status that Prof. Kennedy accords to race. Kennedy: "Racial distinctions are and should be different from other lines of social stratification." Thus, if it can be shown, as it surely can, that state troopers stop young people more than old people, relative to young people's numerical representation on the road being patrolled, that is of no consequence. If they stop black people more than white people, on the same criterion, that is of large consequence. This, in spite of the fact that the categories "age" and "race" are both rather fuzzy (define "young") and are both useful predictors of criminality. In spite of the fact, too, that the principle of equality before the law does not, and up to now has never been thought to, guarantee equal outcomes for any law-enforcement process, only that a citizen who has come under reasonable suspicion will be treated fairly.
It is on this special status accorded to race that, I believe, we have gone most seriously astray. I am willing, in fact, to say much more than this: In the matter of race, I think the Anglo-Saxon world has taken leave of its senses. The campaign to ban racial profiling is, as I see it, a part of that large, broad-fronted assault on common sense that our over-educated, over-lawyered society has been enduring for some forty years now, and whose roots are in a fanatical egalitarianism, a grim determination not to face up to the realities of group differences, a theological attachment to the doctrine that the sole and sufficient explanation for all such differences is "racism" -- which is to say, the malice and cruelty of white people -- and a nursed and petted guilt towards the behavior of our ancestors.
At present, Americans are drifting away from the concept of belonging to a single nation. I do not think this drift will be arrested until we can shed the idea that deference to the sensitivities of racial minorities -- however overwrought those sensitivities may be, however over-stimulated by unscrupulous mountebanks, however disconnected from reality -- trumps every other consideration, including even the maintenance of social order. To shed that idea, we must confront our national hysteria about race, which causes large numbers of otherwise sane people to believe that the hearts of their fellow citizens are filled with malice towards them. So long as we continue to pander to that poisonous, preposterous belief, we shall only wander off deeper into a wilderness of division, mistrust, and institutionalized rancor -- that wilderness, the most freshly painted signpost to which bears the legend RACIAL PROFILING.
Call it my military training, paranoia, whatever...but when I fly, you can bet your butt I check out every person I see getting on the plane. It's not like I stare at them defiantly or anything, merely take a look to see who I am flying with. You can always tell when people are up to something, you just need to be alert. The problem is, there are a lot of people that are *very scared* right now. The government is taking advantage of this to push through legislation that in a pre 9-11 world would have been laughed at scornfully.
People need to realize that rather than do this, maybe we should have more intensive screening for foreigners coming INTO THE COUNTRY. When my unit left the Middle East, we were lucky enough to fly out on a commercial airline. When we were getting prepared to leave Egypt, we were searched VERY thoroughly. EVERY BAG, knick-knack, etc. was checked. Not one person was singled out, everyone went through the same screening process. And you know what, other than the mild irritation of being delayed a bit, not one person minded. It's called safety. So, keep your database to yourself, Government, and let us get on with our normal lives, else: "THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON"
Sent from your iPad.
"This technology, based on transaction analysis, behavior analysis, gives us a pretty good idea of what's going on in a person's mind."
Yep, now they can tell what's going on in a person's mind. The real fun part will be watching their faces as I imagine Peewee Herman doing Dr. Ruth Westheimer doggie style. And trust me, you *DON'T* want to know what they are doing with the Calamari.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
From the article:
For instance, it would note if an individual lived at the former address of someone considered high-risk.
Great. So now if my former college roommates do anything bad and get on the high-risk shit-list, then I'm going to be detained at an airport.
Theoretically, the system could be calibrated to watch for people with links to restaurants or other places thought to be favored by terrorist cells.
Hypothetical sitation: I'm visiting a friend in town. I stop into a coffee shop a few times while I'm there. Joe Terrorist also frequents that shop. A few weeks later, he tries to blow something up. As a recent patron of that store, am I going to be questioned?? I know this is a more extreme example, but it shows the type of situations that could arise.
The thing I mainly don't like about systems like these are that they filter out people that "mainstream" society generally thinks are going to be dangerous or problematic, regardless of their actual behavior. It is also becomes a problem of drawing a line for inspections. Even if a person comes up as a "green light" in one of these systems, they will probably be stopped if they have visible tattoos and/or piercings, or if they are flying one-way, or if they frequently travel alone.
Is there anything that can actually be done about things like this??
This technology, based on transaction analysis, behavior analysis, gives us a pretty good idea of what's going on in a person's mind.
And when this happens, the days of Orwells Thought Police will truely be upon us.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
The index would send color-coded signals to airlines. Green would indicate no problem. Yellow would indicate the need for more questioning. Red means apprehend. Ogilvie said the company would try to offer the same sort of service to cruise ships and other facilities that want to bolster security.
This could make security worse. People with little technological training (airline security screeners) often put so much faith in a computer system that if it says something, it must be so. This will result in the screeners seeing a green light and thinking, "This person got green, he can go on through." Unfortunately, they will be looking more at the light and less at the entire circumstances surrounding each passenger because they will trust the all-knowing computer - "just look at how much data it has, it must be right! And gee, if I see the green light I don't have to do any extra work."
For instance, if somebody has a normal name, doesn't have any irregular travel patterns, doesn't have any warrants, and buys their own ticket with a return trip in advance, they will get a green light in most cases. Now, the problem with that is simply that just because you don't have a recorded history of problems doesn't mean you won't cause problems. So, the screeners will just waive you on through because they don't know that this will be your first and last act of terrorism, you got a green light, and the green light will be all that matters to them. Great.
These are the petty annoyances with systems like this - the false hits far outweigh the real ones, and innocent people get harassed and treated rudely by ignorant, underpaid security guards for things they never know about. It's like someone stealing your identity, ruining your credit rating, and leaving you to pick up the pieces - you don't see the authorities in the credit industry rushing to clean up the records of identity theft victims, do you? No - the victims must spend months if not years reclaiming their credit rating - just as he-who-lives-two-doors-down-from-Muhammed would have to somehow convince Big Brother that the same street name doesn't add up to jack.
Was that out loud?
This article raises a lot more questions than it answers.
OK, let's hear the arguments in favour of it, but whatever they are, I contend that if we put in place a vast, complex, expensive system that is too problematical to use, then all we're doing is spending Federal money to perform a PR exercise for the airline industry.
And if we do use it, then god help us all. I never, ever want to hear this phrase spoken to me or to anyone else:
"The computer says you're 67% likely to be guilty, based on your past actions and associations. We're not going to release you until you can prove your loyalty."
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Please, think before you speak.
That, sir, would go against every tenet upon which slashdot is built.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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.
No comments:
In the only interview with the al-Qaeda leader since the 11 September attacks, Bin Laden declares that "the battle has moved to inside America".
"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," he says.
Click here for the whole article
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
After reading this article, I reflect that my three year old daughter was flagged. She does NOT have a beard. I am an Army Reserve Captain and fit the Topgun Iceman profile (big white guy with a short military haircut and demeanor). We all got flagged and searched (carry ons emptied, patted down again etc.)
Although I understand people's concerns, Europe for all their supposed laws about privacy and information continues to be the most racist place in the world. I can't tell you how many (serveral) times coming through customs in Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland, I sailed through with nary a glance but the Latin American's behind and in front of me were interogated (who are you visiting, why are you here, who are you with, where are you staying).
In Bilbao, Spain, I was watching their local television news program where they were patting themselves on the back because they didn't have the same race problems as the US. "We have no such problems in Bilbao," The anchorwoman beamed, "We are proud of the six black families that live here in our city and consider them equals."
YOU COUNTED THEM?! And you know where they live, don't you? That's an indictment of the first degree. You can see that immigrants are not fleeing worlds of oppression and landing in Bilbao Spain that's for sure... doesn't that tell you something?
I've lived all over the world, and although the US is certainly not the utopia people think it is, we really are the best place to come if you are different or oppressed. Millions of immigrants can't be wrong *G*.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
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 entities proposing this plan are the US government and the US airline industry. Both these organizations have abused their power in the past, what makes you think it will be different on this issue?
From the article:
"This technology, based on transaction analysis, behavior analysis, gives us a pretty good idea of what's going on in a person's mind."
How long will it be before the government knows EXACTLY what you are thinking all the time. And if they find out you are thinking of committing a crime, what is the harm in arresting you? Sure it cuts back on crime, but at the price of freedom. Sounds exactly like Orwell's thought police to me.
Enigma
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
Feds Undertaking Massive Passenger Profiling Plan
<humor>
This doesn't sound too hard. I mean, just how much variety are you gonna see looking at the profiles (side view) of massive passengers? ;^)
</humor>
All the privacy freaks can just use their standard technique of falsifying their information (as they do when registering with web sites), to make it say that they are an 84-year-old grandmother from Wyoming. Oh wait, they might encounter a little bit of trouble when checking in or boarding the airplane...
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
Yes, but part of the terrorists winning is the fact that America takes another step closer toward an Orwellian future and another step away from personal freedom. America without personal freedom is not America anymore. Yes, Israel still exists, and if America was like Israel, we wouldn't be America anymore. America will still exist, that's not the question. The America of personal freedom, a man's house is his castle, that sort of thing, is what will cease to exist.
Then explain the 17-year-olds holding loaded M16s on street corners.
Well, in Israel it is the law you must join the army, and if you don't they put you to jail. If that was the case, would you go to jail and not serve the army?. Due to that fact there are many 18 year old Israeli soldiers out in the streets and they are given the M16s to keep on their vactions. There are also discounts for soldiers, and that's why you see them everywhere. They can't tell you anything to do. They're just people with no real authority (unless they're on duty ofcourse).
And what would the Arabs living in Israel think of your response?
You are absolutely right. Israel treats its Arab citizens very badly and preforms war crimes on a daily basis. We even have a war criminal as prime minister.
However, the US is taking all the steps in this direction. The hate-spreading against Arabs; the checks against people who fit a certain "profile"; security personell everywhere. I wanted to show that the situation in Israel is not all that bad.
And while I agree that Israel has a right to exist in peace, if you didn't treat the Arabs like pieces of shit ("Hey, I need a new fence. I'll hire an Arab!") and weren't the absolute rudest fucks on the planet (ever try to get on a plane with a bunch of Israelis? or drive in Tel Aviv? Geez!), the Palestinians wouldn't be so willing to die to make you go away.
I, personally, treat the arab citizens of Israel with great respect, more than I treat the jewish citizens for that matter. I try to fight this mentality as much as I can. I vote for the extreme left-wing parties which actually want peace. Yes, I think this is terrible and I wish it were not so. Wouldn't you wish all Americans were against the DMCA?
PS - and your food is the absolute worst. I always eat at Arab restaraunts...
Well, me too. Arab restaurants rule!
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
This will be great because sometimes I like to wear hats.
Justin Dubs
The (absolutely) last time I tried to book an airline ticket with a travel agent my family had done business with for years, they told me they could no longer make reservations over the phone unless I came in and filled out a profile. It was a whole lot of marketing crap about what brand of hotel and rental car you prefer (the cheaper the better), would you rather sit by the window or aisle (like you have a choice), food preferences (why, little packets of pretzels and peanuts, of course), checklist of countries you'd like to visit (didn't see any choices for Antarctica or the Solomon Islands), package tours, cruises and casinos (wouldn't be caught dead on any of them) etc. This was definitely not being done for MY convenience.
I book all my own trips online now. Travel agents may be OK for people who enjoy travelling in herds, but I'd rather just buy my own ticket and decide what I'm going to do once I get there.
The U.S. government and FAA are usually pretty far behind the curve on information systems, so I doubt they would get their terrorist profiling system up and running any time in the foreseeable future. I wonder if they will have any more luck with this than making sure people's baggage goes to right destination.
My question is: if someone wants to see the criteria they used to select "security honorees", will that code be open for viewing? How else can we be sure that such a powerful tool isn't being abused with biased/racially motivated lines of code??
And if the system does start working, does the security agent looking at your score get to see why the damn computer flagged you? Shouldn't they be able to see why it thinks you're a threat, and simply ask you some questions to clear up the situation?
For example, "Sir, the computer tells me that you fly a lot of last minute one-ways, can you explain why?" "Yes, I work for the State Department" "I see, if you can show me your ID, we'll be all set here."
People fall into the trap of thinking that something computerized will do it better. That's not true. It'll do it faster, but somebody's still got to make the programming decisions. And possibly, computers will make this kind of situation worse by decreasing the alertness of security officials! So many false hits are going to be generated, that the computer matches might lose credibility, or the security guys/gals will be flooded with people to question...
It is a common error - one repeated widely in the press, to suggest the U.S. is not adhering to the Genveva Convention. In fact, that is the very treaty that lays out what an "illegal combatant" is. Spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and guerillas have always be treated differently, and usually much more harshly, than regulars.
I wrote parts of this stuff
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.
First of all, leaf burning laws are local, not federal laws. Second of all, censuses have been in existence in the US since 1790. 2 years after the adoption of the Constitution. I can't bear to reply to the idea that federal standards on toilet flush capacity is Orwellian...
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Since there haven't been a lot of terrorist attacks, there is essentially no data available to validate such a system. As a consequence, the "threat assessments" will have to be based on prejudices and guesses by law enforcement about what are "normal" living arrangements and "normal" travel patterns. You can figure out for yourself what these people are going to consider "normal" and "suspicious".
The protections afforded by the Geneva Convention do not extend to unlawful combatants, i.e.,
* Those who engage in combat while hiding among the civilian population to avoid retaliation
* Those who do not wear uniforms representing their affiliation with a national force (more to the point - are not distinguishable from the population at-large)
* And since the GC is an agreement between nation-states, please explain to me how al Qaeda combatants qualify as members of ANY nationally recognized force (Afghan or otherwise). Would you have us believe that the al Qaeda fighters are members of the Saudi, Yemeni, (insert native country) armed forces, engaging in combat under the direction of aforementioned countries and therefore afforded to protections under the GC?
It would seem that if you could catch 10-20 people on a flight of 100 by doing a close screening of everyone on board, it would probably be done. Certainly there is nothing to prevent immigration from doing a thorough search on everyone entering the country on a particular flight, and it would make for great press coverage to catch that many drug smugglers at one time.
I'm sure a lot of us have stories about the utter stupidity of so-called airport "security."
I fly once in a blue moon. As a result, I'm not exactly up-to-speed on the new security paranoia. I go to check in, and answer some silly questions, none of which include "are you carrying anything sharp -- a knife, nail clipper, knitting needles, that sort of thing?"
My luggage goes through. I waste an hour waiting to for the boarding call. It comes. I enter the security area. Toss my coat and carry-on onto the xray, and I'm about to walk through the metal detector. Then I remember my car keys. I step back, take 'em out, toss 'em into a tray.
The security guard just about shits herself. "Is that a knife?!" she asks. "Er, yah?" I reply. It's my little keychain knife. It's as sharp as a spoon and has a 1/2" blade. I use it for opening envelopes and potato chip bags.
Well, my god, you'd think it was the discovery of the century. She literally grabs them from my hand and goes frantic removing my knife from the key ring. Does not ask to look at them, does not ask if she can fuck with my property, and then hands me a bullshit line about either throwing it out or mailing it to myself. I got rude about that: it's not a cheap knife, and there's no post office in the airport.
It ended up being checked in as luggage, in an envelope and an enormous plastic bag. Must have cost the airline 3x what the knife was worth.
Anyway, the security bitch took my name. I suppose I'm in some database now as a badass, to be cavity-searched next time I come within a mile of an airport.
Now, what really pisses me off is the implied insult in the whole thing. They really think I'm stupid enough to believe that the security check has anything to do with making the plane safe!
I could have carried a 6" lexan dagger through the metal detector and they'd *NEVER* have known about it. I could have walked through with plastic explosive in my shoes. I could have run piano wire through my belt and used it as a garrot. I probably could have walked on with a glass bottle of Coke.
Or I could have snapped the pull-out handle off my carry-on luggage, and weilded two 16" long sharp-pointed metal sticks.
Or I could be trained in the martial arts, and way more dangerous than most anyone who is carrying a weapon.
(Or if I'd left the damn knife in my pocket, I'd probably have cleared the metal detector: it didn't detect my belt buckle, which contains about 10x the metal content of the knife!)
THERE IS NO FUCKING SECURITY ON AN AIRPLANE!
I am deeply insulted that the airlines are playing this stupid little game of pretending to make us safe by disposing of our nail clippers. That isn't improving our security at all. It's just an insult.
I'm also PO'd that the check-in desk isn't suggesting to passengers that they think about any sharp objects that might be confiscated, and consder checking them in with the luggage.
And I'd like to slap the bitch that was so rude about it all. I'm going through a small-town Canadian airport, riding a piddling small jet, and I'm carring a piddling small knife. It wasn't the find of the century: it was an obvious mistake, and she should have politely asked me to step aside and remove the knife myself.
It also pisses me off that the best I can do is gripe about it all here on Slashdot, because if I go to the airport and talk to her supervisor, I'll probably be filed in some freaking Interpol database as Dr. Evil.
Ok, your turn: what's your airport security horror story?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
We couldn't just pretend that nothing happened. If we'd have done that, that plane that dropped in Pennsylvania would have hit its target
You are wrong. The plane that went down in PA didn't do so because of government security measures. This plane was brought down because passengers -- just regular people -- had cell phones, knew what happened to other planes, and decided to fight rather than be sheep.
There is a big difference between effective security and fascist nonsense that gets pushed onto us under the name of security.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Its time to ditch this candy-ass approach where we are afraid of hurting people's feelings when it comes to airport security.
Because of this we have an invasive system being put in place instead of a far simpler but less politically correct one.
Fact is, if the criminal matched certain criteria that is the criteria you use for your search. You don't accost 90 year old NUNs just to be fair.
Political correctness will deprive MORE people of their freedom than effective profiling.
Yes it would mean that anyone from a foreign country would be subject to more scrutiny.
Yes it would mean that those of Arabian descent would be subject to more scrutiny.
Yes it would mean that those who are both Arabian descent and Muslim would be scrutinzed more...
BUT... if your evidence points one way you cannot ignore it without unfairly impacting all the safety of those same people, or that of other totally unrelated groups.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Gee, I think you should get a job as airport security! You can ALWAYS tell when people are up to something! And, apparently, so can EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the military! We must have nothing to fear.
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.
Sure, but I certainly am not aware of anyone who has assigned probablilities in any meaninful manner to any identifiable subset of the population. How does the facts of the known details of the deceased terrorists change the probablilities?
What we do have is a bunch of people who figure that their perceptions of the probablilities for particular individuals justify them being treated different from other individuals. This isn't a good model for running a security system.
Yeah, yeah. Feeding the trolls is bad, I know. Ayway...
I'm not making a jodgement on how the prisoners are being treated, only on the US's unwillingness to follow international law and its blatant use of propaganda techniques on the public. If there is a war, then it is clear that the prisoners should be covered under the Geneva convention. If there isn't, why would we be arguing about what to do with them 'after the war'?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
As someone who travels a lot I welcome all the "draconian" rules. It's a pain in the ass to board a plane because clueless idiots who don't fly a lot, or simply don't think, don't follow the rules, which are clearly posted everywhere, and clog up the system. Idiots trying to leave their laptops in their bags, when it clearly says that you have to take them out and put them through the X-ray machine separately. Idiots who waste time by complaining for tens of seconds instead of taking the 5 seconds is should take at a maximum to take their laptop out -- those tens of seconds add up quickly and if someone can't get their laptop out of their bag in 5 seconds they shouldn't have one.
Plus, most of the people I work with fly a heck of a lot also, have been doing so for the last 10-20 years, and have the same opinion as I do when it comes to the new "stricter" rules. Most frequent flyers wish that the rules would get much more stricter, because we know from experience how lax they really are.
Yea, and it's a pain in the ass to buckle your seatbelt when driving a car, those turn signals are just a pain in the ass, and screw those pesky pedestrians crossing the road. Both driving a car and taking a flight have rules of the road. If you don't like them then don't drive, and/or don't fly. You sound like the idiots who think everything is so troublesome that they may as well break the rules and go down the up escalator, or try to get past security, or some other stupid prank. THOSE idiots are who make your 3-hour wait on the tarmac unbearable.
I say shut your stupid mouth - I'm obnoxious
Government says shut your stupid mouth - you've been censored
Gee, could it maybe make a difference who says something? Perhaps, just *perhaps*, language is not neutral as to speaker and listener.
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.
In my experience in flying between European countries customs has been a joke, if anyone was even there to talk to. Hell, my last trip over in November I didn't even get an entry stamp.
Single male entering Thailand - visa declined
US passport holders are not required to have a visa for stays of less than 30 days. Thailand is part of the visa waiver program. Before I started travelling a lot (office in India) I thought it was difficult to go some of these places. It isn't. The visa waiver program makes it very easy, and for most other places it just takes a little bit of money. I realize it is ethnocentric to say but in my experience merely holding a US passport changes the ease with which one can move between certain countries.
I see your point, however, that if we (Americans) begin to profile people based on their ethnicity that we should also expect to be examined in a similar manner entering other countries. Well, I have news for you. We're already pulling Arabs aside! I flew from Heathrow to Dulles about a month ago and found that the United gate agent had a list of people she wanted to hand check. They asked what seat you were in (1D for me! upfront is nice) and if you weren't who they wanted you got to board, if you were unlucky you had your bags hand inspected. Let's just say when I went through there weren't any white people being checked out.
Another anecdotal note, when I came home in December 2000 via Dulles no one even looked at my passport. As I found out later, and an article here talked about it, our flight was precleared, there was no one they were interested in so the immigration guys just ignored those of us with US passports.
I have been around the world twice in the last 18 months and the only country I had trouble with was Japan. The guy couldn't understand that I was only going to be in Osaka for a day and wanted to enter the city to look around. Eventually he just stamped me and let me go.
Say I have a dependent variable called "did a crazy, evil thing." Now I have dozens of independent variables called "income," "purchase behavior," etc. How many positive cases do I have on the "did a crazy, evil thing" variable? Let's assume that the FBI won't just leak all their investigative data into this system (which would permanently blow those investigations). So that means we have what, like 100 million people with negative scores on the "did a crazy, evil thing" variable, and like 30 ppl with positive scores?
The statistics suck here, folks, you will NEVER isolate the variation under these conditions. You'll get millions of innocent people whose patterns among the indep variables match the incredibly thin patterns you get among the terrorists.
This is TOTALLY different from credit analysis schemes where you have like 1/3 or 1/2 of the people in the dataset with occasional or severe credit problems. Modeling really works here b/c a) you have a quantitative measure of the dependent variable (you can smoothly and precisely quantify HOW bad someone's credit is), and b) the dependent variable gives a nice scale with tractable variation, probably one of those infamous bell distributions conveniently around some point (or if you stratify properly you'll find the bells, whatever).
And don't be fooled by the fancy-sounding "neural network" stuff, that's just another modeling technique which loosens a few assumptions. But it does NOT fundamentally change the need to have enough positive cases to balance the variation in the independent variables. And binary dependent variables? Sheesh. BAD DATA! DOWN BOY!
And let's talk for a second about the living arrangement correlation analysis. If someone X has lived with someone Y known to be positive on the "did a crazy, evil thing," variable, I sure as hell hope that someone X was questioned very, very thoroughly by the cops. So what good is this additional profiling??
BTW, I travel internationally with my laptop pretty often. EVERY SINGLE TIME I go through Schipol in Amsterdam they pull me out of the line for ~20 mins of additional questioning. They don't tell me why, but I'm tripping something in their profile. It's not racial, but I think "has been to Bosnia" or something, plus that I have a laptop. They always pester about whether the laptop is mine or my employer's, and being the latter, they are very, very concerned.
Profiling creates millions of false positives, and it is by no means clear that it prevents false negatives.
Wrong! I couldn't disagree more. The liberalization of the Supreme Court and its re-interpretation of the Consitution of the United States have made this country a worse place, not a better place.
Although I can't find it at the moment, it seems like I once read (or heard?) Walter Williams discuss the folly of a "living" Constitution. Basically the problem is this: if the rules are malleable, the game doesn't work.
The Framers didn't intend us to have a country run by the rules of Calvinball, but thanks to your gleefully activist Supreme Court, that's what we've got.
Games people play are known for their unchanging rules that are known and understood by everyone. The Constitution was intended to be a "set in stone" framework for government, not a warm and fuzzy Silly Putty ruleset.
That doesn't mean that the Framers intended the Consistution to never change: they included provisions for incorporating amendments. To be constitutionally correct, if The People wanted a right to privacy added, then the amendment process would be utilized to add it. As it reads, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution of the United States.
The job of the courts is to apply law, not interpret it. A corollary of this is that Congress should not write vague and nebulous laws, but that's a seperate issue. Even in the presence of poorly written laws, the courts should only make use of the literal verbage; to stray from that standard to find "original intent" or whatever is a departure from their constitutional duties and is an invitiation to impeachment from Congress (see Article 3, Section 1: shall hold their offices during good behaviour).
And if you do any of those things forget about EVER visiting the US.
Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
Also, since Israel gets a lot of US aid, they might even be willing to extradite you to the US for illegal DVD usage, decryption, etc.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Jeez, here they (some) go again. The reason the attack on the WTC worked so well was because nobody every really considered the possibility of using airplanes as projectile explosives.
The idea cropped up in fiction quite a while ago. It's the "endgame" sequence in the novel of "The Running Man", the novel "Stroming Heaven" a terrorist organisation buying up a used 747, repainting it and managing to file a fake flight plan that it's a US government E4. Also the Japanese used aircraft in exactly this way against US warships nearly 60 years ago.
It's a "no brainer" that civil aircraft could be used as improvised cruise missiles.
I'd say that there is really no chance that any terror network is going to waste its time trying to get onto a plane at this point. Yes, the US airline system was pathetically unsecure, but it really wasn't an issue until last year.
They arn't going to use planes because all the attention is focussed there. Instead they will look for something where security is overlooked now.
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
You know, all the ./ers said terrorists would never use export grade encryption either, yet we all know of the recent story where one did.
Terrorists will use whatever is available. If they can't use encryption they will use some other method of covert communication. Of course they might simply use the encryption for disinformation...
30%: "If this is what it takes to not get blown up by terrorists, OK."
But the "if" is a big if. You cannot be sure that it will do anything to stop terrorism at all, security which is more an illusion than actual (or security which is open to subversion) could make terrorism easier.
That's the sound that the privacy-conscious traveller of the future will hear as he travels without haste, half-cokes, three peanuts meals and air-rage, all the while enjoying the scenery in a rooooomy seat or the privacy of a comfortable bedroom.
Now is time to travel with Amtrak more than ever...
We already have a consitutional guarantee that events like 9/11 will and should not have happened. It is called the right to bear arms and no terrorist in their right mind would atempt to hijack a plane filled with armed passengers.
Except you don't want people with regular firearms in a preassurised aircraft.
Since the Government has already taken our weapons away and our cans of Whoop-ass(tm), obviously they need to protect us. The have already taken way our ability to protect ourselves
Which the US government failed to do, dispite having a huge militray and a complex (and expensive) air defence system. Including procedures for interception of civilian aircraft doing strange things. After all they managed to send fighters after a Lear Jet. (Which, IIRC, can fly faster and higher than the average wide bodied jet.)
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
Right. Except when it comes to the treatment of our 'prisoners of war'. Then, we are suddenly not at war.
Actually, acording to the Geneva convention - they are captured "Unlawfull Combatants." The Geneva convention makes a distinction between a obvious soldier dressed in a military ragealia and a spy/sabatour dressed in civilian clothing. The former get Geneva POW treatment, the later get close to nothing under the Geneva convention.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Merely being constitutional doesn't make it any less of a stupid dangerous idea that won't actually make flying one bit safer. There's no constitutional restriciton against putting police cameras and listening devices in every public place, but it still makes people uncomfortable, for good reason.
Your idea that travel is somehow a privelege, and not a right, is fairly repulsive, too.
--
Benjamin Coates
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden said as the U.S. war on terrorism raged in Afghanistan. "The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
I think Osama has confused the U.S. Government with the RIAA. It's an easy mistake to make. One is a bunch of pompous asses, while the other is an organization dedicated to controlling our lives by eliminating freedom. As an American, I still get confused about which is which.
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".
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.
AUGH!
El AL uses profiling, you great bleeding moron.
Quotes.
"Even before that flight left Amsterdam, Mr. Bar-Lev had demanded the
removal of two suspicious passengers -- who promptly boarded and
hijacked a Pan American flight. El Al's airborne precautions are
designed as a fallback to the more important security screening on the
ground."
So, what EXACTLY is their criteria of suspicious? I bet it was dark-skinned Arabic or Palenstian people.
"But the keystone of El Al's security is the interview. Well before
passengers arrive at the airport for their flight, El Al security agents
scour passenger manifests for names on watch lists and check information
about when reservations were made and how tickets were paid for, to
identify potential high-risk passengers. Then examiners, usually Israeli
university students, question passengers to compile a quick risk
profile, ranging from a naive type who may be unwittingly carrying a
bomb, as was the case with a pregnant Irish woman in 1986, to a person
deliberately plotting sabotage."
The interview, and PROFILE. They check information to identify high-risk passengers. How is that NOT profiling?
"El Al's profiling might smack of discrimination in the U.S. Palestinians
and other Arabs are almost always asked to step aside for more-thorough
questioning and searches. Aviation experts say that, like human agents
in the intelligence world, preflight interviews are an indispensable
security tool"
They admit to it and do the same thing that that I was talking about. If you're gonna comment responding to and trying to disprove a post, make sure you aren't gonna look like a great big dummy first off, okay?
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
The Washington Post article that is linked from the story is missing a small little fact; the cards will include biometric information about the holder. Have a look here:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/business/2002013
I feel sorry for you guys, this is a back door way to get national ID cards in place if ever I saw one. Some of you people even quote Thomas Jefferson "those Who Desire To Give Up Freedom In Order To Gain Security, Will Not Have, Nor Do They Deserve, Either One." however most comments lean in favour of this. Those comments that don't, congratulations.
Learn from the Israeli prick that posted in this crap in this story "Yes we have national IDs and soldiers and security guards everywhere, but we have freedom of speech (at least to some extent).". This misguided fool thinks he has freedom (despite the soldiers etc) because he can rent zone 1 DVDs, well lets put this in context: Forced military service for 2 years (killing 10 year olds) but if you can rent zone 1 DVDs you must be free, brainwashed scum.
You Americans are going down a very very slippery slope quickly and I'm actually very affraid of where this will lead the world. Think for yourselves, geeks are meant to think and not just follow what you are told. Does what the media are telling you make sense?
The facts involved in 911 are a long way from known, the majority here seem to have accepted the official story of events, think for your selfs. All you lot know about 911 is from the American mass media, you have been given hardly any facts at all and yet you "know" it was 19 or 20 Arabs. Somethings don't make any sense:
http://clients.loudeye.com/imc/mayday/mediafile
http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/01_25_02_revise
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/inde
*sigh*. Actually what's the point, this is a waste of time, no doubt this will get a lot of patriotic nonsense replies. You go and get those oil fields^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H evil arabs.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Should the US be invaded, make sure you put on a uniform before you pick up a gun.
--
E_NOSIG
The government is taking advantage of this to push through legislation that in a pre 9-11 world would have been laughed at scornfully.
Point one. When investigating a crime, the mostly likely suspect is the one with the most to gain from the crime.
People need to realize that rather than do this, maybe we should have more intensive screening for foreigners coming INTO THE COUNTRY.
Point two. Dead right, common sense isn't it. Unless of course you were more intested in keeping control over your own population.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Next time, why not post a link to the original article rather than post it in its entirety here? For those interested, the article seems to have originally appeard here.
As has already been pointed out to you several times in this thread, they are covered. They are being covered under the illegal combantant clauses.
:
Please, point out these 'illegal combatant' clauses of the Geneva Conventions. I'd really be interested in seeing them. Here, I'll spell out what *is* said for you:
Article 4, Section A
Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
...
Are you really trying to say that Al Quaida(sp?) does not fit the above description?
Article 5 clearly says: "Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."
So when, exactly did these prisoners have their tribunal deciding that they weren't prisoners of war?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
airliners are not the only way for terrorists to commit their acts. McVeigh didn't need one. neither did the people who attacked the embassies.
call me conspiratorial. i don't see why the govt needs a lot personal information about us for "air safety." it seems to me that now they will have an easier way to eliminate anyone who makes them mad by shooting down their plane with a "missile defense" interceptor. they at least will keep even more tabs on people. if knowledge, or information, is power, then this starts to be quite a concentration of power. to what end?
do i have a right to freedom of movement? if i am not in prison/under arrest, yes. it doesn't have to be explicitly stated in the constitution or bill of right for me to have it. even if i am suspicious, what happened to innocent until proven guilty? do i have a right to speak up if i think the govt is being repressive? yes. i am not saying it is now, but this leads down that path.
"To stop the terrorists."
Man, I'm getting sick of the overly-liberal attitude around here. :-)
I'm all for whatever someone does in the privacy of their own home is their own business, but when they're killing thousands, something has to be done, privacy be damned.
If the government used this to "out" five gay guys living in the same apartment in NY, can you imagine the huge scandle it would create? It just would *not* be used for invasion of privacy purposes like that.
But if they spotted a bunch of Afghanistan citizens who bought one-way tickets, and stopped a major disaster, more power to them. (And if the lead was bogus, no harm done, but a minor inconvenience.)
I think North American society has gone too far towards protecting the privacy of citizens; it ends up protecting the rights of criminals as well. I'd love it if the government checked the serial numbers of all consumer hardware in everyone's house on a monthly basis. They'd get nothing on me (I bought it all legally, I've got *nothing* to hide!), and they'd likely find all my stolen stereos, shop gear, and other stuff that was taken during two burglaries of our house. If there were a society that had that as it's policy, I'd sign up in a second, and sleep better at night (as would my daughter, who still has nightmares about the burglary).
I'm feeling more violated by the rights of the criminals under these "protections", than they supposedly provide me. Sure, give me a rundown now and then, as a minor inconvenience, as long as it nabs the people who are violating me through burglaries and other social crimes.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Awesome.. Now i get to say the same exact crap people say to me when I say the USA has problems. Ok Here goes:
If you dont like it, move. I am sure you can find a country that would love to limit the privacy of its citizens.
I will only buy your arg when the powers that be stop LYING to the people and say that they are KILLING people in order to ensure out freedom.
Yes, its unfortunate that we end up protecting the crims as well, but guess what?
thats the proce we pay for freedom..
Actually, D00d, I *don't* live in your country. so I don't have to move
Ummmm, explain that to me again? Protection of criminals' privacy is the price you pay for freedom? Define freedom? Freedom from the authorities knowing what illegal activity you might be up to? I'm not being sarcastic, I just want to know what particular part of your privacy you're protecting that would prevent authorities from knowing about criminals' activity?
Maybe I'm just too damn squeaky clean, and I don't smoke pot (I don't have any problem with anyone else doing it, and think it probably should be legalized), and I don't pirate software (heck, I'm on slashdot, I run open source OS's at home, and I relish the free stuff out there), I don't copy music (if you can even call it "music" that the producers are cranking out these days") or movies (there hasn't been a great one in awhile, and when there is $5 at the local video store well fix me up fine). Maybe if there was some petty piracy crime that was worthwhile, I'd feel different
Providing absolute privacy to *all* citizens means you provide absolute privacy to *all* *criminals* as well. That's not freedom, in my book. Unfortunately, in any group of people, there are some elements that you need protecdtion from, and giving *them* absolute protection just doesn't cut it. Especially after September 11th.
Anyhow, I've been personally victimized enough by criminals with too much privacy, and other folks hiding behind veils of anonymity, to be a big fan of privacy thsee days.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The problem can be solved by sealing the cockpit and ENFORCING a policy of NEVER giving in to a hijacker's demands.
It won't eliminate terrorists, but it will force them to move on to other things.
Currently it seems that the federal government is more than willing to help the terrorists punish Americans by stripping them of their rights and destroying their way of life.
Another way to curb terrorism would be to cease U.S. funding and arming of these sorts of organizations. It seems that a great many leaders who are more or less covertly funded later end up using American weapons and money against America.
to make a long story short, I can understand yer thinking, but for me, moi, I am not entirely convinced that the story we are being told about the big bad brown people around the world happens to be true.
Bush and his little band of criminals have a long long history of being the biggest fans of war and hatred in the name of money and power the past century has seen. While I do know there are "terrorists", I do no think that while on one hand these twerps running the show right now say, well yeah you are gonna have to give up your freedoms so as to protect you from these "Freedom Hating" brown/yellow/red/different people (who incidently do not like US gov installations of dictators, and corporations, who are decidedly anti democracy) coming in and saying how they should act, what sugar water they should buy, etc etc..
So anyway, these rulers here are telling us to give up our freedoms and privacy a bit, yet are storming around the globe, right now as we 'speak' calling democratic countries (Iran) "Axis' of Evil", doing secret covert actions in 150 countries, where the people are obviously pissed at us already (assuming they are behind 9/11), telling the US army women its cool to shit on Islamic tradition by not having to go around covered in Saudi Arabia anymore, one fuckin week after Saudi hinted that we should finally leave their country.
I mean, besides kicking Afghanistans ass, and replacing a sicko gov with another sicko gov (but one who likes Oil plans), and capturing a bunch of people on the old CIA payroll and bringing them to Cuba to dispose of, what the hell have we done to make us more safe?
Not a thing, we are making the world more angry with us, and isolating ourselves furthur with a perpetual "us against them" stance.
So my point is, until these selfish bullshit artists put their money where their mouth is, stop lying to us perpetually, and pissing off people around the world by pissing on International Law, etc. i dont want them taking one fuckin shred of my freedom away.
They absolutely do not fit that description, and frankly, I think that's obvious.
Could you please explain how they *don't* fit that description? Were the prisoners not 'members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict' or 'volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces'?
Remember that the prisoners only have to fit one of the criteria spelled out in section 4 - being in any one of the six categories is enough, and it seems like people only want to focus on part 2 and it's qualifications. This is all just another example of our government lying to us in order to get what they want, legally or illegally.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!