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*
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.
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
You're making the same mistake that the US media tends to make when reporting on this issue: tying two unrelated problems together. The government keeping and correlating more information about an individual, and requirements to show ID more often, are entirely separate topics despite how the press - and the civil liberties lobby, sadly - portray them. Every single place that takes a credit card could demand to see a driver's license starting today, without any new laws or any need for the government to gather more data. Or, the gov't could gather more data, without ever having a national ID or requiring anyone to identify themselves at any point. Two entirely distinct issues.
As an example, France. The French do have national ID papers, but as with most European nations, they strongly limit data gathering by statute. (Of course, given what an amazingly high percentage of the French population works for the gov't in one form or another, any belief that they don't actually go ahead and collect that data anyway is charmingly innocent, but that's another matter.)
Treating these issues as a unit weakens the arguments against them, to me at least. Most folks in the US don't mind the idea of a national ID card, or even a national driver's license. They'd be annoyed if they had to show it all the time, but the simple combination of the ID's into one system doesn't bother them. Most folks who move between states would be strongly in favor of not having to go through the grief of changing their DL to the new locale. And, sadly, most of the folks in the US are sheep as regards protecting their personal data, so that argument doesn't do much either. I know that the civil liberties folks hope to tie in the idea of gov't lackeys demanding ID checks in hopes of getting the public to get angry with the other issues, too, but I think it's working the other way. Since everyone sees all of these topics tied together, their favor or apathy for some of the issues is becoming favor or apathy for the whole set. Lets keep separate issues separate, and clearly show why each is separately a bad idea. Didn't we all favor suing M$ to get *them* to stop bundling?
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
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.
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.
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?"
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 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
I have to disagree with you. I believe all these items truely are "a unit." By consolodating ID's under the control of a Federal system, the Federal authrorities don't have to concern themselves with that pesky 10th amendment, where all laws and regulations not specificly outlined in the constitution are reserved to the indivial states. This gives them the power and authority to handle all mater of security, search, seizure and survelience. The bush administration is only exploiting the emotion carried over from the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to greatly expand the power and authority of federal law enforcment over state-run ID systems. I'm sorry to say this, but the first poster is correct. In about 3 years, there will be some gov't goon standing outside all major transit stations asking, "papers please." Anyone who looks suspicious or doesn't have their papers WILL spend some time in jail until their identity and motive can be determined. They won't be arrested of course, but they'll be detained. Don't believe me? Here's a true story. Exactly 4 weeks ago, I returned home from a trip to Bulgaria. (It's a small former communist-controlled coutry just north of Greece.) On my return flight back into the US, there was an elderly German couple standing about 6 feet away from me as we were waiting for our baggage; so we could proceed thru the customs checkpoint. Everyone who enters the US must fill out this little peice of paper where you list the items (food, plants, animals, precious metals etc) you are claiming thru customs. Well, some army punk was walking his "bomb-sniffer" dog among us pasengers as we waited for our baggage. The dog stopped at the German couple, because it could smell a half-eaten chocolate bar. The army punk started given the couple a hard time, and yes, he really did say "Where are your identification documents!" The couple stared pulling out their passports. The army punk didn't care to see the passports, and instead asked "why didn't you declare this food on your customs paper?" And, oh maybe two seconds later, he asked the couple to follow him into some security room nearby. I know everyone reading this will think, "Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. And who cares about some old German people." And if that's your opinion, than so be it. But, interestingly enough, when hitler took over in germany, he expanded the gishtappo (which just happens to be German shothand for "Homeland Security," cute) for fear of attack from other nations -- which lead him to belive that only through strict "zero tolerence" law enforcment and military security will his people be safe from outside agression. (This all happened many years before the war.) Funny how history repeats itself. - Richard.
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.
http://www.supersphere.com/FrontPage/Politic/Artic le.html?ID=911&NAME=1984 or read it below. The worst of it, he's getting more right by the minute. War is Peace? Iran now, and then... Freedom is Slavery? Watch your privacy disappear before your eyes. Ignorance is Strength. Yes, by keeping the people ignorant the government gains strength.
Bush's Orwellian Address
Happy New Year: It's 1984
by Jacob Levich
Seventeen years later than expected, 1984 has arrived. In his address to Congress Thursday, George Bush effectively declared permanent war -- war without temporal or geographic limits; war without clear goals; war against a vaguely defined and constantly shifting enemy. Today it's Al-Qaida; tomorrow it may be Afghanistan; next year, it could be Iraq or Cuba or Chechnya.
No one who was forced to read 1984 in high school could fail to hear a faint bell tinkling. In George Orwell's dreary classic, the totalitarian state of Oceania is perpetually at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. Although the enemy changes periodically, the war is permanent; its true purpose is to control dissent and sustain dictatorship by nurturing popular fear and hatred.
The permanent war undergirds every aspect of Big Brother's authoritarian program, excusing censorship, propaganda, secret police, and privation. In other words, it's terribly convenient.
And conveniently terrible. Bush's alarming speech pointed to a shadowy enemy that lurks in more 60 countries, including the US. He announced a policy of using maximum force against any individuals or nations he designates as our enemies, without color of international law, due process, or democratic debate.
He explicitly warned that much of the war will be conducted in secret. He rejected negotiation as a tool of diplomacy. He announced starkly that any country that doesn't knuckle under to US demands will be regarded as an enemy. He heralded the creation of a powerful new cabinet-level police agency called the "Office of Homeland Security." Orwell couldn't have named it better.
By turns folksy ("Ya know what?") and chillingly bellicose ("Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"), Bush stepped comfortably into the role of Big Brother, who needs to be loved as well as feared. Meanwhile, his administration acted swiftly to realize the governing principles of Oceania:
WAR IS PEACE. A reckless war that will likely bring about a deadly cycle of retaliation is being sold to us as the means to guarantee our safety. Meanwhile, we've been instructed to accept the permanent war as a fact of daily life. As the inevitable slaughter of innocents unfolds overseas, we are to "live our lives and hug our children."
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. "Freedom itself is under attack," Bush said, and he's right. Americans are about to lose many of their most cherished liberties in a frenzy of paranoid legislation. The government proposes to tap our phones, read our email and seize our credit card records without court order. It seeks authority to detain and deport immigrants without cause or trial. It proposes to use foreign agents to spy on American citizens. To save freedom, the warmongers intend to destroy it.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. America's "new war" against terrorism will be fought with unprecedented secrecy, including heavy press restrictions not seen for years, the Pentagon has advised. Meanwhile, the sorry history of American imperialism -- collaboration with terrorists, bloody proxy wars against civilians, forcible replacement of democratic governments with corrupt dictatorships -- is strictly off-limits to mainstream media. Lest it weaken our resolve, we are not to be allowed to understand the reasons underlying the horrifying crimes of September 11.
The defining speech of Bush's presidency points toward an Orwellian future of endless war, expedient lies, and ubiquitous social control. But unlike 1984's doomed protagonist, we've still got plenty of space to maneuver and plenty of ways to resist.
It's time to speak and to act. It falls on us now to take to the streets, bearing a clear message for the warmongers: We don't love Big Brother.
Jacob Levich (jlevich@earthlink.net) is an writer, editor, and activist living in Queens, New York.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The screening plans reflect a growing faith among aviation and government leaders that information technology can solve some of the nation's most vexing security problems by rooting out and snaring people who intend to commit terrorist acts.
Information technology is not some kind of magical spell that will allow telepathic scanning of what goes on in a person's head before the fact. All the data processed by a computer will be configured to respond to specific clues, which people will always manage to go around.
Computers will never replace the judgement of a human being, and will never be able to determine what the intentions of a person are because of a very simple reason: computers measure actions, and the same action by different individuals does not imply that they have the same motives.
Despite what many politicians and officials seem to think, computers will not solve all of the world's problems. Their "faith" is just that: a belief in something based on no rational grounds.
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
Unless you buy your tickets at the ticket window or do your own complete reservations, usually your whole itinerary is published, sold and marketed. What is wrong with throwing some security behind it?
It isn't racial profiling or segmenting out certain people, just tracking patterns of who does what.
Hell, even in small as Lancaster PA of a population of 300,000 at most, they profile. They profile segments of town to track population, growth, crime and variations in all of the segments. If they see a crime "Wave" moving through they have an idea of where it originates and they can attack it from the source.
You aren't aware of it, you aren't being racially profile or magically segmented out, people are just using what is known to track, monitor and predict many fascets of normal everyday life which just so happens to include the threat of terrorism.
Your aren't loosing any liberties when people use information already available. They're not going to do anything unless your being suspicious.
If you fly 3 different airlines across the us constantly scoping out different airports and have the abilities to rackup miles, rewards, points and member benifits, but don't then that should raise a flag, especially if your paying cash for tickets or full price. As the typical person no matter if a business or personall trip will try and get all the benifets and perks of flying including saving money on advanced purchases, hotel rewards, point sharing rewards and predicting and scheduling their plans.
The people being evavisive for a reason will have another reason to fear flying. Either way you won't loose your liberties unless your TRYING TO.
The US has laws and rules to protect your rights, you don't loose them unless you express through actions or words you understanding of the loss of these rights.
I don't see a single legit american being held, all the people being held without release right now are people overstaying visa's or using education visa's for other purposes. The country they come from can get them extradited, but they don't. Is it wrong for Americans to protect themselves because other countries could care less about there own citizens?
These aren't people who merely stole a candy bar from 711 who are going to be held, and i'm sorry but a visa infraction is a SERIOUS crime. Your over staying your legal visit in a country and your stated purpose is no longer binding. Your going to pay the price and you were told simply the cost of your actions when you came to this country.
So don't consider it PROFILING, consider it being rational and using the numbers just like everything else is done. If you county has a high traffic accident rate you pay a higher insurance premium because they came up with a rational way of handling the problems of that area, they profiled the population and didn't hand all the expenses to black people, white people, chinese or japanese, but you know if that WHOLE DAMN AREA IS BLACK, WHITE OR CHINESE THEN IT IS THAT POPULATION THAT HAS TO ACCEPT THAT PROBLEM AND FIX IT. There are plenty of other BLACK, WHITE, CHINESE,INDIAN areas that DON'T have that problem.
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.
I'm sorry, but who invaded whose country here? Yes, the Taliban are shitty people, but our whole reason for attacking them was to 'get Bin Laden'. If an army invaded your country, would you fight it or just let it roll through? How can you be an 'unlawful combatant' when you are defending your home? If there any *better* reason for fighting?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
"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!"
Should the US be invaded, make sure you put on a uniform before you pick up a gun.
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E_NOSIG