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EU Agrees to Give Passenger Data to U.S.
de la mettrie writes "The EU Commission has agreed in principle to make airlines provide U.S. Homeland Security with detailed passenger data for flights to the USA. Things Uncle Sam would like to know about passengers include their itinerary, their credit card number and whether or not they asked for a meal without pork. The data are supposed to help prevent terror attacks and are to be 'handled appropriately'." The U.S. is collecting the data for a massive passenger database, intended to increase passenger profiling.
There's a concept of personal privacy called a reasonable expectation of privacy. For instance, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you are in public, but you do if you are in your own home. I would say that putting your meal preference in Expedia precludes any reasonable expectation of privacy.
This sounds like the movie _Airplane_, in which the search was on for a passenger who could not only fly a plane and land it, but who also didn't have fish for dinner.
If only *this* were a movie, I might find it funny.
-- Rick
Now Bush is calling everyone chicken because they don't want to storm Iraq with him. Yeah, now who's daddy got him out of fighting in Vietnam?
Poor fellow, since the took the helm it has been one disaster after another: dotBomb, 9/11, ineffective Bin Laden chasing exercises all over the desert, WorldCom, Shuttle.... you can see why he wants to keep on upping the stakes until something goes in his favour. It is almost as if he's playing that old gambling system of doubling your bet every time you lose.
Well Americans, I hope you can see that most people in the rest of the world are getting tired of this attitude.
Thanks for being anti-American a$$hole assuming racism on America's part (if America is a racist nation, why do third world peoples flock here?). If we did everthing that people think we do, the world would not exist. Grow up and get over your inferiority complex.
Because it might allow them to link up other transactions made with aliases?
It's not like people have a fundamental right to privacy when traveling on a plane. If you people haven't learned from 9/11 by now, airplanes have been a target for terrorists for years, and will likely continue to be. It's the easiest way to cause terror and destruction.
And "profiling" is a much better way of stopping terrorists instead of stripping down some 80 year old grandma from Kansas City all in the name of political correctness. Using this information might give the Feds another tool to identify and apprehend these evildoers without causing a massive inconvenience and slowdown to others.
So you slashbots should come down from your high horse.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
Sure, this can be seen as an invasion of privacy. While this is terrible and unfortunate, the fact of the matter is there currently exists some very terrible, murderous people in this world that are willing to do things that have never really been done before, in order to accomplish their task of murder.
I dislike the facts of this modern reality just as much as the next person. Unfortunately, there isn't much that the US Government can do to protect its citizens (which is a big component of government) and preserve the way life has been.
There simply is no other way to rectify this issue. Even if the US pulled out of the Middle East and swore off the oil habit and simply ceased dealing with that part of the world. The minds behind these murderous fundamentalists would not change. They would still plan their assaults and still carry out what they are able to carry out.
Living in this day and age is simple one of those most frustrating of times to live in.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
OK, I can understand the following:
Name
Airport of departure
Airport of destination
and that is IT. The government doesn't need my credit card nuber, and my meal preference is none of their damned business!
Besides, one doesn't have to request "no pork" to eat "no pork." I can just as easily get the meal with pork and not eat it, just the salad or crackers or whatever else I bring on board.
And yes, I agree that we are shooting ourselves in teh foot with all these knee-jerk reactions. At first I always said that this wasn't about being against Muslims/Islam, but our beloved executive branch is making that argument harder and harder every day.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
When will governments understand that Sept 11 was based on the premise of surprise. The nutters on the plane did not even have guns. They had little forks and knifes. They used the element of surprise to carry out their attack.
And when will governments realize that these terrorists DO NOT use technology. The problem is that when you use technology to figure out profiles, it assumes that others are using technology as well.
Of course the current administration cannot be blamed alone, the EU is going along lock stock and barrel.....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I swear, this country is tearing itself apart with self-induced paranoia.
You know I've been wondering about this, because that average person that I talk to is much more sane. Well, not as much as would be nice, but certainly not so bent on bombing and policing everything like Bush and the general media seem to be. The paranoia is being spread by from the top down, it certainly isn't grassroots. What bothers me is that so many people seem to just eat it up and don't pause to think about the reality of the situation for a minute.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Also watch out for: reading complicated literature, showing concern for their fellow man and liking to share...
Cheers
Jon
the truth in this is astounding - -even though you may be joking.
im not sure if anyone has been paying attention, but the American State has turned into the feared society written about in the book "1984". it is unbelievable the amount the propoganda machine is spewing out, and even more so unbelievable the watchful eye the governement is using....
all Americans should be afraid for their lives/liberty, because you are losing it for the sake of a little bit of false sense of security.
The Bush Administration has done well to control the proles, no?
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Did everyone forget that the terrorist paid everything with cash when attacked on 9/11? What good would have credit card information have done? They paid cash for flying school, cash for tickets, travel and accomendations. I would be more interest in flagging people who paid in cash.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
Second only to frisking little old ladies in bringing your security station up to the state of the art.
The idiotic thing is that I very much doubt Al Quaida will ever again try to use an Airplane as a bomb, or even hijack one. Why? The customers won't sit still for it any more. There have been a number of cases since 9-11 where would-be hijackings etc. have been stopped by the PASSENGERS. The equation is changed. The bottom line is that all the airline security garbage is nothing but a feel-good measure that does little or nothing about the fundamental problem - which is that you've got a lot of medium crazy people who want to kill Americans.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
1) Should U.S. authorities make any attempt to identify potentially dangerous travellers before they enter the U.S.?
2) If so, should they check out every single person? If they are unable for some reason to check out every single person, how should they decide who to check out?
It seems to me that people want to bitch and complain about any attempt identify possible security problems before they occur. I'm curious if these are the same people who criticize the U.S. government for not stopping the 9/11 attacks which, just as a side note, were committed by men who probably would not have eating pork on the way over here.
I was going to leave it at that, but let me throw out an example of why this complaining pisses me off so much: suppose you administered a mail server and wanted to make sure that your machine was not used to send spam. You have noticed in the past a pattern in which accounts were opened with similar information and from a particular IP block, and then those accounts were used to send huge blocks of spam. If one day you see a few new accounts opened following this pattern, is it really that unreasonable to take a few simple steps to check and see if those people start sending spam? Maybe check the logs a few days later, or write a simple script that monitors their port 25 traffic? You haven't kicked them out, you haven't blocked their port; you really haven't done anything other than keep an eye out, based on a known pattern.
The bottom line is, this information is a STARTING POINT. No one is in trouble. No one is prevented from travelling. But you have to start somewhere. Unless, that is, you want to sit back, do nothing, and complain about everything done by those who are actually responsible.
Evil is the money of root.
This issue is tricky in respect to treating information as property and involvement of multi-national corporations. The arguments go beyond American constitutional law, specifically the expectation of privacy, into the sale and disclosure of information to third parties. With corporations and government agencies as intermediaries, it easily circumvents the issue of searches conducted without a warrant.
It gets muddy in that travel is not considered an inalienable right and therefore the information disclosure is a voluntary requisite for travel. I sometimes ask corporations for their privacy policies and it drives them insane when I ask them about how long my data will live in their database, if there is a procedure to request purging of such data, and how long my carbon copied forms are kept on record. A somewhat wishy-washy corporate stance regarding exchange of information can foil attempts at protecting database privacy. While it may be against the laws of one country (against the wishes of a corporation or second country) to disclose such information, given the fact that the database data may reside in multitude of countries where an agency is willing to disclose is either a benefit (for the government) or a problem for the privacy sensitive consumer. This problem extends to almost all things that live in a world of wide connectivity and needs to seriously be dealt with through international privacy law.
that Homeland Security Agency is at the present time not able to process the data that is provided... We have ~25 european airlines with each its proprietary system, that are not compatible to the systems that HSA is using...
Millions of records get lost for the moment, until the Windows NT/2000 server machines are able to cope with the data the Unix servers of the european airlines are bombarding them with...
If I recall, this is exactly what the nineteen hijackers of 9/11 did; at least insofar as drinking beer, attending strip clubs, shaving their beards, etc. This sort of instruction was also found in the al Qaeda training manuals our folks found in Afghanistan. They know what the stereotypical terrorist is, too, and they strive to avoid that.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
This seems to be official US policy these days. And they wonder why the rest of the world hates them.
You may be right, but I seem to remember that the ones who hijacked the planes on 11/7 lived in the US, even if I don't remember wether they were actual US citizen, or they only had a visa or something like that.
Yeah, there are nasty people out there wanting to kill us.
But I find increased government power far more scary. Remember that more than 90% of all mass killings have been done by governments, including the US federal government.
If that gets out of hand, and anything that has unchecked power will abuse that power, we will long back to the rosy happy innocent days of only fearing a rag tag band of deranged lunatics.
Ignorant uninformed opinions like this is what will lead us into world war three. If it was a troll it was one of the best ones i've seen. Do you really believe people would go out of their way or even sacrifice their lives to "bring down the US to the level they live at"? Did you ever stop to think that maybe they USians were the first to put their noses where they didn't belong? I pity you, i really do.
No offence. But where do you get this idea from? There are quite a few other contries that have more freedom than the US. You the US doesn't even have a real democracy for starters.
And I do agree with you point, that the US is not like 1984. But I think the original poster's point was that's the way it's heading at the moment.
I can smoke a Cuban cigar. Can YOU?
I can even GO to Cuba. Can YOU?
In Russia, it's totally acceptable to walk around on the grounds of the Kremlin sipping a beer. Could you imagine doing that on Capitol Hill?
I don't think most Americans really have any idea what freedom really is?
I don't think most Americans really have any idea just how much of their beloved "freedom" they have lost in the War on Terrorism...or the War on Drugs, for that matter.
Don't you think there's something a little wrong with being made to pee in a jar just to keep your job? omething about innocence over guilt, and the burden of proof? This has been all but forgotten in the drug war, and will be even more so with all the extra security and paranoia put into place post 9/11.
But it's much more useful than that - if they're able to collect all that information, they can correlate it with people who give money to the Green Party or peace groups or environmental groups (some of whom are already on the TSA's not-allowed-to-fly lists because of their political incorrectness.) Also, the increased "information sharing" between the US civilian police agencies, spook agencies, and military, plus the redefinitions of lots of forms of vice as "national security" issues means that they can use those hotel bills from Humboldt County, California to decide to give your luggage a lot of extra attention when you're flying back from Amsterdam, or ask the Internal Revenue Service to check out your tax returns after that trip to Las Vegas just in case you might have been "money laundering" or passing some cash to that suspicious Penn fellow.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And I always thought that big brother would come from some disgruntled eastern-block socialist group. A terrible crime is being committed as a result of fear and hysteria. Sure we need to combat terrorism, but is it worth the loss of everyones individual rights and freedom.
It is hardly surprising, but still a real disappointment that the country that has the ability to protect freedom is the country that seems to be the quickest to try and curtail freedom.
Shame on the US government, and also Shame on the British and Australian governments for being so easily led in this. As an Australian, I am disgusted by that little "toad" of a Prime Minister who does nothing but continually suck up to foreign governments without taking into account the needs of his own people. As an australian, I apoligise to the rest of the world for my countryman's behaviour... His beliefs are not shared by all.
I for one do not condone any action taken that leads to anyone's personal freedom being abused, and I regret the day that my own country does the same as what the US is doing today.
Ashamed.
Every precaution against terrorism will strengthen censorship, totalitarism and the destruction of democracy. Every citizen should be fully conscious of this.
For the US, the only sensitive way to fight against terrorism is to force the government to implement a foreign policy which doesn't ask for trouble.
I have no problem, I don't see that non-citizens are due the same rights as a US citizen
Why are americans so special that they have rights that others do not?
Try reading this, and get back to me.
Or do you think that because that is what everybody tells yo to think
...doesn't mean I can't admire certain aspects of their society.
...anybody else.. is just too strong.
Sorry, I had intended to write,
"...because that is what the state tells you to think".
It was supposed to be a cynical tongue-in-cheek play on one of the themes in "1984", namely state based mind control.
Of course, however saying that US citizens still enjoy more freedoms than anybody else on the planet IMO is at best highly questionable, and at worst blind propaganda.
I agree that they do have greater freedoms than citizens of many countries however once you start looking at a broad set of countries such as {USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Japan} and try to really define which is the "most free" you will almost certainly end up in a philosophical quandry.
e.g. If you assume (a Satre like) definition of freedom to be "the ability to do what you want" and qualify it with "to the point where you don't remove the freedom of other people" then for example...
Smoking -> Sure do it if you like, however it will impact on other peoples freedom not to have to breathe your smoke.
In the US, the UK and much of Germany this seems to be the predominant way things are going. Cutting down on people freedom to smoke in public places since it reduces the freedom of people not to breathe smoke. However in France and Greece smoking (to my displeasure) is still very much "de reguir". Under which case are the citizens the most free?
Once you get this level of comparison, you end up splitting hairs, for example.
In Germany there are sections of Autobahn without speed limits. On US Freeways it's 65Mph (or will be soon). In Germany you can drink beer at 16, in the US it's 21 (though you often get asked for identification even if you are middle-aged and balding).
Returning to your previous point..
US citizens still enjoy more freedoms than anybody else on the planet IMO
If you can quantify this statement by counting the "freedoms" in each country then great!
Otherwise you probably mean...
US citizens still enjoy a great deal of freedom compared to many countries in the world
Which I would agree with.
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Source : Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This is to answer to all who says 'ok, right' to the above poster ... while it has been correctly moderated as 'funny'.
#include "coucou.h"