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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.
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?
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 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 seems to be official US policy these days. And they wonder why the rest of the world hates them.