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CAPPS II Guidelines Released

Posted by michael on from the hakuna-matata dept.

W33dz writes "WIRED magazine has released an article detailing the Transportation Safety Administration's latest guidelines for the second-generation Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS II. As outlined in a notice to be published Friday in the Federal Register, CAPPS II will rate every passenger by checking dates of birth, home addresses and phone numbers against commercial databases and the government's terrorist watch lists. This is a pullback from the original plan which called for wide dissemination of data including financial and medical history."

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fine, Go ahead. by rritterson · · Score: 2, Informative

    Sure, consume more gas per person, adding more CO and nitrous oxides to the enviorment.

    What would you like? Allow everyone unrestricted access? Or would you prefer some sort of automatic discrimination at the gate?

    Yet, it's only the disgrunted people who hold up the line. It pissed me off when someone goes through security in a fit because they have to take off his/her shoes. Normally I can get through the checkpoint at SFO in 5 minutes.

    --
    -Ryan
    AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
  2. Re:Screw public aviation! by mpoulton · · Score: 2, Informative
    they wanted to X-Ray four floppy disks I had... It took a while of telling them what would happen if they did
    And exactly what would that be? As all geeks should know, magnetic disks (as well as all other modern storage media) are utterly and completely uncompromised by ionizing radiation. RAM (including flash) may be subject to occasional bit reversals under these circumstances, but it is exceedingly unlikely to cause a problem. As in, so unlikely it's simply not a concern.
    --
    I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
  3. Dear God, do they even read what they write? by Rogerborg · · Score: 3, Informative

    CAPPS II will [reduce] the number of people who [are] are misidentified as potential terrorists.

    How can you correctly identify "potential" terrorists? This is meaningless "brown alert" blurb. You either are or you aren't. What exactly is the penalty for being one? How can you prove that you're not a "potential" terrorist? Is a "potential" terrorist different from a "suspected" terrorist?

    Look, it's a perfectly simple proposition. How many actual terrorists has CAPP I caught, and how many actual terrorists will CAPP II catch? "Potential" my huge hairy arse.

    --
    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  4. Re:Screw public aviation! by TheAncientHacker · · Score: 2, Informative

    Um, mpoulton, perhaps you don't realize that x-ray machines have big magnets and until a few years ago they weren't shielded...