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CAPPS II Guidelines Released
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."
How are they planning to deal with the large numbers of false positives a system like this will generate? In my experience when you try to predict such low probability events as being a terrorist (no matter what you 'should' believe, even 100,000 terrorists in the US is only 0.0004%) the number of false positives far exceeds the number of true ones (or even the potentially true ones if you picked them all up).
And I really don't think a 'fly' list is the solution - if it automatically lets you fly, and considering that suicide bombers rarely have a history, it would be too obvious a back door.
... this all seems quite sensible.
It's ridiculous that at the moment more stringent checks are made on someone applying for a credit card than on someone boarding a plane.
I have flown one time since the attacks and it ended up being a living hell of rooting through my stuff (carry-on and my luggage), pulling me aside (twice!) to frisk me, shoes off and scanned, nothing but a big hassle and a major irritation.
Oh, and watch it if you're carrying an iBook. I guess since it looks different they will want to open it up and play with it while people with 'normal' laptops just walk on without a second glance.
The whole reaming out convinced me it was worthless to spend my hard earned money to walk up and get treated like a criminal. I quit flying that day and will never step foot on another plane for the rest of my life. I drive everywhere on vacation now, stop where I want to, eat when I want to, carry on what I want to and have the peace of mind knowing there's not some government asshat sniffing through my b0xx0rz or looking up my personal information just to appease Washington.
I feel for the men, women and children (!) who really have no choice and have to be subjected to this fisaco in the name of security. Take a stand if you can and drive instead of feeding this monster. Vote with your dollar.
/ rant off
Now I'm all for planes not blowing up, but these security measures have gone too far and, in my opinion, don't seem to offer any significant benefit other to increase the racial divides between humanity at a time when we should be attempting to come to a common ground.
Inspecting luggage on a Greyhound sounds more like a War on Drugs thing than a War on Terrorism thing. The end result's the same (you're pissed and nobody's really any safer), but...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I hear you. I'm the original poster. That was "sarcasm".
I cant even complain about the drug testing because it makes me "guilty" to the asswipes who say "bring it on, i've got nothing to hide."
Hey, why should we complain if they want to sort through our body fluids to verify our habits in our off time. (more sarcasm)
Personally, I can't friggin believe it. If they think a TELECOMMUTING PROGRAMMER ON WEED is bad, lets see what an incensed TELECOMMUTING DRUNK AND ANGRY PROGRAMMER is like. Oh, but alchohol is OK, so obviously a drunk guy whose pissed off is not a danger.
The point is *not* to hijack the bus and crash it into anything. Who wants to commandeer a bus, of all things? It's hardly an effective weapon.
On the other hand, ask any Israeli why you search the bus. Take off your 9/11 blinders: terrorism isn't about killing people with vehicles. It's about instilling TERROR. Imagine what happens when they blow up a "bus in the middle of Missouri". It never was about hijacking; that was just a means to an end.
I've had it with all of this paranoia, I am just not going to fly ever again!
With this much harassment, is it any wonder why fewer people want to travel and why the already failing airlines are asking for bailouts?
If I didn't need to arrive 2 hours early to be scanned, searched, remove my shoes, wait in line, wait in line, and wait in line, then be searched, searched, and searched again, it might be faster and easier to go home to visit the family by airplane, but as it is now it is easier and cheaper to spend the extra 4 hours and DRIVE!
The passengers will never again allow terrorists to crash an airplane into something, so terrorists have nothing to gain in trying the same scenario again. Let's get over the paranoia, take some personal responsibility and use common sense for our own security, and understand that if we want freedom we need to accept a certain amount of risk!
Donate free food here
Oh yes... if you want a puppy, start out by asking for a pony.
Of course, this 'puppy' will no doubt grow into quite a large bull-mastif. *sigh*
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
I agree, it is "it is a privilege to come to this country" and you do need to "make sure they'll appreciate it". A potential solution would be to make all foreigners wear a distinctive id - how about a yellow star? So everyone else knows that they are the ones responsible for all of USA's problems. And if any of them protest - just send them to the camp in Guantanamo. This will also allow not to falsely identify "caucasian suburban minors" for "the U.S.'s hitlist".
Imagine what happens when they blow up a "bus in the middle of Missouri"
;P
I'm imagining a 15 second sound bite on CNN?
Also imagining maybe a 1/16th page article in the "C" section of the local newspaper, combined with a map of the US, indicating where Missouri is...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
A few dozen people die. People freak out for a week or so wondering if there will be more bus bombings. Then they realize that there aren't, and are quite relieved if this is the best Al-Queda can come up with then this terrorism thing is licked (And no, I'm not implying it is, or would be). Sorry, but a bus bombing would be a pretty weak follow up to taking down two buildings and part of the Pentagon. I think Al-Queda would try to kill more people than say Great White killed with a sparkler.
The bus bombings work in Israel because you have a large amount of guys willing to blow themselves up in Israel. People get scared if busses are blowing up every week. Suicide bombers are a lot more rare and and "valuable" in the US, so they certainly wouldn't be wasted on blowing up busses.
AccountKiller
The US isn't currently occupying and building settlements in a neighboring... uh... country? occupied territory? like Israel is. Israel also depends on the Palestinians for a large part of its economy (and workforce), so it's not just a simple matter of restricting travel.
In other words the people that are most pissed off at the US live fairly far away from the US (and not on a border country), and live in another country (and not an occupied territory). Having large numbers of them enter into the US is thus difficult.
The people most pissed of at Israel live within the occupied terrories, where border crossing into Israel is easy. Even if you aren't allowed to cross at the official border crossings, it isn't that difficult to cross elsewhere, to the point where they're building a frickin wall around the occupied territories to try to keep them out.
Thus, getting people willing to commit acts of terror into the US is much harder than getting them into Israel. Therefore there are far less of them in the US than in Israel.
AccountKiller
just not going to do us any good.
If somebody wants to die to cause some damage to the US, then they have a high likelyhood of doing it.
The ratio of terrorists compared to good people is too low to allow any reasonable accuracy no matter what the predictive system.
What's worse is the engineering of possible weapons will make the already low rates worse. They can't check for what was just invented can they?
The land of the free was formed with some pretty strong responses to threats.
Personally, I would rather see more of that, than attacks on our own people.
I realize the world is changing and that information systems can be helpful, but we must balance our hard won freedoms and rights at the same time. If we lock things down to the point where potential terrorists cannot move freely, given their low numbers doesn't that mean none of us can have our freedom either? If this cannot be the case, then they will have won no matter how many are killed or caught.
Most of what I value about America is being eroded away under the mask of security. Security for whom? I feel a heck of a lot more insecure now than I did 10 years ago. It's not the terror doing it either.
How many of you feel the same?
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