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JetBlue Gives Away Passenger Info To TSA?
Old Ben Franklin writes "In September of 2002, JetBlue Airways secretly gave the Transportation Security Administration the full travel records of 5 million JetBlue customers. This sensitive travel data was then turned-over to a private security contractor for analysis, the results of which were presented at a security conference earlier this year and the analysis then posted on the Internet." This comes after Wired News's recent article on this matter, explaining that "...the proposed government system to prevent terrorism by color-coding airline passengers according to their risk level will be tested using old passenger itineraries from JetBlue", but quoting a TSA spokesman as saying that "currently only fake passenger data was being used."
Sleep well.
First they nerf the guns, next the lerks need flight clearance? Ew...
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Please throw me off the plane. I am a civial, understanding american who through no fault of his own got this label attached to me and can only travel by car.
Will the color coding match the current "threat level" coding? I hope so, because I don't know if I can memorize another color system.
the proposed government system to prevent terrorism by color-coding airline passengers according to their risk level will be tested using old passenger itineraries from JetBlue
So is blue good or bad?
I flew them earlier this year. After already being on the plane 15 minutes at the gate a guy comes on board, calls my name, and escorts me off. Apparently they had marked me for the double-secret security scanning and failed to do it at the security checkpoint. No problems, really, and I was back on the plane about 10 minutes later in plenty of time for departure. Of course, my carry on bag was left in the overhead compartment the whole time I was off the plane.
It was the security folks who failed to do the extra scanning at the checkpoint, but it was Jet Blue's guy who got me off the plane. He didn't know and didn't care that I might have already snuck something onto the plane. If Jet Blue wants to help fight terror in the skies they'd better re-think their priorities. Paying lip-service to security is a long tradition in commercial aviation. Just think about this: if there was no law passed mandating crash-proof cockpit doors, most airlines wouldn't have put them in.
Nah they'll probably color-code them the ol' fashioned way. Pale=good, down to that nasty grimey brown we all know is the root of all evil.
And I thought I was bitter before Slashdot...
Looks good for your age..
Typical - the first step probably seemed perfectly reasonable to JetBlue - I mean what could be safer than a Security Administration huh?
But then the records get given to a private firm and like Chinese Whispers, the privacy implications are completely forgotten.
I notice the exact same effect at work. I explain the ethical implications of not spamming to my boss. He then exlpains to clients that it's fine for them to send information to existing client lists. They then come and ask us to send mail to a list they have bought in from a 3rd party supplier!
I guess that problems like this are going to crop up more and more as we give up more and more of our personal data to large companies.
A little planning goes a long way...
Unless they seriously start doing some racial profiling, airport security is a joke. It isn't 80 year old grandmas and 12 year old boy scouts causing trouble, but that's exactly who I see getting searched every time I go to the airport.
Meanwhile Hamid and Abdullah are going through the gates untouched because the TSA is more afraid of suffering a racial discrimination charge than planes flying into buildings.
http://cryptome.org/jetblue-spy.pdf (2.2MB)
I don't know about this -- this seems a little specious to me.
I'm not saying that I don't beleive that it's impossible that JetBlue gave/sold their passenger list, but the article doesn't give any corroborating evidence other than the old "they deny it, it must be true." The file they linked to as a copy of data put up on the web also seems to be empty, so I couldn't look at what this data was. Regardless, how did they figure out that this was JetBlue's data? I'm also wondering if JetBlue even has had 5 million customers -- perhaps they meant 5 million transaction records?
I'm all for privacy, free speech, blah blah blah, but this seems pretty alarmist and reeks of, what's the term... conspiracy theory. This just doesn't add up.
Just my two cents, go ahead and flame me.
Actually the new coding system will have two labels:
1. Has No WMD's - safe passenger
2. Has No WMD's but with no evidence or any link whatsover to recent terrorism, we want you to think he has WMD's so lets haul him off the airplane for a near nuclear anal probing where we will find no WMD's and call in the UN to clean up after us when we can't handle the mess we made anymore. - safe Arab passenger
My father in law was branded as number 2 recently - with his tan from working in africa for months, they thought he was middle eastern, when he pulled his shirt open to expose his untanned white skin, the guards laughed at their 'mistake', stopped searching him and let him carry on.
Now if you Americans would stop pissing off people around the world, you wouldnt need all these colour schemes.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
As one of JetBlue's first passengers, when the seats were still new and the TV's weren't working yet, I'm upset by this. I flew them in the first weeks they were flying, and then frequently afterwards, because the planes were nice, the service was good, and the rates were cheap. Now I'm even more screwed than normal, I'm deep in the belly of the CAPPS II system. Bastards.
It was very nice of them to include the SS#, address, and date of birth. I recognize some of the addresses on pg 20 of the PDF, it would be almost trivial to find out the names to go with those, and use them in identity theft.
I wouldn't do it, but I might anonymously mail a printout of the pdf to them.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
"The United States has long pressured European airlines to submit passenger information in order to prevent the arrival of terrorists in the country."
"This information will include names, travel routes, credit card numbers, and possible special meals."
full article
if you color code the passanger's in the traffic light way (green for "too stupid to be a terrorist"; yellow for "suspect" and red for "oh my god, he has a beard and even more, he wears a turban") and there is a suspected terrorist threat in a location of the u.s. will you deny the "red" passengers transportation? And how do you classyfy the color system? Would be interessting what happens when sombody say's there will be an attack on the white house and 5 planes with "red" passengers are on it's way to Washington DC. will they be rerouted to a save location (Nevada for instance, or maybe even Guantanamo)
".Sig Stealer" was here
If the idea is to test whether CAPPS II can accurately determine the risk level of a potential flyer, I don't see how they can accomplish this with data from old passengers. Don't they also need data on how much each of those passengers ended up BEING a RISK?
I don't know how you'd even begin to come up with such data. But if you can't figure out how much of a risk each passenger actually was, how can you see whether this correlates with the risk score CAPPS spits out? As far as I can see, this massive breach of passenger confidentiality will do nothing to test the efficacy of CAPPS.
(As far as I know, no terrorist acts have been committed on JetBlue, so all passengers who have flown on JetBlue should have been given the "Green" CAPPS rating. Hence once they feed this passenger data through CAPPS, it better spit out low risk for everybody. Otherwise, this profiling obviously isn't working.)
All schemes like this increase the chance that evil people will target low risk travelers for identity theft.
Scenario: terrorists identify suitable target in fairly remote location. Break in, force target to purchase tickets over the internet, disclose PIN numbers to credit cards etc., kill target and catch plane. It takes a bit more organisation and time, but these people seem to have plenty of that. You can't even rely on those sneaky people to be darker shades of brown: the white English-speaking world has shown an ability to produce home-grown bombers, in the US, Northern Ireland and the UK.
If this is going to be a substitute for airport security (and I suspect it will be) all I can say is, fortunately I rarely need to travel by plane nowadays.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Can anyone tell me why they let known Airline Terrorists fly at all??
There is some interesting data-mining being done in the document. Correlating several databases together gives you a good profile of the people on the plane, but it doesn't give you an idea if someone is a terrorist. Like the presentation sais, Find a needle in a haystack, without knowing what the needle looks like If you don't know what it looks like you won't find it. What you do find is anamolous behaviour that points to interesting people to check.
Finding these people largely depends on how much they differ from the ordinary profile. Ordinary here is middle income suburbanite. So low income ghetto dwellers get singled out time and time again. Yes they might be out of the ordinary, but it doesn't mean that they will blow up the plane.
Use Adsense for Charity
yo mama is so ugly she walked into a haunted house and came out with a pay check
Seeing as how JetBlie hasn't AFAIK had any "terrorist" incidents then isn't this a bad demonstration of the guvmint's new fangled technologies? If Torch Technologies used the customer data given to them from JetBlue to run through CAPPS-II what are they going to find? That they needlessly made 1 million people take their shoes off, wasted atleast 200 rubber gloves doing strip searches and shot some old ganny named Irma on sight?
But in all seriousness - isn't this a bad sample? Wouldn't we want to run the information from say United through the thing to see if it works.
Oh yeah, and to stay on topic, privacy good. Guvmint bad.
Same thing happened to me at JFK. Ever since taking a one-way flight to Florida for a prolonged business trip, every flight I've been on I've been labeled "SSSS." I think it stands for Super Secret Squirrel Security.. I'm not sure. Anyway I get to cut the long lines at regular security so I don't care if they think I'm a terrorist.
The usual procedure is to stamp the ticket and punch a hole into the ticket to prove that the SSSS security check was made. After my very thorough SSSS check which involved unzipping my carry on and looking under one shirt, I got my ticket stamped but no hole. I'm about to board the plane when they say I can't get on because I only have the stamp.. not the hole.
Mind you, the hole IS A REGULAR CIRCULAR PUNCH HOLE CREATED BY A 1.99 STAPLES HOLE PUNCHER.
Of course I had to walk 900 feet back to the checkpoint, as this magical punchhole proved I was clean and not a terrorist. Kinda scary, no?
Also upon flying out of Burbank airport, flagged my usual terroristic SSSS, I asked which line is for SSSS security. To which the "guard" replied "Oh we don't do that here, just go through regular."
Now of course I know that I am no terrorist, but what about others who may be? When I told a close friend who is a pilot for United about that, he freaked out and said theyd be in huge trouble if the FAA ever found out.
Needless to say the whole airport security thing is a facade of false security, regulated by mystic punch holes, dimwitted workers, and innane flagged policies - He took a one-way flight!!! He's a terrorist lets do extra security on him for the next 30 flights!!" When of course anyone looking to cause trouble would just book round trip..
How To Fly Without ID. I wonder if this will still work... and if so for how much longer.
I wonder what that one's reserved for?
Ah yes... the Big Brother mega watch list in full swing...
MoFscker
I know this is Slashdot, and on Slashdot everything the government does is Bad, and there's this sacred notion of "privacy" which apparently has to do with not being accountable to anybody for anything. However, there's something the Americans in the Slashdot Privacy Crew should consider:
THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO WANT TO KILL YOU.
Yes, they want to kill you. They have for many years and they will for many years to come. They are very creative. And that's why new measures like these are necessary.
I'd venture to guess that the same folks who denounce a passenger-profiling program are the first ones who will criticize and point fingers for "not seeing the 9/11 clues". You simply cannot have it both ways.
DirecTv watches you!!
Anybody can have your passenger info if they really want it.
Foreign airlines flying to US destinations have had to turn over their passenger manifests, incl. credit-card details and special food requirements ("No pork means....") to US authorities for months now. If they don't do so they lose their landing-right, can get fined etc.
This isn't just for "scary/suspicious countries", but for all countries. Even those allied with the US.
terrorrists color-code you!
This is the icing on the cake, it's kinda late so I guess that's my excuse for forgetting to type it..
While leaving Burbank my "friend" had purchased a kitchen utensil set. Upon packing the luggage my "friend" looked at the 8 inch chef knife and said.. "Damn I'm gonna have to ship this back or give it away cause there's no shot in hell this is getting let on the plane in my carry-on." His brother says Ah give it a shot, if its a no-go let security confiscate it.
Needless to say, my "friend's" bag went through the X-Ray machine, and the attendant didn't even give it a glance. Remember he is flagged for extra security.. regardless of the 8 inch knife on the X-Ray, the bag has to be checked by FAA policy!!! His bag was never opened and he boarded the plane and landed with the obvious contraband aboard. But I dare the 90 year old woman to try to board with a nail clipper.
So not only was he flagged as a security risk, but he sucessfully boarded the plane with an 8 inch chef knife without anyone giving him a second glance! Of course he had no mal-intents but the whole incident shocked my pilot friend and he was furious as it showed how really terrible airport security is, and how easy a terrorist can smuggle stuff in if a regular passenger (who was flagged a terrorist!!) can get by without trying to circumvent any security.
What I don't get is how they think labeling passengers as "safe" or "unsafe" is going to make the actual TRIP any safer. After all, how hard is it to trick someone in the "safe" category-- grandmothers, kids-- y'know the people who everyone is mocking the security for searching... what's to stop a terrorist for targetting THEM as a weapon or bomb-vehicle?
I remember hearing something about El-Al years ago having discovered a bomb in the luggage of an Israeli girl...who unknowingly was dating a terrorist. If they can find one stupid low-risk passenger to carry on an unusually heavy stuffed animal or whatever, it could be bad news...
Top secret fact! CAPPS is actually only based on whether you have any medical history of any kind.
The data includes your SSN and dates of service for medical conditions and general location. Thats it.
All this fluff that is being studied by the document the contractor did is not what the FBI uses.
Basically... you need to create a fake limited medical history in the major databases sold by blue cross and others for favors to the gov.
If you have a valid passport and credit card adn back acct but absolutely no medical history tied to your SSN then you are flagged for SSSS sec line treatment.
Its that goddamned simple.
MEDICAL HISTORY this limited 5 million record jetblue database is nothing but the tip of the iceberg.
The us thought of everything but the only thing that works best is medical histories. Any history at all is "clean" and no history is suspect.
BTW : the 19 saudi nationals had no us insurance based medical histories... but then again they had other signifying traits that were indicative of being a foreigner.
I wonder why no one gets the mediacl history angle.
its 90% of the weight of CAPS II profle.
modreators please mod the parent up, he's making a valid point
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
the proposed government system to prevent terrorism by color-coding airline passengers according to their risk level will be tested using old passenger itineraries from JetBlue
Ok, so no JetBlue planes were hijacked in recent memory (ever?) so, by extrapolating the data from that, the people who should be colored GREEN (no threat) are.... everyone.
as terrorists are likely to be using fake data themselves!
This database used by some fools at the Dept. of Homeland Security to fight terrorism could end up aiding terrorists, since it could lead to identity theft. It appears that some of the 9/11 hijackers had stolen other people's identities. That website has a very good 9/11 timeline.
We seem to assume that they're predictable. One lousy guy has some explosives attached to his shoe, and now suddenly every airline passenger has to take off their shoes at lease once each time they fly.
The JetBlue Security Rating System
1. Make the dot Dot the same approximate color as the skin of the passenger
2. Correspond the dor colors to reflect the following threat assessments...
White: Safe
Female White: Very Safe
Yellow: Pretty Safe
Black: Mostly harmless but hide your wallet
Beige: DANGER! HIGH THREAT ASSESMENT LEVEL
Sunny
Be my Friend
Now, there are about 350 days in a year, so that makes 3 500 000 flights per year.
So yeah, order of magnitude, 5 million flights is probably 1 or 2 years' worth of data.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
"currently only fake passenger data was being used."
sure.
..all its problems without any of its benefits.
is this a 'black thing' ?
Mandatory link on why nothing short of checking everyone will work
Keep pushing people to jump through more and more hoops, literally terrorize your own population. Can you smell the *cough* freedom. Somehow I don't feel like these kind of actions make us the winners... Definitely moving to a guilty until proven innocent paradigm, great job.
I easily passed thru security while wearing a slightly bulky jacket with a Beluga Whale tucked under my armpit. My friend got stopped for trying to bring on his 157mm howitzer though...
..........FULL STOP.
You are ignorant. I'm not being rude, I'm being honest. Profiling is less secure then random sampling. It's mathematical FACT.
The reason it is less secure is because it's hackable. By that I mean, if you can reverse engineer the algorithm they use to determine who is to be searched, you can break it. All you would have to do is go a few hours early for your next flight with a pen a paper and sit in front of the gate. As you sit there you tally who gets searched (what do they look like, what are they wearing, etc.) and who doesn't. Do that for a month and you now have all the data you need to find the "perfect" terrorist.
For example, if you see that white teenage girls almost never get searched, then your next recruit will be a naive white girl you meet at a sorority mixer. She'll bring in the weapons for you and boom, you have your next terrorist attack, and it's much less probable that you'll get caught.
A random sample, even despite the 12 year olds and grandmothers, is inherantly more secure becuase you can't find a way to guarantee that you won't be searched with the right racial candidate. It is impossible to reverse engineer.
Ahha, gotcha! You are Philip Ruddock and I claim my autographed
Pauline Hanson mug!
The comfort you demanded is now mandatory - Jello Biafra
You have the actual label on your boarding pass effectively saying that you are suspect? Ubelievably cynical! Even in late Soviet Uinon, where I happened to live good part of my life, authorities avoided to humiliate the citizens so openly. (And mind you, USSR wasn't exactly the place where personal freedoms were flourhising).
I sympathise you, and wish you best of luck. Hopefully your country will recover the freedoms and sanity that its dwellers were so proud of.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Red is the colour of blood and, since the time of cavemen, has been the accepted colour for danger.
Green is the colour of most safe to eat plant-life (most ripe vegetation is green, dead vegetation tends to go black, etc), hence it's the natural choice to indicate safety.
Look around you everywhere, this red/green usage is almost universal. Traffic signs, emergency vehicles, motor sports, etc.
"Nuts to adopt yet more color codes"? I don't think so - red = bad and green = good is something that even small kids can understand. Why would you want to get away from the simplicity of that?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
An Irish terrorist found a dim English girlfriend some years back.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,60489,00. html
you should request at booking time a muslim meal and have a ticket with a final destination like kabul, teheran, tripolis or pyonyang... Be sure to that the alarms of homeland security go red within 10min of the booking.
So if I have a record of flying to "rouge" states every now and then, plus I don't eat pork I'm guessing I get the "red" or whatever color means I'll get a plastic fork whereas John next to me gets the tiny metal fork (both which are still inferior to a shoelace for hijacking a plane).
But this kind of information is already used when you shop with creditcards, everytime you get a directed ad because you ordered something in the past etc etc. In my opinion, using some real data (e.g. travel history) in the security is better than the system of harassing people for looking foreign or whatever. Just don't supply more personal information than you need when flying and your privacy should be ok.
Also, if you are a terrorist, wouldn't you fly with a brand spanking new identity every time? Perhaps the color code to start with should be the most dangerous, and frequent flyers should earn their green code with their frequent flyer miles? Only after a couple of flights could you expect anything less than a full cavity search? =)
as an experiment last year I decided to go through the TSA hriring process fro bagage screeners at airports to see if security has being done..
While I cannot give details as Uncle Sam deems normal citizens as more likely to be trrorists rather than visa candidates here is what I know bases on my military training..
1. All terrorists speak arabic and write it while CIA, FBI, and other law enforcement officals do not.
2. Terrorists come in all social economic classes
3. Psychology profiles tend to indicate fundamentalism in religon as a binding force.
You cannot defeat the enemy if you are not willing to even speak the langague and walk into that life by knowing how reliong contributes to the terrorist profile. USa gets f*ing F on security and terrorist acts prevention..Note real arabic speakingcitizens of USA want to serve FBI in this regard and the FBI would rathe rfocus on spreading racism than receiving help..
Welcome to Ashcroft's USA where only he can be president..
Folks it snot credit profiles, law offenses, or etc..the popel ewho blew up the fed building in Oklahoma were of a specific religous sect so were the poeple at waco..have we forgottten? While religon alone shoudl not be the determining factor..a religous sect that is known for producing terrorists is obvious a good indicator!
Al-Queda is both a terrorist group and a religous offshoot of wabbi..we even went for the worng country Iraq..are there any wabbi in Iraq? No...
Lets see where are there wabbi sects? Afganistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, UAR..get the poicture yet?
If we want to find terrorists then we better learn the wabbi religon and fast..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
...One reason that the 911 attacks occurred was that normal citizens and the transportation industry weren't thinking about attacks at that point.
I also think that a stern lesson was imparted by the liner in PA, where the passengers teamed up to thwart the attack, resulting in mission failure for the dumb asses that didn't know how aggressive American men can be in a pinch. (Instead of a martyr's paradise, they get a dunce cap and a distraught family) I have it on good authority that simply killing oneself is a big no-no in Islam, in fact to be a valid martyr, one's actions must carry the day, which none of those clowns did. There is a lot of heretic spew in recruiters efforts, Muslims aren't normally any more anxious to stop living than anyone else.
> BTW : the 19 saudi nationals had no us insurance based medical histories... but then again they had other signifying traits that were indicative of being a foreigner.
Yeah, they were carrying Saudi passports.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
It's not as serious as this...
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
I carried a bag of computer parts, inc hard disks, onto a plane in Germany. Apparently they have no problem with people carrying small metal boxes with circuitry clamped on the underside. That was through 2 security checks w/scan too.
:)
They did hassle the hell out of the 12yr old girl infront for having a metal comb in her bag though.
Makes ya feel so safe eh
.... when you turn your private information over to a corporation?
I don't have a home phone number! Am I going to be stopped from flying in the USA?
I can give my work phone number, (or my pager), but I do NOT have a home phone.
I guess I'll be labelled "RED"
The data was "the proposed government system to prevent terrorism by color-coding airline passengers according to their risk level will be tested using old passenger itineraries from JetBlue..."
How can this possibly be "tested?" Were any people now known to be terrorists flying on JetBlue during that time period? If not, how does anyone know whether the high-risk coding was valid?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I've been reading this thread and all I see is a bunch of complaining and Monday morning quarterbacking. "This won't work" or "That won't work", but no one has offered a better alternative.
It's like when I ask my wife where she wants to go for dinner. I have to go through a long list of local restaurants and I get "No not I'm not in the mood for that one" until she's finally satisfied. If she would just tell me in the first place it would save a lot of time and trouble.
The same goes here. What is it that YOU think would balance individual rights to privacy with individual rights to fly safely?
Has anyone at TSA ever heard of checks and balancces? Judicaial Oversight? What hapens if somone is classified a RED and denied transportation? What if its the CEO of a multimillion dollar company who was born in the US and happens to be a muslim of arabic decent? My question is: How do I get off the list if ive been wrongly flagged or worse, If I have the same name as somone who has been correctly flagged not to travel? This has already hapened with the current system. Apparently somone with a name like "bob Thomas" was tagged as a terrorist, but they only go with what their name is, so even though "bob Thomas" was a "5'9 white male with brown hair" They were pullig over black people and asian people because their name was BOB THOMAS not because they matched his description.
JetBlue has clearly stated that they never consented to the data being used in this manner.
quote: "Yesterday [Wednesday], ANN got a call back from jetBlue's Vice President, Corporate Communications, Gareth Edmundson-Jones, who wanted to go on the record, in the wake of the lousy publicity his airline had gotten yesterday. He wanted us to know, in no uncertain terms, that, "jetBlue is not entered into an agreement to participate in CAPPS II.""
Link to article
Using past data to predict future events has always been a tricky situation, but the more dangerous trap is beleiving that if your model works with a set of past-data, that it is good. An excellent comparison is the stock market and people who try to predict it - sure, you can do a super-duper model that fits well with the data that fed it, but it ultimately fails when handed new data. If it worked, there would be a whole lot of very rich people out there.
Stock market modeling seems like it would be much easier: you've got daily data on every single company going back 100 years, plus a whole lot more detailed financial information than you could ever get out of passengers (what's your book-to-bill ratio?). To top it off, performance can be measured in one absolute indisputable figure - profit - that is an attribute of most companies, whereas security has a fuzzy performance measurement(*) and few examples of what officials are looking for.
Another thing that concerns me is that, AFAIK, the jet blue travel database contains precisely zero hijackings, so it seems to me that -- according to any possible model that could be generated -- the old system worked perfectly and could not be improved. Nail-clipper weilding maniacs, sure - plenty of those, but no actual hijackers.
(* Pop quiz. Who killed more people, 9/11 or the airline "security" procedures that followed? If you added the expected life expencties of the people who died that day and got an hour number, that number is on the same order of magnatude of the extra time wasted in airports every year)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
"Seperate planes first, seperate neighbourhoods next. Why not just round them all up and put them all in a ghetto now?"
All I gotta say to this is - Can do.
And when they come for you? To put you in your little ghetto too? Who will you turn to for help then?
People like you make me sick. You espouse all these reasons why you're society is so great because it's built upon the guarantee of personal freedom but you're all for taking those freedoms away from whole swathes of society just because of the actions of a few extremists.
Well, next time some white 15-year old loner decides to shoot up half his class because nobody liked him, I'll be listening out for you shouting for all white teenagers to be rounded up and put into camps too.
Next time, there's a mother who kills her young kids before running off to start a life with her new boyfriend, I'll be listening out for you shouting for all mothers with young kids to be rounded up and treated like the lowest of the low.
You can't have your cake and eat it. If you want to live in a free society, learn how to cherish the freedoms of others as much as your own.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
On sort of a non-outraged point, how do you backtest data when there are no positives? Were there serious security incidents on JetBlue that I didn't hear about? If there weren't, wouldn't you then just have to classify all people with the characteristics of those 5 million flyers as 'safe'?
But, then again, stats was never my strong point.
Milo
I've been labeled "SSSS."
So do you get a chuckle when you go up to security and say, "I'm one of those guys with four ess-es." I would be tempted to put a slight accent on the thing and make the "e" in "ess-es" sound more like an "a".
It's mathematical FACT
You are either the biggest fucking dumbass ever or a troll. Mathematical fact??? Where's your data? And I know soriety girls are braindead, but I think they would know if a fucking arab was using them as a mule for explosives.
Let me try to clue you in on a little thing we like to call "reality", big guy. Profiling does not mean that the gaurds will only stop dirty, turbin-wearing foreigners. Profiling means that the airport security has enough sense not to strip-search children and grandmothers just because some "random" sampling rule tells them to. Profiling means you fucking stop anyone that looks suspicious. It's common fucking sense, not an act of racism.
Just thought the mental giants out there might need an eye opener.
CAPS is a profiling system for AIR TRAVEL. As such it should be able to pick out terrorists who hijack AIRCRAFT. To my knowledge, Timothy McVeigh, the Unibomber, and Koresh (was he even a terrorist?) - the much used examples DIDN'T HIJACK AIRPLANES. I'd be impressed if someone could name a single instance of a hijacker NOT being a Muslim Extremist.
As for those like McVeigh et al, we call them "Domestic Terrorists" and they have their own profile. Ever tried to rent a Ryder truck? It's like trying to apply for a bank loan.
To quote my grandfather: "It's better to keep quiet and look stupid than to open your mouth and leave no doubt." Some of you should heed his advise. (Unfortunately you don't know who you are!)
DearJetBlue@jetblue.com
Route to misc.test, your favorite spammer, etc.
If the incoming terrorists had gone through security, they still might not have been stopped, but the fact that they didn't left a big gaping hole in the security plan to begin with. One that's supposedly closed now... in theory...
My former roomie had to go through extra checkpoint security to fly to a convention. She wore her knee high boots (she hadn't flown since 1999) and she got picked as a random high-level check. They wrote this on her ticket weeks in advance. But security let her through. and then realised, so they stopped her in the line and asked her to please remove her boots. She said, "Huh?? Why??" and the next thing she knew, there was a ring of guards around her, and so she took off her docs, they checked them for explosives etcetera, gave them back, searched her luggage, and let her go. What got me was that her ticket was labelled for an extra security search... my former roomie, the born in USA couldn't be less middle class white girl. Majored in geological studies, works editing textbooks, lived in one town all her life, and had a round trip ticket on a good credit history and going to a small town, and they wrote on her ticket in plain english that she needed an extra search. all i could figure was that they had a quota to meet.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
I'm a member of an academic quiz club, and we carry around a portable Jeopardy!-esque buzzer system when we go to tournaments. We flew down to Los Angeles last year with the buzzer, and it received quite a few odd looks. The reason? It's a brown briefcase with some leds on it, a mess of wires on the inside, and a giant label that reads "THE JUDGE."
I think this is the kind of bomb a fashion designer would design.
I recently took a flight the other day and the passenger before me with his laptop only had to open the bag and show it to him. They however made me take off my shoes, open my case and take my laptop out and used a pair of forceips to wipe some sort of cloth around my laptop. Even over the screen which I was none too happy with.
Who's to say that they have not already started testing this system on actual travelers.
Also international travelers will not have any sort of credit profile so WHY do they have to include OURS as part of the system. It makes me sick how it's acceptible to discriminate on people becuase of poor credit.
As an example I have a score right above 650 but am currently a State Farm customer for my Truck's insurance. I decided to shop around to see if there were alternatives that were cheaper.
Geico and Progressive both quoted double my current premiums. When I asked a manager of the similarities at Progressive he responded both companies set your rates based in part on your credit profile. I asked what difference does it make on my driving and he said people with poor credit tend to drive worse.
I'd say that's bull since I know people that are well off and they drive like a bat out of hell. I had though that by being a responsible driver I would be rewarded but that's obviously not the case.
The point here is that credit ratings have nothing to do with how dangerous people are. I would question the Unibomber's credit rating if he had one at that time and what it really was.
I'm also sure that Tim McVeigh had good credit also.
If you thought misleading or incorrect credit information was hard to change, just wait until the credit people and insurance people get ahold of our "security color coding information" and start using it to alter^H^H^H^H^Hjack up our rates.
There's already been a flap in Minnesota about insurance companies using credit scores to influence auto insurance; they claim a correlation, which is probably there, but someone wisely called "bullshit" and took them to task for using criteria other than someone's actual driving record.
Further ironies abound, since those of us who don't carry a lot of debt and pay of our credit early get reduced credit scores -- and I thought responsibility was rewarded! (Yes, I'm aware that those of us that pay off early fubar the economic plans and machinations of the credit industry, since they plan to make all that interest income off of me).
But just wait until you apply for a loan and find out your interest rate is sky high or your insurance has gone through the roof because you're mistakenly labeled a "security threat". I've already read plenty of horror stories about people that couldn't fly and who spent months fighting the national insecurity apparatus trying to understand why they were considered risks and getting it changed.
I used to think that the foil hat crowd was a little off the deep end with most of their complaints about the collection of information, but now I'm starting to agree -- its gone too far, there are no controls, and its clear that Bu$h and A$hcroft have no compunction about giving this information away to their corporate allies.
Ok, so here's a question. Considering that JetBlue provided the information of their own free will, but that Torch didn't sanitize the data included in the report (which JetBlue certainly wasn't expecting), does this qualify as a breach under the new law in California?
For those playing the home game, the law I'm speaking of mandates disclosure of any breach of information involving names, SSNs and financial data like credit card numbers. The way the law works, you have to have a number of elements (name and SSN together qualify) to consider it the proper type of breach.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
For my master's thesis I'm testing a data-mining application on this kind of data. We got it straight from the TIA agency, but it is indeed fake, sample data. It consists of passenger manifests and some other travel-related records, in a bunch of Excel spreadsheets. My understanding is the data I'm using has four "terrorist" profiles in it, and I'll be testing the effectiveness of this program in finding these.
From my understanding, the government already has complete access to passenger manifests. I don't think there's any new data being acquired by TIA. However, I'm not sure what JetBlue might have given to them.
I can say that this doesn't surprise me. jetBlue was the first airline in the U.S. to have those locking extra-secure doors installed on their cockpits for their entire flight. Sometime after that devastating event, I was flying from JFK to Buffalo and the CEO of jetBlue was coming on board every flight just to calm people down and tell them that jetBlue was serious about airline security.
Now, because of that seriousness and their cooperation with the TSA, they get a PR nightmare because some private corp posts a PDF with statistics based on their flight transactions online. Why the TSA had to contract this out is beyond me. I'm sure it didn't save us any taxpayer dollars.
Thank god for that tax cut though, that $0 refund I got was worth it :) At least I don't have to worry about estate taxes on my great-grandfather's multi-million dollar estate. Oh wait, my great-grandfather(s) were subsistence farmers. </please_let_someone_who_can_beat_gwb-aka-clark-wi n_the_dem_primary_rant>
I still love jetBlue, if for nothing more than the scads of free headphones. Go ahead, give my social security number, etc. to the government, they're the one's who issued it to me in the first place. It's what the government allegedly did with my secret (btwn me and the script kiddies who've stolen it from other corps over the years) info that disturbs me.
Frankly, if I have to put up with a background check before I can buy a squirrel rifle, then you can deal with a credit check before you board your Weapon-of-Mass-Destruction...
...-.-
what permissible purpose, as defined by the FCRA (fair credit reporting act), have they used to buy the credit reports? IANAL, but I do know that credit reporting agencies are liable $2500 per credit report sold without a valid permissible purpose. 5million * $2500 it's a lot of money !!!
If I were one of the five million I would go to a lawyer, and get a class action suit going.
My $.02
Quoting:
JetBlue Airways confirmed on Thursday that in September 2002, it provided 5 million passenger itineraries to a defense contractor for proof-of-concept testing of a Pentagon project unrelated to airline security -- with help from the Transportation Security Administration.
The contractor, Torch Concepts, then augmented that data with Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information, including income level, to develop what looks to be a study of whether passenger-profiling systems such as CAPPS II are feasible.
Note that JetBlue has a privacy policy on their website that includes this statement:
The financial and personal information collected on this site is not shared with any third parties, and is protected by secure servers.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
through Security wearing Metal Collar Stays, or at least remember to take them off before walking through the detector, but as they are Kinda pointy youll probably lose them anyway
Also If you are a female passenger Never wear an underwire bra, My wife and several female co-workers were pulled aside on several occasions for a firm patting down by a female security worker for setting off the detectors and wands.
Although I have to say it is somewhat amusing to watch a germ-o-phobic person trying to keep there bare/sock feet off the floor when their shoes are being checked, and I can laugh as I seem to get flagged for Super Secret Squirrel Security Every almost every Business trip...I've just taken to traveling in sandels and light loose fitting Jogging-wear...
--Im an oven mitt, not an engineer! (SLArbys Radio Commercial)
Ahh yes, all hijackers are muslim extremists, ahh okay, let's turn to our old friend google and take the first 3 links:
In Russia, we have this story
And did you forget about CUBAN hijackers?
And if you look at this article, oh wow, look, peruvians, algerians, columbians, brazilians
In the future please make sure your rantings are equal opportunity , thanks.
Maybe, it's time for an alternative?
= 9J =
Here's my novel suggestion.
Security through obscurity.
Give every person plane controls but only one pair is live. That way when the terrorists attack, they won't know who the real pilots are!
Also you have to dress the pilots like regular travellers
Seuss - I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
And in return JetBlue get to choose their own colour for their passengers: BLUE.
So from now on, when you travel with JetBlue, you will have to stick your head in a bucket with blue paint so that the automated face recognition systems can identify your risk factor.
I think Northwest was originally opting for RED. However, when they realised that this would mean that their passengers would all be escorted from the airport in armoured vehicles. As this would be bad for bussines, they are now opting for black.
There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. (Francis Bacon)
MEDICAL HISTORY this limited 5 million record jetblue database is nothing but the tip of the iceberg.
So Democrats are terrorists, too, now. That's just great (think mandatory national universal health care).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Gareth Edmundson-Jones, a spokesman for JetBlue, would neither confirm nor deny the company's involvement, saying only, "That's not public information."
Does anyone else see the irony in this? Their corporate policy information is private, but they had no problem making our private information public. What damn EULA did I fail to read this time?
I've already read plenty of horror stories about people that couldn't fly and who spent months fighting the national insecurity apparatus trying to understand why they were considered risks and getting it changed.
Yes, but destroying these people's--citizen's-- livelihoods is completely justified by the completely unknowable number of lives saved by the war on terrorism. Yippie!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I hope people read my comment above as sarcastic... these things are too opaque to some Slashdot readers, it seems.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
The advantage of those lists is you can know now who the bad guys are. But that doesn't mean you knew then... So perhaps they let the "known airline terrorists" fly because at that time they were not known. Between the time that they flew and now they became known.
I also find your last paragraph hilarious. You have created your own reality. In that I say that you created a set of rules for profiling people, assigned it to someone else, then condemened them for using those rules.
Perhaps those aren't they rules they are going to use?
Pity the people who see the healthcare industry for the huge racket that it is, and only use it as an absolute last resort.
I'm working on a plan right now aimed at purposely getting falsely arrested as a terrorist. That way I can constitutionally challenge the patriot act and put an end to this maddeness once and for all. Call it a private citizen's sting operation. I've changed my name to sound more arab like and I tan everyday. I've also died my hair darker. I've started to learn farsi and practice speaking farsi to my teacher on a cell phone. We talk about events in Iraq and how the US is going to pay etc. I'm starting flight training next week. I figure it's really only a matter of time before they arrest me. Wish me luck!
Since no JetBlue flights have been hijacked, the TSA search should turn up no terrorists
They attempted to mislead in their denials of participating in the CAPS II program. Period.
I'd encourage folks to express their opinions to customer service, reservaction agents, speak up cards on jetblue planes etc.
Remind folks that we are people, and when we lie to each other we undermine our communities.
Why not have 2 seats per flight reserved for members of the Armed Forces who, after passing a competency and skill evaluation process (ie mastery of the Vulcan death pinch), can fly for free if they agree to "work" that flight.
The Fed, when they put their minds to it, can come up with some really stupid things. A result, primarily, of scores of clueless gov't employees/officials that must justify their positions by contributing something. This can be anything, effective or counter-effective, logical or just plan cockamamie, it's all the same.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
There have been on the order of a few hundred hijackers worldwide. The number of passenger-flights is on the order of billions, with probably on the order of 100 million unique passengers.
If we use Bayes's rule, the prior probability of NotTerrorist is essentially 1. Even if we use a more advanced technique, how can that little data be mined effectively?
I don't think JetBlue has ever been hijacked, so what can be concluded from their data? Regardless of passenger profile, none were terrorists. Which leads us to a convenient one-color scheme.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Check out the wired article here
Because the FBI systems were so discombobulated & archaic that they had to have someone hand enter the information into an Excel spreadsheet & then distribute that spreadsheet. What a joke!
Of course the layout of those tables was what you would expect of a computer neophyte & it was a terrible job to 'normalize' that spreadsheet data to something halfway usable in a real system (aliases would be in different columns from person to person, first & last names would be in different columns from person to person, spelling & punctuation would be different, no standardization of Jr, SR, 2nd, II, etc etc). Have been away from that job for awhile, so I hope they've come up with something better in the meantime.
This is the quote i liked the most:
.US study Abroad students i can understand more off the hate against USa.
TSA spokesman Brian Turnmail should stop treating the American people as if they were less intelligent than the seasonal fruits and vegetables he used to peddle.
In my experience US PPL are less intelligent than fruit. After spending 3 years with
OK, I wrote a letter to David Neeleman and recieved this in response. I thought it was a nice gesture, and personally I like JetBlue. Every airline has its weakness' - most don't make a big fuck up like this though.
CUT CUT CUT
Thank you for writing to me so that I have an opportunity to apologize
to you personally and set the record straight.
Most importantly, JetBlue has never supplied, nor will supply, customer
information to the Transportation Security Administration, or any
government agency, unless we are required to do so by law -- not for
CAPPS II or for any other purposes, whatsoever.
However, I regret that, more than a year ago, we responded to an
exceptional request from the Department of Defense to assist their
contractor, Torch Concepts, with a project regarding military base
security. This project had no connection with aviation security or the
CAPPS II program and no data files were ever shared with the Department
of Defense or any other government agency or contractor.
We provided limited historical customer data including names, addresses
and phone numbers. It DID NOT include personal financial information,
credit card information, or social security numbers.
Torch further developed this information into a presentation, without
JetBlue's knowledge, for a Department of Homeland Security symposium.
We regret that this presentation included the personal information of
one customer -- although the customer's name was not used. Again, we
had no knowledge of this presentation until two days ago and we were
deeply dismayed to learn of it.
The sole set of data in Torch's possession has been destroyed; no
government agency ever had access to it. With Torch's help, we are
continuing to make every effort to have the Torch presentation with the
one customer's information removed from the internet.
This was a mistake on our part and I know you and many of our customers
feel betrayed by it. We deeply regret that this happened and have taken
steps to fix the situation and make sure that it never happens again.
I am saddened that we have shaken your faith in JetBlue but I assure you
personally that we are committed to making this right.
Sincerely,
David Neeleman
Chief Executive Officer
How on Earth is analyzing two years of JetBlue data going to do any good given that JetBlue has never been involved in any incidences of airplane terrorism?!??????!?!????
My favorite:
I flew out of Oakland, California in 2002. I had a one-way ticket. I told the folks behind me in line at the X-ray machines "you might wanna get in another line". They watched me pull out laptop after laptop out of my carry-on bag, and they got in another line.
No need. I grabbed a whole bunch of trays and ran *FIVE* laptops through the x-ray machine, picked them up on the other side, and waltzed onto the plane (Jet Blue, by the way).
Nobody asked me why a guy with a one-way ticket needed to carry five laptop-shaped objects in a carry-on bag. I was all set for the big anal probe, but nothing.
Now I know that if I were flying San Jose to Austin on the Nerd Bird, this would be normal, but one-way from Oakland to NYC?
The alternative is to restore our fundamental freedom to travel, which came down as part of our heritage. Ashcroft and Bush have no authority to prevent people from flying for not showing an ID, for not having a credit record, etc. They have no authority to search people because they wouldn't show an ID. They have claimed an authority that they don't have. Don't give in to it. Help to push them back into the hole they belong in.
They have no power to make people divulge their home address, phone number, date of birth, etc before traveling either -- but they've announced this as a plan (CAPPS-2).
When senior bureaucrats are power-grabbing for a police state, it helps to go back to the basics. You don't need to show an ID to live in this country, and you have every right to travel to any part of the country without interference from the government. See http://freetotravel.org
...it's all about fear and *control by fear*. They don't care if processes work well, or if they work at all. It's probably even better (from their perspective) to just let them not work well, to keep people uneasy and make them more afraid.
The solution? I don't know. At least make sure you vote, but finding out who to vote for in this travesty of democracy that is the US bipartisan system is a tough call. If you vote basically you have a 50/50 chance of voting for the less bad one, but if you don't vote you have a 100% chance of not voting for him.
I heard they got some flak when they started using purple to color code passengers. Fallwell insisted the system turned perfectly straight people into homosexuals and could result in dangerous cross dressing on airlines.