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Passenger Risk Database to be Implemented in U.S.
bluephile writes "CNN is running an article on the The Transport Security Administration's (TSA) renewed efforts to implement the CAPPS II color-coded passenger risk-assessment program, despite outcries by numerous privacy activism groups at the program's collection and redistribution of personal information. The TSA has made several claims that the system respects passengers' privacy, but their track record isn't impressive. Congress suspended the program last year in order to investigate its privacy implications. One MIT paper suggests that CAPPS II could make flying MORE dangerous, rather than less."
Airplanes can't be hijacked anymore after 9/11. People now realize that it's not a matter of demanding your comrade be released from prison, but instead a matter of taking control of the world's biggest bomb. Nobody is going to yield to a terrorist carrying anything short of an automatic firearm.
be put on the list.
;)
If they didn't hate America they wouldn't be on the list.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
What good are civil liberties when you're dead?
Or as I prefer to see it, what good is life without civil liberties?
> This is not an invasion of privacy
Yeah, right.
First They Came for the Jews
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemoller
- no sig.
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.)
Credit reports? Yes, I'll admit it, I got my car payment in the mail late last February. Is that really a sign that I'm part of an Al-Qaeda hijacking conspiracy?
welcome to nazi germany 1945..
..
there goes the remainder of our freedoms..
next is the DNA sampling
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
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I have no credit history because I have little income and can't get a credit card.
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I pay cash because I can get a discount
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I buy a one way ticket because I wont be returning until I have earned enough money to afford a return journey
Will I be barred from travel? I think I might. At the very least I'm likely to be detained for further questioning.Why not get the real ultimate power?
Hurray! Once again, let's make this country safer by scaring the piss outta everyone in it! First they brought us convenient color codes to tell us just how much we should be crapping in our pants on any given day but now we can even pick our friends based on their red orange or blue status! Don't worry, the government treats everyone equally.
And what will the mantra be this time? "Be suspicious of the red-banded cohorts... but don't change your plans." Just like the "Terrorism Alert Level"; be nice and scared enough to fall into line but please, not so much that you question the ability, necessity, or morality of "the man." After all, questioning the government is unpatriotic.
Oh crap... with that diatribe I just 'elevated' my status to orange. Mod me down damnit.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Why? Because the rules have changed. Prior to 9/11, the thought was that if you cooperated with the hijackers and take them where they wanted to go, most people would be released safely. Now we know they have no intention of releasing passengers safely, so you will die if you let them do what they want. Passengers will fight back, because if they fight back, the odds are still better that they'll survive.
That's not to say pilots, locked in the cabin, trained for missions years in advance couldn't do things with the planes. Background checks should be performed on all pilots regularly.
What?! You said NO??
Well, give me liberty or give me death then!
This would not have stopped 9-11. Making me wait in security lines an extra hour at the airport would not have stopped 9-11. Making old ladies take their shoes off before boarding planes would not have stopped 9-11.
I know that my personal files are interesting, but I'd rather keep them private, thankyouverymuch.
The more power you give to mindless morons the less is left for normal people
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
People will not be protected under this rediculous plan as it would appear this is nothing more than big brother being allowed to aggregate data on U.S. citizens and profile us.
Nowhere is it mentioned and nor is it possible that the 55 Million foreign visitors that enter the U.S. every year will be able to have a similar amount of data regarding their potential threat assesment be calculated as the U.S. Government doesn't have access to credit and criminal data about any of the 310 Million Europeans or the 1.2 Billion Chinese or any other nation.
So it would appear this measure is only intended to know who is traveling within the U.S. and how to make it more difficult for deadwood Americans to be pestered away from using valuable resources better used by others.
>and I did not speak out
>because I was not a Jew.
>
> Then they came for the Communists
>and I did not speak out
> because I was not a Communist.
>
> Then they came for the trade unionists
> and I did not speak out
> because I was not a trade unionist.
Funny answer:
Serious answer:
The color coding system is here so that Bush can CYA in front of the media when the next terrorist attack hits: "see, we told you it wasn't green".
It also allows Bush and Fox News to label anyone criticizing the system "weak on national security issues" and therefore "not presidential" for the next election.
Thanks Mr Ridge, may I have another?
there's no place like ~
So what will you when every toll road you travel on by car passes your travel details automatically to law enforcement based on your license plate? Or when one day every intersection has a camera collecting this kind of information? Or when there's a camera doing face recognition on every street corner, evaluating whether you are a terrorist or not? Will you just stay at home all day? I think a more proactive stance is needed here. Just boycotting the airline industry is not going to do much at all.
Getting the general public to understand the privacy implications of these systems so they stop voting for people that put them in place is probably a lot more effective.
Pretent that you are tasked with protecting American lives from Islamic terrorists on your own soil. How would YOU do it?
I'd start by not making the assumption that the terrorists would be Islamic.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The parent is modded as funny, but replace "terrorist" with "communist" in the above quotes and realize that ordinary, reasonably intelligent people really said and believed such things only 50 years ago.
It's not far-fetched at all.
DNA just wants to be free...
To protect Americans from ANY terrorists on airplanes, the first thing I'd do would be stop disarming Americans on airplanes.
While it might not be a good idea to let everyone on a plane have a gun, I think issuing a nice large knife to every adult passenger upon boarding would do wonders as a terrorist deterrent. Combine that with a requirement that the cockpit door stays locked no matter what happens, and you've solved the problem.
The 9/11 attacks happened because airline policy was to give the terrorists what they wanted, in the assumption that they were interested in their own safety, and would land the plane.
That assumption is clearly no longer valid, and passengers have already proven that terrorists will not be tolerated (try to light your shoe on a plane these days - somebody will stop you.)
In short, I'd stop treating passengers as terrorists, and start treating them like intelligent individuals responsible for their own safety.
What a great idea. Let's see if we miss anyone by going with your new security system, shall we?
Timothy McVeigh
Ted Kaczynski
Eric Harris
Dylan Klebold
George Metesky
David Berkowitz
Jeffrey Dahmer
Perhaps a planeload of these fine, upstanding citizens is your cup of tea. Personally, I'd rather have better detection systems and better trained airport security personnel.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
>>Per CNN: Under CAPPS II, TSA will obtain the passenger's full name, home address, home telephone number, birth date and some information about that passenger's itinerary.
Except for the flight itinerary, this kind of information isn't really private. Everything is already a matter of public record. Once something is public, why worry about privacy?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Did you read the MIT paper? It is very clear that CAPPs is or will be less secure than the same resource put into random searches. The problem is that terrorists can test their CAPPs profile by simply going on a flight. If they are not searched on a limited number of test flights then they have a lower change of being searched in the future than if purely random, non CAPPs "assisted", searches are done.
Government inspected you...
and determined whether you were able to travel freely within your own country.
Not funny? No, it isn't.
Did you read the MIT paper? It was very simple, and required no mathematical background at all.
It had nothing to do with privacy. It merely argued that CAPS makes hijacking much safer (for terrorists) and easier, and that CAPS-II will be even better for hijackers. The crux of the argument is that CAPS gives out trust to passengers, and does so publically, so it is a great boon to terrorists who wish to determine which of their potential hijackers are trusted.
The MIT student paper claiming CAPPS will reduce security assumes that random security checks will decrease. This is a major assumption, and I personally doubt whether this assumption is valid. Further, I believe that this program is a good idea.
So the KKK'esk guy arrested who was packing a biological weapon capable of making 9/11 look like a scratched knee, with apparent plans to use it near or in a Federal building (ala McVeigh) was not a terrorist? What about the anthrax mailings that disappeared off the news as soon as it became apparent that it was not the work of evil guys in turbans, but more likely white supremacists who "borrowed" the samples from the US government lab they where traced back to. Domestic terrorism is alive and well, but people are ignoring it because its more convient to have a single enemy, whose skin color, religion and society is different. On topic this won't do any good, in most ways it just helps Bin Ladin. As we saw in the first 9/11 commisions results, one intercepted transmission showed that they actually did a complete dry run to determine if they could sneak weapons through security and onto a plane. With this kind of permanent security designation, its just a matter of sending agents on normal flights and seeing which ones get stopped for searchs and which ones go on the plane. Then you send the green ones on your suicide mission.
Are we going to start packing passengers into the cargo hold now? And where are these extra passengers going to come from, now that your plan has made flying even more of a hassle?
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
As an American I can safely say that is fine with me. There are plenty of people here already so you can consider your position accepted and reciprocated in full. Have a nice day!
Other than McVeigh, how many terrorists who've given us trouble lately have not been Islamist headcases? Does it not make more sense for airport-security types, etc. to pay a bit more attention to Mohammed al-Bumfsckistan than to some random grandma from Des Moines?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I think you're rather missing the point.
In the 1950s, many people (non-communists) lived in fear of being "fingered" as communists or communist sympathizers and having their lives utterly destroyed as a result. Sometimes those fears were quite justified.
We're very fortunate that things never progressed as far as actually killing them preemptively.
I'm also not sure I understand how preemptively killing communists would constitute anything but murder and suffering.
Even if it could be justified, what about the (not inconsiderable) number of people erroneously identified as such?
Also, what about the risk of arousing pro-communist sympathies? Martyrdom always plays well for ideologues.
DNA just wants to be free...
I think we might share a different definition of "reasonably intelligent." Reasonably intelligent people don't go about participating in witch hunts. Idiots do, however. And from the looks of it, the United States won't be suffering a shortage of those anytime soon.
> Why? Most Muslims are not terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims. Hmmmm....
All recent American presidents have been terrorists, using the American Governments own definition.
During 'code orange', the center I worked out stopped me _every time_ I entered, because I had a non-picture ("temporary") badge. Despite that said badge requires an accompanying photo id and just getting the 'temp' badge took all the paperwork and processing that goes into the photo ones, and is valid for 3 months at a time.
I became very familiar with the search procedure. I knew exactly when and how the search went. Being searched twice a day for 2 weeks will do that for you.
An _effective_ search strategy would have been, oh, give the guards new instructions daily like 'today, search all green cars' or 'today, check all plates beginning with '1'".
Those ('true randoms', i.e. avoiding selection bias by guards and avoiding profiling holes), a no-goodnik wouldn't be able to predict, and yet it also wouldn't hit any one person frequently that they'd be intimately familiar with (and thus able to easily circumvent) the security protocols.
So yeah, CAPS II is worse than being 'a hassle', it's a hassle that provides _worse_ security than you get without it.
A.
Why in the world would a terrorist attempt to get through security that was tight before 9/11 just to blow up an airplane? It would be much easier to get on a bus and do the same thing!
Reinforce the cockpit doors and move on. This discussion is ridiculous. The only reason "terrorists" would even attempt the Herculean feat of getting weapons on an airliner would be to hijack it. Take that ability away by not letting them through the cockpit door. End of fucking story.
This TSA tactic is not to provide safety, but rather a new avenue for gaining information on people, because it can. "You must fear them, we will protect you." Fear breeds consent. The power gained with a fear wracked populace is enormous, and many in power realize this, or are learning. This is just the latest "avenue" for gaining information on more people, nothing more.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
We haven't established any evidence that purchasing an airline ticket makes you more likely to be a terrorist. Certainly the correlation is lower; I'd wager that at out of every bar visitor and liquor store customer, at least 2% (and probably more like 5%) end up being a legally drunk driver. How many airline passengers are planning to hijack the plane? Certainly less than 1 in 10,000,000.
Somehow I'm not surprised that you don't outright reject my patently absurd suggestion, and indeed propose even more ridiculous suggestions.
Your problem is that you're too trusting of authority figures. You should try to get some historical perspective: for every person killed by terrorists in the past century, at least 100 have been killed by their own governments.
I certainly wouldn't launch into an entire program of ridiculous new inspections and intrusive measures. The people that came up with this bunch of rules had something in mind far beyond protecting airline passengers and restoring confidence in the air transport system.
On September 11th, a group of determined men gained control of several American airliners and launched an unprecidented but predictable attack on a New York landmark thereby murdering thousands. What were the mistakes in the rules that allowed such a tragedy to occur?
I posit the following:
1. while guns, baseball bats, swords, and other obvious weapons were easily and efficiently prohibited from the airline passenger area; other less threatening objects such as swiss army knives or box cutters were not2. ever since the first aircraft was highjacked to Cuba in the early 1960s, it was the established policy of airline crews to fully cooperate of those that would attempt to take control of an airliner.
Now, as far as number one goes, this was not universally true. Back in 1995 when I was flying in and out of Brazil on American Airlines, there was an airline attendent stationed at the rope barrier in from of the check-in desk. Her job was to ask if you had anything like a pen knife or swiss army knife in your carry-on luggage.
If so, she would request that you transfer it to your check-in bag, otherwise they would later detect it and you would be detained. As a matter of fact I used to carry my swiss army knife in my carry-on bag at this time and on subsequent trips made sure that it was packed in my check-in luggage.
So, the technology and the knowledge of one of the rules necessary to prevent the 9/11 tragedy was not only in place but operative in a country served by an American carrier. I don't know for a fact, but I suspect, that that was an addendum to transport law added by the Brazilian government since I was never asked a similar question in any other country in South America nor Europe.
Another interesting anecdote; at Heathrow in London, the police would randomly ask the question about whether someone had given you something to take take on-board. This was years before it was the norm on domestic US trasport.
In any case, IMHO after 9/11 all that was required to protect the safety of airline passengers was to change rule number 2 as well! Job done.
No idiotic, million-dollar xray machines that misidentify fruit cakes as explosives. No draconian and intrusive background checks -- nada.
We would still be just as safe flying as we are today and it would be less of an annoying procedure.
That's just my opinion -- I may be wrong.
CAPPS II is unnecessary imho. However I don't think you can honestly say that the old system was working.
I do feel safer knowing that the TSA is responsible for airport security then say a private company hiring ex-cons and paying them $5.15 an hour. I have a friend who is an airport operations manager at a regional airport -- he can tell horror stories about the private companies they used in the pre-9/11 days. One time he claims he put a loaded gun into a shoebox with nothing else in it and it was missed by the 85 year old part-time lady hired by the private security company who was manning the x-ray machine. I've flown more then a dozen times since 9/11 and I've never had a problem with TSA. They have opened some of my bags on occasion (apparently the batteries in my digicam look like bullets ;) but they were always courteous and professional about it. I wouldn't expect the same from some Wal-Mart type employee making $6/hr. We don't need people with a "Sir, I only work here" mentality protecting our airlines.
I also think air-marshals are a good idea. One air-marshal on each flight with a lousy stinking pistol would have stopped 9/11 in it's tracks.
Secure cockpit doors are also a must. No matter what happens the pilots do not open that door -- they get the plane on the ground at all costs. With that in mind I am opposed to arming the pilots. They need to focus on one thing -- getting the plane on the ground -- nothing else matters. Once the plane is on the ground the terrorists are done.
I don't think we need intrusive background checks on everybody boarding a plane. What are the odds of another 9/11 type scenario? Are the passengers (not to mention the pilots and the air marshals) really going to submit now? Would you submit to one or two guys armed with Swiss army knifes or box cutters? I don't think it's happening in the post 9/11 world.
Just my two cents.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
99.999%? So, if Tim McVeigh is the 0.001%, that means there are 99,999 "foreign born" terrorists in the US. Oh, wait. Tim had a partner. And the KKK are a terrorist organisation. That makes it over twenty million terrorists in the US.
According to your crazy/racist logic, the US is already crawling with terrorists, so it's too late.
As for your "do not have the same rights" nonsense, they DO have the same rights. The constitution is extended to all people on US territory. Otherwise, how can the US be the "champion of human rights and freedom" and recognises that "all men are created equal" if it discriminates against people, purely on where they came from?? To me it smacks a bit hypocritical. Does that not ring any alarm bells in your head?
Narrowing down criminal activity to ethnic groups thought to contain higher threats is racist, pure and simple. It's degrading to those form the minority/group who aren't doing anything wrong.
"You have to accept false positives" - bullshit. You want to sacrifice liberty and freedom for that?? I'd rather die free from terrorism than live under the thumb. Otherwise, the terrorists have already won. What exactly are you defending?