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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.
The solution to stopping terrorism on flights is two-fold. One, everyone travels naked, without carrying thing on the plane. Two, luggage goes on a second plane operated by robots.
Color Coded, eh? Now I can sleep easier at night, knowing I am protectected by a color coded system. I wonder if this will be about as useless as our fabled Homeland Security "Orange Alerts"?
Well they'll only get me for one flight...As i move to Canada...
"In wine there is wisdom. In beer there is strength. In water there is bacteria." --Old German Proverb
What good are civil liberties when you're dead?
Or as I prefer to see it, what good is life without civil liberties?
If you have a bad credit score, be prepared for a full body cavity search.
> 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
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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.)
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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?
If this system does not implement some method of appealing a classification expece to hear about a massive wave of lawsuits.
There is no appeal. Why should there be? The system is flawless, so anyone it flags must be a terrorist! Why let terrorists waste the time of honest, upstanding American citizens with an appeal that is certain to be denied? Are you suggesting the system might be flawed? That the Government might be wrong? Are you trying to undermine the all-important War on Terrorism? Is it possible that you are in league with the terrorists? Is it possible that you are a terrorist?
Fellow Americans, we must be endlessly vigilant! Terrorist could lurk anywhere! Your next-door neighbor might be one! How well do you really know them? Is it possible they might be hiding something? That they have some dark secret?
Don't hesitate! It is better to be safe than sorry! If you see someone acting suspicious, report them to the nearest federal agent as soon as possible!
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Seriously, I expect the lawyers at the ACLU are already preparing their case.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The more power you give to mindless morons the less is left for normal people
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I think "scaring the piss outta everyone" is a well used device that shakey governments employ to increase their chances of re-election. It's pretty clear that a determined terrorist can do what they want to do if they put their mind to it, even if everyone is asked if they packed their own bags. This is just FUD, and expensive & inconvinient FUD at that.
In other news, Al Queda agents and officials retired en masse today. Evidentally, the U.S. government is now doing a far better job of making Americans fearful and submissive than Al Queda could hope to do with the techniques they have. "We did a lot of damage and killed a lot of people," said one unnamed source. "But Americans responded only with defiance and belligerence. Within a couple of months, they'd gotten on with their lives. The DHS, on the other hand, can frighten the American people practically at will, just by announcing rumors or cancelling a plane flight. In this climate, we can't hope to compete."
Representatives of the Bush Administration called the mass retirement a possible ruse, and urged people to remember all the rumored attacks that might have been thwarted had Al Queda attempted any attack on U.S. soil since domestic security initiatives were put in place.
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.
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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.
I must have missed the bit where we started rounding up and executing all the Jews.
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So what if I'm accidentally tagged as red/orange? How impossible would it be for me to clear up the mistake? Or can I do 20 years of community service to have my color lowered to yellow.
Bad, bad, BAD idea.
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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...
I would say we are really a lot closer to Nazi Germany circa 1932-1937.
We need to fight with the next election. Get rid of the problems.
I'm willing to take the same terrorism risk on every plane flight that I took before 9/11. Let's roll back these draconian, orwellian, nazi-esque laws.
Write your senators, write your representatives, both federal and state! Let them know that we are not willing to "buy safety" at this price! It is not worth what we are giving up!
Jim
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."
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.
Firing a bullet from a handgun thru the side/window of an airplane at 25k-30k feet will not cause explosive decompression. You have to pretty much set off a bomb that will blow a sizeable hole in the plane. And even then, if you have your seatbelt fastened you aren't likely to be sucked out. A similar situation actually happened on a flight at that altitude, but it was due to metal-fatigue, not foul-play. The only death was a flight attendent standing in the section immediately under the roof when it came off.
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.
You cannot appeal it. It is only a gauge of how likely it is that you are a terrorist. You can't prove that you arn't one, and even if you arn't, the colour only represents the CHANCE that you are, not whether or not you ACTUALLY are. If you get a red, that just means you probably are according to their metrics. You can't prove that wrong.
My dad, a Canadian citizin, is a high risk flyer. Whenever he tries to come back from a conference in Portland, he has a HELL of a time getting on the plane. The reason he is on their list of terrorists? My mom's sister in Toronto is married to a guy from Lebanon. So you see, to be ranked a danger, you need only be related to somebody who is related to somebody who is related to an Arab. (And belive me, they know) To make matters worse, the LAST time he tried to get on, his luggage set off the bomb detector. Apparently, the chemical sniffer said his external CD-RW was some form of platic explosives. I knew they could be fooled by cologne, aftershave, mouthwash, deoderant, and shampoo, but apparently they can also be fooled by "new electronics smell."
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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
For instance, these guys (use pointless as the user name and password) could have been a problem:
"Investigators found nearly 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs and briefcases that could be detonated by remote control.
Most distressing, they said, was the discovery of 800 grams of almost pure sodium cyanide -- material that can only be acquired legally for specific agricultural or military projects.
The sodium cyanide was found inside an ammunition canister, next to hydrochloric, nitric and acetic acids and formulas for making bombs. If acid were mixed with the sodium cyanide, an analysis showed, it would create a bomb powerful enough to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot facility, investigators said."
And they were found almost entirely by accident.
Look, I'm not suggesting that Islamic terrorists aren't probably the biggest current threat. But don't be stupid.