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Congress to Test Air Screening Program
unassimilatible writes "The Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday it will order airlines to turn over passengers' personal records in the next couple of months to test a computerized passenger screening program that could keep dangerous people off airlines, reports Yahoo/AP. The Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS II, would rank all air passengers according to the likelihood of their being terrorists. Suspected terrorists and violent criminals would be designated as red and forbidden to fly. Passengers who raise questions would be classified as yellow and would receive extra security screening. The vast majority would be designated green and allowed through routine screening. But some say the project would violate privacy rights, while others are concerned it would cost the private sector too much money. The Air Transport Association, the trade group for major airlines, has come up with seven 'privacy principles' that it says the government should follow in implementing CAPPS II."
But some say the project would violate privacy rights, while others are concerned it would cost the private sector too much money.
Reasonable people could argue those points if the damn thing could work, but it can't. (For discussion see this interesting paper.) And since it cannot be effective, it is complete foolishness to even consider this massive invasion of citizen privacy, not to mention waste so much money!
I'm sure many many people are ready to start explaining why this is a terrible thing, but I (especially after reading the Myth/Fact list) have decided that, if they were to follow the procedures listed, this could be a very effective, and reasonably fair way of increasing air-travel safety. Plenty of issues may be raised about whether information privacy is threatened, or if certain people may become unfairly "flagged", but I believe that (aside from the perhaps unfair requirements placed on the airlines themselves), the ideas behind this program seem fairly valid. We'll have to just wait and see how it is carried out, I suppose.
Will they run the list through the program and see if it correctly picks out acts of terrorism ahead of time based on personal information fed in in a chronological sequence? I kind of doubt the program will be able to do it correctly. At first. But then they will tweak it to work, and they will claim success. But it will be biased at this point, they may tweak it not to spit out many false positives when run on the data given to them. If it does get put into practice, expect a lot of false positives. Expect civil liberties groups to be outraged. But there is currently a Federal do not fly list, and I don't think it is coordinated now any better than it was when it was first set up. People get put on the list, and no one can say why, or how to get taken off the list. At least if this list is centralized, there will hopefully be some way of clearing one's name if one does get on it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah right. "I call for a boycott on flying." It'll never happen, and you know it. Besides, it's Congress that's doing this, not the airlines.
I suspect that what will REALLY happen is that they'll screw up the implementation and some VIP will get red flagged. Poof! Project disappears.
The Founding Fathers surely recognized that there was no way they could spell out every single imaginable right, explicitly. Hence the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which has been widely ignored. But remember that any right not explicitly granted to the Federal government is reserved to the States and the People....
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Probably I look more like a potential terrorist (long hair, scraggly beard, army boots, disheveled clothing) than anybody here, but I've never been even searched since 9/11, whereas my 68-y.o. mother, grandmother of two, gets searched almost every time she flies.
What about all the tens of thousands of people who've been arrested on criminal charges for carrying a deadly weapon (3+" knife blade, unloaded gun, nunchucks.) I bet they're gonna be flagged "violent criminals" and be denied access to the country's jet transportation system.
Yeah, CAPPS is gonna be a real hit.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
At the time of the first Gulf War I was at University, and I took a summer job selling computer games (16 bit stuff). We had been told by the various credit card companies that if we saw certain cards we were to cut them up in front of the owner.
One such class of cards was 'anything ever issued in Kuwait'. And, amazingly, I actually served a customer who tried to pay using a Kuwaiti-issued credit card. You can imagine how delighted he was to see me retain the card and shred it into tiny pieces in front of him. Really happy, he was.
Now, the Kuwaitis were the people we were supposed to be on the side of, right? Yet we refused any Kuwaiti currency. Similarly, I would have thought that trying to launder ill-gotten gains by buying copies of Turikan for the Amiga might have taken quite some time. Despite that, into the shredder the card remnants went.
Talk about using a blunderbuss approach...
Cheers,
Ian
"The Political Safety Administration said Wednesday it will order parties to turn over politicians' personal records in the next couple of months to test a computerized political screening program that could keep dangerous people out of the government, reports Yahoo/AP. The Computer-Assisted Politician Prescreening System, or CAPPS II, would rank all candidates according to the likelihood of their being corrupt. Suspected corporate cheats and self-centered assholes would be designated as pig-fuckers and forbidden to vote or run for election. Candidates who have questionable stock or campaign contributions would be classified as yellow and would receive extra security screening. The vast majority would be designated 'friends of Diebold' and allowed through routine screening. But some say the project would violate the corrupt and idiotic way of politics, while others are concerned it would just be another corrupt entity. The Supreme Court, has come up with seven billion dollars that it says will go to the best bid, and as always, companies who would like to bid to build and run the system may have any political or corporate affiliations they want.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I don't think he's talking about people with warrants out on them. Obviosly they need to be arrested. I think he's talking about what if a criminal served his time and was released legally.
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
The Constitution guarantees all persons born or naturalized in the US all the "privileges and immunities" thereof. Way back in the 1800's there was a case in which the Supreme Court tried to almost write this out of the Constitution. They said that "privileges and immunities" didn't include anything like voting or having a fair shot at government jobs or contracts, or getting to go to the same schools or bathrooms as other people, it meant only a few simple rights like the right to sail the navigable waters of the US and the right to travel from place to place. Seems like that ought to include the right to ride on an airliner, and they shouldn't be able to take that away from someone now without a trial.
Timothy McVeigh?
Ted Kaczynski?
Charles A. McCoy Jr (soon to see I guess)?
John Malmo?
While I don't think you are a troll, and I understand the point you are trying to make, this situation is an extremely complex problem. Pointing the finger at a specific nationality, age group, gender or religion can focus the search too narrowly and miss the exceptional cases.
If it weren't for the United States' unilateral support of Israel, the Muslims wouldn't hate us. Do we deserve to be attacked for it? No. I'm just saying the obvious.
You lost the freedom for which you stand....
Not true.
You can vote.
Right here on this Diebold machine connected directly to the Republican National Committee!
(Small print: Please note that we consider voting Democrat to be an indication of possible connections to terrorism, under the CAPPS II protocol! In the interest of Halliburton, we mean, National Security, we will filter out 10% of Democrat votes! Please enjoy your Faux Democracy!)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
This issue is not simply a matter of invasion of privacy. The screening will of course be automated. This means computers. The task of working out who is a possible communist, sorry, I mean 'terrorist', is uncomputable and therefore yet another totally idiotic use to try to put them to. Practical example for no reason: Consider credit card fraud. The heuristics run on my bank's computer have many times stopped me from making legitimate purchases but have twice failed to stop actual fraud. I have learned that I simply cannot rely on any of my credit cards functioning at any given time. Do I now have to get used to the idea that I might at any time be prevented from flying or be held without trial for being a 'terrorist'? Just because of an illconceived computer program? While I might consider giving up some of my individual rights to privacy for the general good, giving them up to governments who think that computers are up to the job of monitoring would... Aw, discussing it won't stop it happening. We're boned.
And just where is the office that those who are wrongly accused by this system go to in order to get their good names back?
Even if there was one, it won't help much unless you have lots of money & time.
I suffered identity theft quite a while back. Someone got my SS#, a copy of my birth certificate, and then a driver's license. He went on to rack up a quite a number of charges in another State including Spousal Abuse, Grand Theft Auto, Resisting Arrest.
On top of that, he then stopped using my identification which created a 'Flight To Avoid Prosecution' when it was noticed I had a drivers license in another state. Over the years, I've been trying to clear this all up and it's cost quite a bit of money and time. I've barely put a dent in the problem because of how the system is set up.
Now, here's the not-so-amusing part. The man who used my identity is obviously of a very different racial heritage than I am and cannot possibly be mistaken as me!
CAPSII will flag me RED every time I fly. After all, if our national database software STILL isn't up to the job of filtering out obvious problems in it's records (such as mine), how well will software that depends on those same databases fare?
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
As opposed to spending countless millions (billions?) on different systems to screen people every time they fly why not just require everyone flying in the U.S. to have a valid passenger's liscence. I don't like the idea, but i think this is a much cheaper method and I also believe there are much better things that the money spent on these new systems could be doing. IF you liscense everyone then you only have to screen them each time they renew as opposed to scanning through thousands of people every minute
Of course, it could just be random screening, but I that seems unlikely to me. I got selected the last few times I flew from Detroit.
Frankly, I still find the procedure somewhat humiliating. It's incredible how inefficient they are. There are always 6-8 TSA guards standing around waiting until the next guard can take over their passenger for the next step. Apparently collecting the documents from the passengers, waiving the next person through the metal detector, staring at the xray monitors, handing over the documents to the person doing the baggage searching, and doing the metal detector screening are all highly specialized tasks that require special skills so that it is strictly impossible for one guard to take over the responsibility of the next one.
Their metal detectors are so sensitive that they regularly "detect" the trouser buttons. Then you have to roll over over the trousers a bit, so that they can check more closely. Their baggage searching doesn't exactly make the impression of being undefeatable, to say the least, but at least that means that it doesn't take ages and they put everything back together as well.
Now imagine you started queueing 30 mins before your boarding deadline, and all this goes on and on, inefficiently etc. First some 15 mins in the queue, then you have to wait again until your baggage got x-rayed, then again for the metal detector checking. I think the worst thing is -- even if they seem nice, maybe I actually feel like chatting with them, then I start think, "Oh better don't, might get misunderstood", "Oh come on, they are humans, too, after all", "Better not, even if it just causes a delay, remember your flight is going in 15 mins". It's like being in an exam without knowing what you are being tested in.
Well sorry about my ramblings, many of you probably know the procedure yourself, but had to get this off my chest. But I would be curious if there is reliable information on whether this "selected security screening" is purely random based, or based on some sort of profiling.
You don't need to keep the "dangerous people" off passenger planes any more. When someone stands up and rushes the cockpit and starts banging on the door, they get jumped by dozens of other passengers. 9/11 changed the whole hijacker/hijackee contract. Before that, it was understood that your best chance of survival as a passenger or crewmember was to cooperate. Not any more. The "trust" is gone.
The only way that the hijackers could hope to get control would be if they had a ratio of hijackers to passengers of something approaching 1:1, or if they had smuggled weapons on board that allowed them to incapacitate the passengers and crew. Security screening can stop the weapons, hopefully. I don't know how to stop a sleeper cell of 50-100 terrorists from all boarding the same flight, but I consider that to be a fairly improbable scenario.
If the terrorists just want to blow a planeload of people up, and not hijack it into a building, then there are much softer targets out there than an airplane. Trains would be the recent, obvious example. If they want to drive a plane into a building then a cargo plane with a crew of 2 or 3 would be an easier target, I would think. A year ago some guy smuggled himself onto a cargo plane by FedExing himself from New York to Texas!
Generals always seem to be planning today to win the last war. These $$$ spent on passenger screening systems may be helpful for that, I suppose. But perhaps the money would be better spent hardening some of the softer targets that are more likely candidates for the next battle...
Whether you agree or disagree with the program, you can thank Gen. Wesley Clark for selling it to the government. He was the salesperson for the company that developed the program (I forget the name right now) last year.
When asked during the debates about CAPPS II, Gen. Clark said he'd never heard of it, even after the moderator reminded him of his role in implementing it.
Seems a little strange.
why has the tsa developped such a tool ?
1. the best solution is to scan everyone. every bag, every person and no exceptions. no one.
2. use a tool to "tag" some people and scan them.
solution 2 is what tsa would prefer because solution 1, which is the only valuable one regarding security, requires TIME and thus MONEY.
i would suggest to use solution 1. it will pay in the long term and save lives. and because everyone has to be searched, it will not raise as much problems as flagging a few.
this stupid program is just a try to avoid solution 1 to spend less cash and putting more risk on people that will die if something wrong happens.
and solution 2 will allow terrorists to do "dull runs" for years and once they're always taggued green and have a clean aspect like a family life, good job and education, they will be able to attack again.
most 9/11 terrorists were pretty clean. some had families, been living in the US for years, reconnaisance around the twin towers started four years before attack (as video founds show) and they had real papers under false names, issued by someone from the administration in Virginia that issued true driver licenses but under false names.
jump on solution 1. scan everyone, everything. solution 2 is just keeping the risk over people's life and they are priceless.
Right - Al Qaeda had no history of simultaneously bombing trains, so they must not have bombed Spain this week. We should be going after the ETA, just like the defeated Spanish lackey^WPresident wanted, Iraq style. What makes you think you can reduce to a /. paragraph a deterministic filter that antiterrorist organizations haven't been able to articulate, given years and $billions? Airline sabotage security screening is an intractable problem, because the players are dynamic. Take a young European convert to Islam, brainwash them in Wahabism, run them through the US security gates for a year on travel pretexts, then train them for the suicide mission using poison bamboo darts/blowgun fashioned into a musical instrument. Next, run a bereaved widow. Or control a grandpa through hostage grandkids.
--
make install -not war
Actually, there will be an appeals process.
o rial_1202.xml
From: http://www.tsa.gov/public/interapp/editorial/edit
With CAPPS II, there will be a redress process established, to include a Passenger Advocate. The Passenger Advocate will focus on assisting passengers who feel that they have been incorrectly or consistently prescreened. Since CAPPS II will be a centralized government-run system, rather than a decentralized system implemented by over 70 airlines, CAPPS II will provide the opportunity for a more efficient and effective disposition of passenger complaints. The passenger authentication process that CAPPS II will provide will eliminate many of the mistaken identity situations that airline travelers currently face under the pre-screening system that the airlines now operate.
Airport Security Agent: "Sir, did anyone give you anything to carry?"
Terrorist: "No."
Agent: "Have you had your bags with you at all times?"
Terrorist: "Yes."
Agent: "Are you a radical Islamist planning to hijack the airplane?"
Terrorist: "Yes -- I mean no!"
I think the events in New York and Madrid and many cities before them have shown that there is no "stopping terrorism" through screening and extra security. When people are desperate enough, they can do some amazing and horrendous things.
I believe air marshals combined with giving the cockpit crew the means to defend themselves would be the more effective than screening, if people insist on doing something to feel safer. The men from 9-11 had valid IDs and appeared normal. Or now that we have made air travel troublesome, they'll hit our trains or roads or something else.
Let's address the reasons why terrorists are gunning for the U.S. and other states in the first place. Do you accept the line that they "hate our freedoms"? If so, then we're helping them by curtailing our liberty in order to feel more secure.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
You seem to have perfectly summed up everything that's wrong with current US policy.
If there's something you are doing somewhere that is causing terrorists to come and attack you, then not changing what you are doing is not only childish and stubborn, but plain stupid.
Unfortunately you have forgotten that with this attitude, policies will have to change, but not the ones that were wrong in the first place. Instead you put in place new policies to 'defend' yourself against the terrorists, which usually ends up trampling on the rights of a large number of innocent people. This just creates more terrorists from those people. You now have a vivious circle, where it will now look even worse for you to change your original policies, and you start having to do even more Draconian measures because there are now even more terrorists etc. etc. For a good example of this, check out Iraq, which has once again become the land of midnight raids where people get 'disappeared', but it's all in the name of freedom and democracy this time. When the Russians used to do this in Afghanistan, they estimated they created 6 new terrorists from the family of every guy they took away. I don't suppose it's much different here.
Of course nobody wants it to look like the terrorists won, but on the other hand, what do you do if their grievances are right? Of course I absolutely decry their methods, but you *have* to look at what they actually want to achieve. They're not all just evil guys who woke up one morning and said "Hey let's take on the USA this year"! Sure there are a few extreme radical nuts who you won't be able to stop at all, but they have a lot of manpower because other people agree with them. If you try to work out what the initial grievances of that large number of people actually are, and do something to sort them out, then the nuts have no recruits and the whole thing goes away.
Maybe this sounds like a naive sort of dreamland to you, but your way sure as hell doesn't seem to be working. Do you really feel safer now than you were 2 years ago? Why don't you ask the people in Madrid how they feel?
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