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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."
GO!
Does this not open the door for racial discrimination? I would suppose that one wouldn't NEED documents to do this, but with a colour rating being put in place, it would be rather easy to put anyone with, say, iranian parents on a code orange warning.
Is this going to be similar to the screening policies that have old grannies being detained for possible terror threats? What gets me is what's going to happen when someone innocent is labeled as the uber-terrorist by this new system...there better be a nice little compensation package for those folks. Oh wait, we as the rest of the consumers will have to pay for both the system AND the compensation. Well, fancy that.
The dontspyon.us site is chock full of info about CAPPS II, TIA, etc.
No problems for me or my brown-skinned and turbanned brothers then?
Abdul Asif Hussein
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
"Passengers who raise questions would be classified as yellow and would receive extra security screening."
:)
It just goes to show you should never rock the boat at an airport (or border crossing).
Wow - ask a question, get "reclassified" as more of a security risk. Sounds a bit McCarthyist . . .
Fast, cheap & reliable. Pick two.
I dont know about anybody else, but as much as I dont like people invading my privacy, I would rather not be on a plane with a criminal.
I think that things like violent crimes and terrorist actions should be looked at when deciding who can fly. It's not the airlines fault that a person broke the law and might consider doing so again.
Now the problem is that these 7 "privacy principles" are probably not going to actually limit any of these types of people from getting on an airplane.
Passengers who raise questions would be classified as yellow and would receive extra security screening
"Am I incorrectly inferring that if I voluntarily submit to a full body cavity search I get to go straight through to my seat?"
-Goatse guy
Am I the only one who read that as, "rubber glove and a handful of vaseline"?
I would think that the "violent criminal" bit could be unconstitutional. This is assuming that they're refering to ex-cons; I don't think that a wanted violent criminal would be given a red flag, rather they'd have the police called on them.
The denial of access to public accomidations was refuted in terms of both gender and race. I know that it's constitutional to disallow felons sufferage, but I don't think that you can do much more to them (save monitoring them).
I think even Rhenquist and Scalia would be against this legislation.
Hit them where it hurts: don't fly. If you really want to stand up, then sit down. tell your favorite airline that you aren't flying until they promise passenger privacy. If you feel REAL civic, write your congresscritter and tell them, too. Money talks, and if enough "consumers" do this, someone will start/reform an airline to respect the rights of Those Who Pay The Bills.
What's that knocking? ^H^H^H^H NO CARRIER
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
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!
So what about those terrorists who are 'unknown' flying for the first time?
They get a green light, pass through and drive themselves and the plane into the ground.
The EFF also has a good write up on it. A second opinion on things is always good.
Also see Why EFF is concerned about CAPPS II
In short, what's at stake?
" Your fundamental right to privacy and your fundamental right to travel without being forced to give up your constitutionally protected freedoms"
This paper describes how such a system actually makes it more likely that a terrorist cell can carry out a successful attack, when compared with random screening. The basic idea is that it is not hard to determine whether or not you are on the watch list, and then the terrorists can use hijackers who aren't on the watch list. Anyway, I know slashdotters aren't known for reading links, but the paper is actually quite accessible and worth reading at least some of.
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.
"As the Supreme Court notes in Saenz v Roe, the Constitution does not contain the word "travel" in any context, let alone an explicit right to travel. The presumed right to travel, however, is firmly established in U.S. law and precedent. In U.S. v Guest, the Court noted, "It is a right that has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized." In fact, in Shapiro v Thomson, Justice Stewart noted in a concurring opinion that "it is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action. Like the right of association, ... it is a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all."
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Those who are dangerous to the highway system lose their ability to drive on the highway system. It's called taking away ones driver's license, and it can be invoked for nearly any repeated moving violation, and for some it even comes on the first offense. But the thing is, in order for that to happen, one has to be convicted in a court of having committed the offense, or at least plead guilty by not contesting a ticket.
I have no problem with those who intentionally cause a security scare being barred from ever flying again, but they should at least have been convicted of an air-security related crime first. The reason why the spooks want to use a system that profiles and acts preemptively is because they say that the first crime they committ will kill everybody on the plane if not more. However, the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were already comitting a crime just by being in the United States of America. If we bothered to have security at the borders, we wouldn't need to be over-securing our airport to the point that some law-abiding Americans get locked out.
Just what does make a terrorist profile? They'll never get it to a 100% science, so what will happen is that there will always be some people who have done nothing wrong but spook the database who will get the red flag, and nearly any journalist who ever challenges the Department of Homeland Security will constantly invoke the yellow flag.
Security-by-annoying-everybody is not a working model. It might spend the allocated money and fool some people into feeling safer, but it really doesn't do anything.
Following your logic, I guess it's safe to take the bus in Israel since they've already done that one.
Life in Orange County
On second thought, maybe it's not such a bad idea.
I live in Canada, the more the Americans pull stunts like this, the more people will migrate over to here (especially the educated ones). This will be great for the Canadian economy!
Well done folks! Keep pissing on your country and driving everybody off it.
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
I was at the airport a couple weeks ago. The system is in place, but they aren't doing screening. Anyway, everybody's getting a bright green color, then the person in front of me gets bright red and the system makes a buzzing noise. He stops and goes "what? what's that?" He was clearly upset. The person checking everybody in said not to worry about it and go ahead and board.
Of course, I knew what it was, and it made me nervous. Then, you wonder what coud happen with that guy on the plane.
They should implement it so you cannot see the screen. I guess a month from now they would pull him aside and get out the rubber gloves.
"BEHOLD, CORN!!" - Dr. Weird, ATHF
The Israelis have been phenominally successful in keeping terrorists off of El Al. They do it by profiling the passengers. They ask a few direct questions and noting the patterns of responses. For a few it means additional scrutiny or denial of access, but for the majority, the system works -- and they don't confiscate your fingernail clippers. There have been no successful attacks on El Al airlines.
"I'm sorry Senator Kerry, supporters, and reporters not affiliated with Fox News, but we can't let you on this flight."
:-/
And to think that prior to Shrub/Ashcroft/Rummy/Cheney I would have thought that to be +5 Tinfoil Hat....
Airline security will be less secure because many security personnel will trust the software to do the job for them. Just like firewalls/anti-virus, it won't stop the people who really want to get in. It'll just encourage security to slack off of screening all people.
Terrorists will figure out all of the things that the system is checking for and find ways around it. Then, we'll be caught with our pants down when a bunch of 'green' passengers take a plane under control. After all, security was concentrating on the red/yellows. Those yellows/reds could easily be co-conspirators attracting attention away from the real threat.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
"The TSA says it agrees that privacy must be protected. A privacy officer, Nuala O'Connor Kelly, has been hired to make sure federal privacy law is upheld. The agency won't hold on to passengers' records, except for people who might be terrorists."
Wouldn't logic dictate that anyone *might* be a terrorist, hence the agency will hold on to anyone's records indefinitely?
Azurite is fine covellite is mine.
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
Is this going to be similar to the screening policies that have old grannies being detained for possible terror threats? What gets me is what's going to happen when someone innocent is labeled as the uber-terrorist by this new system...there better be a nice little compensation package for those folks. Oh wait, we as the rest of the consumers will have to pay for both the system AND the compensation. Well, fancy that.
You forget one thing, there will be no mistakes.
Innocent people will never be flagged as threats because the fact that they are flagged as threats proves their guilt.
There will be no explanation, no due process and no possibility of appeal because that would compromise national security.
Oh, did I mention that once you're on the list, you'll stay there forever? That's right, once a terrorist - allways a terrorist.
Don't think for a moment that this is just another way for Bushcroft & co. to harass people they don't like by denying them transportation rights. No sir! This is the finest example of your taxes at work. You should trust your government, it only tries to protect the country against terrorists.
Now be a good citizen and vote for Kodos, or Kang, does not really matter.
So if someone is a wanted fugitive, yes, I can see using this to catch them. What if they have committed violent crimes and have paid for them, this prevents them from flying? Last I heard, the only thing you lost from being a convicted felon was your right to vote.
What is a "violent criminal?"
"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.
"Passengers' personal records"
"all air passengers"
"travelers' identities"
"a traveler's risk"
CAPPS II at a Glance does not use the word "you" even once
their followup page CAPPS II: Myths and Facts talks about you only twice.
(funny that its in the 'editorial' section of the site) Anyways, before waiving it off as semantics, consider how it would sound if every 3rd person reference to you was replaced with... you.
Under CAPPS II, airlines will ask you for a slightly expanded amount of reservation information, including your full name, date of birth, home address, and home telephone number. With your expanded information, the system will quickly verify your identity and conduct a risk assessment utilizing commercially available data and current intelligence information on you. The risk assessment will result in a recommended screening level, categorizing you as no risk, unknown or elevated risk, or high risk. Your commercially available data will not be viewed by government employees, and intelligence information on you will remain behind the government firewall. Your entire prescreening process is expected to take as little as five seconds to complete.
Not so benevolent anymore is it? The idea behind CAPPS isn't inherently flawed, its just that i doubt it'll be very secure. My guess is the CAPPS II database will end up getting passed around the internet faster than Paris Hilton.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
when the phone # for the "Do Not Call" list is accidentally switched with the "Do Not Fly" list.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
> hey have explosive detectors, they wipe your
> clothes with a little paper disk, put it in a
> machine, and they know if you were even near
> explosives in the last day.
Or manure, or fertilizer, or any number of other nitrogen-containing materials.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The authors described a system by which actual terrorists could easily use a screening system as a tool. By sending known terrorists and terrorists with no record on flights, terrorist cells could determine who will pass the screening, and actually be less likely to be searched in the future. Increasing their chances of enacting terrorism on a plane.
Open source sig, feel free to modify and distribute.
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.
Those who are dangerous to the highway system lose their ability to drive on the highway system.
This is not the same thing at all. An equivalent senario would be people being banned from travelling in (not just driving) any vehicle on a highway if they were caught drunk driving. Banning someone from being a passenger on any aircraft is equivalent to banning someone from ever stepping into a car, bus or truck.
Of course as you note it is also different in that a court is involved at some point (i.e. there is some sort of due process) in driving bans but there are other differences as well. The people they are intending to ban from flying haven't done anything. It isn't like they have a previous conviction for hijacking an airliner so they are not allowed to fly on one again. It is that the government does like them in some way, because they are suspected of being a "terrorist", or for some other reason. Not only does stopping people from flying based purely on suspicion very bad, but it puts a huge amount of extra power into the hands of the government to persecute whatever people they don't like, as you note.
I have no problem with those who intentionally cause a security scare being barred from ever flying again, but they should at least have been convicted of an air-security related crime first.
This is a red herring though. Sure they might use this system to pick on such people but its main purpose will be to select people fitting a certain "high risk" profile. Who would "intentionally cause a security scare" anyway? Sure a terrorist group might phone in a fake bomb threat to cause disruption (its cheaper than a real bomb) but then you are not going to catch them are you. If this is going to be used to ban people from flying who are carry the wrong book or aren't grovellingly deferential enough to the security screeners then that is another big problem.
They should all volunteer to be classified as yellow. That way whenever a member of congress flies they'll if it's working or not. I'm sure Congress wouldn't mind doing this in the name of security.
The best thing is, if there is a terrorist attack, the government will say it is because the system isn't draconian enough and make it even more unfair, invasive and tougher.
If there isn't a terrorist attack, the government will say "hey it's working" and to make it work better we need to make it more draconian and even more unfair, invasive and tougher.
It's a win-win situation for the government either way.