Slashdot Mirror
Airlines Gave More Data Than Previously Disclosed
scottfk writes "Wired news has an article exposing the fact that still more customer data recorded by airlines were turned over to the TSA for their CAPPS II testing. From the article, 'Delta, Continental, America West, JetBlue and Frontier Airlines secretly turned over sensitive passenger data to Transportation Security Administration contractors in the spring and summer of 2002, according to the sworn statement of acting TSA chief David Stone. In addion, two of the four largest airline reservation centers, Galileo International and Sabre, also gave sensitive passenger information, including home phone numbers, credit card numbers and health data, without disclosing the transfers to travelers or asking their permission.'"
Well, perhaps it's not funny... But pretty damn scary.
Hmmm.
The problem is there's a need to balance privacy rights with a hightened level of security.
Disclosing that much information is , in my opinion, excessive and crosses the line.
Of course, privacy seems all but dead these days, so maybe I'm just being too optomistic even about what could be. All I know is I don't think anyone needs my credit card info to figure out if I'm a security threat or not, not really.
"I hate quotations." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
without disclosing the transfers to travelers or asking their permission
Don't you mean terrorists? You can't tell citiz..-err, terrorists, that you're going to investigate them.
Welcome to the United States, where any random citizen is an enemy of the state.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
It's common knowledge that any data that the government wants, it can have. Ofcourse they need a good excuse for it, and I guess the only thing the article exposed was what excuse the govt used.
Before I get modded down, let me clarify why this is a problem:
It's a police state, Bush is the Führer, and any democracy and freedom you believe you have is an illusion (remember the Diebold scandal). The sooner the Americans start a revolution, the better.
Okay granted, under the normal Slashdot regime you'd just substiture 'M$' for 'Bush', but the above is something we've been seeing an awful lot of lately. Let's push for some more biodiversity of paranoia!
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
A new slashdot trope! The new unit of terrorism is the 9/11. Lockerbie was about 0.10 9/11s, for example.
The US Gov is not going to defend you from terrorists, no matter what you want. Individual actions against small groups of people are impossible to defend against, no matter how much money you spend on new police cars. The US Gov needs to stop terrorism at its root cause. Not pissing off every Muslim in the world would be a good place to start.
You must be crazy to think that not using the inofrmation doesn't "make us secure". Do you even know how much crap is confiscated from passengers during searches? My friend works for the TSA and they've confiscated, among other things, switch blades/knives, drugs (LOTS of it, and not just pot either), guns, etc... And almost all of the time these items are taken from white/american citizens.
Now imagine what would happen if that gun wasn't confiscated, got on the plane, and some nutcase decided to start firing at people for whatever reason.
Being "secure" means being certain that there are no holes in the screening process, even if it inconveniences you.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
Hmmm. Dubya is watching you?
Somehow it doesn't have the same effect.
Still, the Big Brother effect keeps becoming greater and greater, and yes... it is very unsettling at times, especially when you don't know what kinds of normal actions (maybe I like the middle seat!) will earn you a second, suspicious look.
"I hate quotations." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you amass this fortune, be sure to forget that if it wasn't for this great country that you live in that is run by this broken government that has worked so well for over 200 years you would probably be nothing more then a substance farmer bathing and pissing in the same river that the cow shits and drinks in.
Also when you find this small country that no one knows about, let me know...I want one too.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
... is not taking the info in the first place!
... and no other info.
As if anyone believes any companie's "privacy policy"... especially when the fine print says it can change at any time and any new law (PATRIOT act) superceeds it.
I wish there was some way to go thru the world without leaving a HUGE record of everything I did. Why does every business request your name, address, etc? (Yeah I know why). What ever happen to the idea of obtaining a token from (say) Visa which is worth $500 and passing that to the airline
You make it sound (intentional or not) like this was done as part of an investigation. This data, however, was provided as part of a screening tool test. Grabbing needed information to investigate a crime that has already occurred seems acceptable. Grabbing personal information to make people into unwitting, unwilling guinea pigs is not.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Better idea, you should move to a small island. People who complain about the government in the US make me laugh. It's probably the easiest government in the world to change if you don't like it. Get a bunch of like-minded people together and vote in a new one. Stop your complaining and change it if you don't like it.
I stole this sig.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Your credit card and medical information can easily be argued to be your "papers and effects." Privacy is one of the few rights that is specifically defined by the Constitution.
If you and the parent (if different from you) are in favor of giving out information, why are you (both) posting anonymously? What have you got to hide? What's your name? I might be a police officer, so it might be illegal to refuse to answer me. And, under the Patriot Act, I don't have to tell you that I am a police officer, or that I have a warrant, since that might be secret, and it might have been issued by a secret court. Got it?
For years, back when I traveled a lot by plane.. and this was many years back... I ALWAYS used a fake name, and paid by cash. Why? Not because I had something to hide. I do not. But I DO believe that my business is just that: my business, and not yours, not the government's, not Acme Marketing's.. These days I travel by car, bus, walk, or ride a bike. I do not fly. I would see no difficulty in "hopping a frieght" if it came to it..
I have always wondered why good network geeks who go out of their way to hide their real IP, and take various other protective steps to insure their net is not violated, will hand over the most confidential data about themselves without a backward glance..
Every incremental step taken "for our own good", "To protect us", or whatever the reason du jours, is just another step away from what this land was once about. We have met the Evil Empire and him be US!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Pop Quiz! Loy's unsworn, unwritten response was,
a) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data to test all of the functions of CAPPS II."
b) "TSA has used (passenger) data to test functions of screening systems not called CAPPS II"
c) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data to test functions of systems other than CAPPS II"
d) "TSA has used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, CAPPS II",
e) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, CAPPS II"
f) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, profiling systems other than CAPPS II".
g) "All of the above are belong to us!"
Remember, we live in a litigious society.
Republicans: You can say - truthfully - that you "did not have sexual relations with that woman", and that still leaves room for gettin' the knob polished, spunkin' up her dress, and finishing off with a slightly fishy-smelling cigar.
Democrats: Now watch this drive!
Yeah and next we will all have to have the proper papers to fart. Let me ask you this. Since Sept 11 and the Patriot Act went into effect, are you or do you feel anymore secure? Does it make you sleep better at night knowing that the FBI can knock down the door of a suspected terrorist in the middle of the night? Your door in fact. Should your paper boy get pissed because you stiffed him last week on his tip and dropped a dime, told some agency that he has seen plans in your house of building blueprints. And they kicked in your door. Pulled your family out of your house at 3 am at gunpoint, this makes you safe? Statistically you have a greater chance of being eaten by a shark than ever encountering a terrorist. Personally I would rather live with the terrorist threat, than lose the freedoms that my father, and those before him fought for. Don't confuse false security with real security. Welcome to the new police state. They are watching us all.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Last I checked, there's no right to breath free air in the Constitution either. Doesn't mean I have given up that right.
Amendment X:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Get that, reserved by the people. Nice little catch-all Amendment.
A bit naive perhaps...
As history taught us (or not is seems)...
Laws increasing governments' power will ultimately be abused.
How long before the transmitted information will be used to catch tax-evaders? Be crosslinked with other data to find *potential* criminals (Minority Report anyone)?
The funny thing is that this information won't even help to catch any terrorists. How often can a suicide bomber be caught repeating his crimes? All that terrorist groups have to do is to send previously unknown people.
The only people suffering are average joes going about their lives.
And don't tell me: "If you don't have anything to hide, why bother." If that is the case, than why not install a camera in everybodys home ala 1984... Nothing to hide... No problem... Right?
And this is just the beginning. I remember a few years back an extensive camera system was installed in London, allegedly to find terrorists. Well, now this system is being used to catch speeders, and to track where everybody is going in the city just in case (which is used to collect tolls).
that American liberties are being subverted by an out of control, increasingly oppressive goverment. It proves the adage 'Those willing to trade freedom for security get neither'. There is no reason for phone number, email address, OR ESPECIALLY financial access #s to be transmitted to ANY agency. This should be treated like the medical testing information, where almost all sensitive information is either hidden or encrypted. IMO all of the new 'security' measures need completely revamped with the focus that most people are NOT willing to sacrifice this much/any freedom for security (and privacy is a freedom).
In conclusion if you aren't happy you were born here, and at peace waving the flag that allows you to bring your highly educated, liberal arse on this website and spout such nonsense, then I would suggest you take the first plane outta here.
Maybe a few years in a third world nation would change your mind and make you realize not only how greatful we should be to have the life we live, but that we didn't accidently get here by stumbling around in the dark for the past 3/4 of a century.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
If each of those $20,000 people had $100, maybe they could become a "bush ranger" and bush might listen to them.
Dick? President Mr. Vice President, is that you? How low you've sunk, posting as an Anonymous lying Coward to Slashdot.
Surely you knew terrorists were planning on crashing into buildings after the President's Daily Briefing intelligence clearly said Al Qaeda was planning on crashing planes into buildings. Or after the French government foiled a well developed plot in the 1990s to crash planes into the Eiffel Tower.
Of course, your "moral equivalence" calculator is broken. I'll point out the moral distance between crashing a hijacked plane into the US Capitol housing Congress, and shooting down that plane: one US Congress, and everything that goes with it.
Cut the crap with rhetorical nonsense like "the gov't is not perfect" - that strawman BS is too tired to even bother with. The government's job is to protect the people. Instead, the Bush/Cheney government has miserably failed to do so, at every turn. Instead of lying behind an anonymous Slashdot post, try reading the 9/11 Commission report, which details a government in "widespread chaos", as summarized last week in a NY Times front-page headline. I only hope I'm wrong, and the actual poster isn't actually controlling the US Executive Branch from some creepy "undisclosed location", but is rather merely controlling a grubby keyboard in their parent's suburban basement.
--
make install -not war
I believe that these two posts have more in common that they realize. The question is: What "America" are they talking about?
The latter is talking about the great country that was founded by a handful of pioneers hopeful for a new life away from the stagnant politics and unjust population control that they escaped from (then, England...taxation w/out representation, repression, etc, etc.) This is a great country, full of great people who have given their lives (in life and in death) to ensure our prosperity and enrichment as a people.
The former references the single largest threat to the latter: the government itself. The former is apalled by the erosion of the one virtue that this country is founded on: Freedom. As the song goes "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free," Where is the pride of America when the Freedom is gone? When U.S. Citizens can be labelled "Enemy Combatants" and lose all constitutional rights, where is the pride in that?
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely proud to be an American. But, when America no longer stands for what it was founded on, then is it truly America any longer?
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
Wow. So do you also believe that all people who choose vanilla icecream over strawberry do so because they are allergic to strawberries? I'm not exactly a card carrying member of the tinfoil hat club, but I do value my privacy and actively work to ensure it stays private as much as possible. And not because I'm involved in illegal or illicit activities.
At some point you need to stop asking "Why do I care if the government has all my information?" and start asking "Why does the government care if it has all my information?"
This falls under the slippery slope scenario (yay alliteration!), the first steps seem harmless: provide your ID when you enter, then it's provide a fingerprint, then it's fill out this form for our records, then it's "no thanks, we don't need to see your ID, I know everything about you thanks to your fingerprint tied to this database." and then it's "Johnson, get me the precise location of the man with this fingerprint by tracing the RFID tags in all the clothes he's wearing and see where he was last scanned."
Maybe you don't have anything to hide, but that doesn't mean spit when you're arrested and thrown in jail because your government profile - for whatever reason, mistaken or otherwise - flags you as being dangerous. Sure, eventually the mistake might be found, or your innocence proven, but in the meantime you're still spending some special time in lockdown with Bubba and his chums.
The point here is that at some point the government knows enough to do it's job, and really doesn't need to know when was the last time you bought milk and who you were with. The more information there is the greater the potential for abuse. It is abuse of the system that we are trying to prevent, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of flesh in my book.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], ``Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. -- Charles Babbage
The bitterest pill to swallow is that for a brief moment, say from about 1968 (when civil rights started to mean something in the South) until about 1989 (when Bush I started to shred the Constitution in the name of the 'War on Drugs'), the United States of America really was 'the land of the free'.
Why is loss of freedom on-topic? Because it has the same cause as the privacy violations. As you wrote, "people continue to look the other way." Having freedom, or privacy, is an unstable condition. Either you're willing to fight to keep it, or somebody (usually politicians, sometimes powerful corporations) will take it away from you.
seriously, not flamebaiting you. but how is giving a fake name nowadays to get on a plane an okay thing to do? yes, you said MANY years ago. and now you dont travel on planes. presumably because "big brother" is so intrusively watching you by wanting to know your real name and verify it against a picture ID, and even.. *GASP* perform a mildly invasive check to make sure you're not carrying explosives or weapons. What an evil empire we live in.
So, i guess my question is: if we live in this "evil empire".. if you were president and had all the magical power to rewrite the rules, what SHOULD the government do, instead of verifying the identities of people who fly, and looking for possible suspicious patterns in their bevahior to find more terrorists among us. I dont much like them being invasive either, but if they dont take some drastic measures, there are certainly more terrorists, currently walking among innocent civilians, who will kill and injure many more of the people around them. If the government just turns a blind eye to "respect" your privacy, you may very well die the next time some fundamentalist blows something up. So, what's the solution?
I'm not particularly on either side, i just think this is a very complex problem (balancing privacy with the possibility of more deaths in the future) that just can't be dismissed by saying our government is evil and intrusive and up to all sorts of macabre tasks.
I work for the government and all I have seen from my end as an employee is an increase in regulations, paperwork, and workload but no difference in how difficult it is to enter the country, purchase a fake identity, and live/exist here with little or no fear of being caught. We can track a single cow to its origin if we suspect that it may be infected with mad-cow disease, but we lose how many dozens of legal aliens every year, not to mention the illegal ones that we genuinely have no idea of...
Again, nothing new here, move along with the rest of the sheep.......we are from the government - we are here to help...
"When people can police themselves then they are responsible enough to not need a large government."
Let's take a look at this shall we?
Assume you care for a small child. Now because you don't want him to hurt himself, or get sick etc. You decide to keep him inside the house, for his "own good".
Assuming the house does not burn down, and you supply him with food etc. He will not probably hurt himself as he grows up.
Now consider you wait until he's 18 and then say okay you are grown up now you can go outside.... Chances are the first time he goes out it will scare the crap out of him and he will not do it again. Thus the system of "safety and security" is the only acceptable world he can live in.
IMO this is the world we are moving towards, where personal responsiblity is minimized or discounted, and everything is considered "not my fault". People cannot and will not learn to be independent in this type of environment.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Don't forget the period from 1789 until around 1860, when it was also the land of the free. Since then, it has been the land of less and less free...
Huh? Throughout that period slavery was legal and common in the USA. Any restrictions in freedom since then pale into insignificance compared to the lack of freedom implicit in slavery.
Folks, comparisons to credit card companies and the data they compile don't apply to this discussion. The Privacy Act makes it illegal for the government to compile secret databases on Americans, for any reason, without getting permission. This is not about loss of privacy to a marketing company. This is about government officials committing a felony, repeatedly lying to Congress and federal investigators about it, getting caught lying, and continuing to lie.
Let's set aside genteel conversation about privacy rights and ask ourselves the pertinent question here: Do we want a bunch of bureaucrats -- who break the law, are stupid enough to get caught, and lie about it like a third-grader that doesn't have shame -- to be responsible for protecting us from terrorists? It seems the answer from most Americans is, yes. THAT'S the scary part!