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
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!
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!
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.
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).
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
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.
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!