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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.'"
We seem to get an overabundance of Your Rights Online/MPAA/RIAA/patent stuff every time he's in the big chair.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Has anyone else noticed that the airlines and the US Federal goverment have teamed up against us, the people? They're criminally spying on us, and covering it up. Our taxes are subsidizing the airlines like never before, bailing out an industry tanking even before 9/11/2001, leading the bursting bubble. At a time when our Treasury is in the greatest debt ever imagined, and jetfuel comes from barrels of oil twice as expensive as in the 20th Century. Meanwhile, the airline/Fed partnership let planebombers hijack *4* transcontinental planes, without scrambling our air defense to shoot them down, turning our whole world upside down. Now air travel is invasive, tangled, moronically insecure, while airlines are pumped full of cash, without changing anything that got them into those messes. Why do they hate America?
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make install -not war
I think the Supreme Court made a bad ruling way back when it determined that corporations have the same rights as real people, without any real limitation on that, except for some vague notion that "corporate speech" is regulatable by the government, moreso than personal speech.
What is happening now is that corporate entities are pushing the boundaries so that corporate rights supplant human/individual rights.
Contrast this with Issac Asimov's rules about robots, a decidedly non-human entity, that established supremacy of humans over robots.
Corporations can essentially conduct paramilitary warfare or warfare-by-proxy. Corporations can hide behind whatever legal system seems most convenient, and proclaim that others seeking redress against them also have to essentially meet up with the corporation's choice of legal domain.
If only I could incorporate my life in Nevada, even though I live and conduct my business in Oregon, California or Washington, wouldn't that be kind of keen? Oh, no, the states would never allow that. Funny, corporations do that. Where does Boeing conduct its operations? Certainly not in Chicago, yet who knows what kind of tax breaks Illinois passed off to Boeing to move its Corporate HQ to Chicago.
I suppose if I were rich enough, I could set up some legal entity or two to own my significant property, etc. to hide assets from taxation, etc., but I'm not. Like, say, a wholely owned corporation that I just happen to be the sole employee of that owns my house, car, etc., but I get "paid" a meager minimum wage from, and I expense my living expenses thru. Hmm...
No, the IRS and state tax boards would not be happy with that at all, right?
I still can't figure out why it is OK for a corporation (that legally is equated as a human being) to do things like this, but if a human tries to do it, they're a tax cheat?
I hope your laptop was not running Windows, if so, the security procedures you and your organization follows are pointless. Not to mention easily defeated with a knoppix boot disk.