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.
Is this even legal to distribute credit card numbers like that?
I hear that there's this websize h@x0rz.hk that'll happily buy such lists of information. Does this precident mean it's Ok to share with them?
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
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Requested center seat. Indications of possible insanity.
This is why I use the bus. Nobody wants any personal information on anyone they've met on a bus.
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
Nobody's going to get fired over this, nobody's going to go to jail over this, nobody's going to even care about this.
If you do, you're un-American. Welcome to McCarthyism, population: you.
If they mis-handled Social Security numbers alone (simply by sending them to the TSA without the approval of the people who possess those SSNs) then this is a very clear violation of the Privacy Act. Hello lawsuit?
Mz6 makes a very good and valid point. I can't say I blame the airlines though. Bad times plus the chance for a law suit sure would make me put all my cards on the table. I am amazed however by how many people think that they have a right to privacy. Unfortunately, no where is it written in the Constitution or any other civil documents that individuals are entitled to privacy.
The deal is the same with ET and life in space, the majority of society is not ready to know this. Joe Smoe in Suburb A, Good Ole Boy, USA doesn't want to know that I can find out whatever I want on him and the government can probably tell where he is within 5 feet at any given time. That is if they want to waste the resources.
This is why I am amazed that the Olympic Bomber Dude (sorry, pressed for time and can't remember his name nor wish to google) spent years in the mountains of my home state without anyone finding him. HE would still be there too, if he hadn't come back into town....
I kinda got off topic for a moment, but to me, this is not news. If you think other companies don't do the same thing you are crazy. If the government came to me and said do this this and this or I am going to shut you down, and not pass this bill that will keep you in business, as well as block this foreign trade, then you would do it too. American Way baby.....
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
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
I understand the worry and concern about mis-use of this data, BUT as I recall, and you might also, in the short months directly following the 4 attempted attacks using airliners the airlines and associates were running scared and were providing the FBI and later HSA any and all information they had, requested or not.
So any surprise or concern over this data seems misplaced. Patterns were being examined and evidence compiled. Yes, extreme measures were taken and should be acknowledged and where appropriate apologized for, but these events should surprise noone and these revelations simply confirm what we already know.
Some people(and corporations) do foolish things when faced with a catastrophe.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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!
Travelocity was "Born of leading travel innovator Sabre (the world's largest travel agent reservation system)." (In fact, recently spun off from?)
YOu cant refuse to give them your name anyways.
They still'll get all your data.
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
So? Forget the fact that all of this information is available on the Internet, the FBI can pull this information very quickly anyway. I support this because it just eliminates the wasted time for the FBI to do so. Passenger tracking by governments is going to be a way of life permanently thanks to a few morons. Just prey it doesn't extend fully into automobile driving, trains, or buses. The fundamental issue here is citizens willingness to have their personal information and whereabouts freely available by the government they are currently involved with, be that their home country or the country they reside in. But I think that is just a phantom of the real issue which is people's fears that by governments simply having that information it can be stolen or sold to somebody to use it against the individual. This is a valid concern in most countries right now. As governments advance and globalize, this kind of information sharing should become more secure and less invasive. Meaning full detailed information will not need to be kept on anyone because if you are in a modern country the needed information will be generated when you need it and not sitting on a server to be misused. I personally don't mind my government (US) tracing my whereabouts and my purchases because I don't feel they can use that information against me. Mainly because I do nothing that they would conceive as harmful to them. Some people want to keep everything private because they fear misuse, but I truly believe most people that want to keep everything out of government hands is because they have something to hide. Perhaps I am wrong in calling them the majority, but I don't understand when someone is worried about your government knowing where you are or how to find you.
I stole this sig.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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.
The airlines gave that much no doubt because they were asked to. And the reason why they were asked to is because it takes a lot of data points on an individual to fully cross-link and cross-reference all the scattered databases that are used to define who someone is and what they are doing recently.
Yeah it is excessive. I don't like it at all. It is spooky. But it happens all the time though generally on a smaller scale.
This is just one time when it was on a huge scale, and so we found out.
Before very long there will be a lot of strangers in the world (I mean all over the world, including offshore outsourced data mining facilities) that know more about the Total You than anyone you actually know personally, outside yourself. That's one of the reasons why privacy laws are such a total flipping joke in the absence of data secrecy.
It's probably better just to stay out of the databases if you don't want your whole life being dredged up in the next terrorist-inspired data dragnet.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
I'm posting this AC because it touches on my job and I try to keep that separate.
Sabre and Galileo are Global Distribution Systems, or just GDSs to people in the travel industry. Several are or were started by groups of major airlines. Worldspan is another; I forget the names of the rest. There are about five of them in total, and they formerly were a very heavily federally regulated industry, the idea being that if they were allowed to, for example, choose their own prices they could offer different prices to different airlines (or different travel agents) and exert an unfair hold on the market. They've been deregulated by Congress within the last year, but it's too soon to say what effect that will have.
The relevant part is this: If you purchase a plane ticket, regardless of how or where you buy it, your availability and booking are handled by one of the GDSes. Access methods vary by GDS, but the reality of it is, much of your information is available to not just the government, but really anyone with the proper knowledge of how to get at it. I can't imagine too many hackers being very interested in getting your mom's flight information or personal info from Sabre, but if they did it wouldn't be especially hard.
There aren't a lot of choices to insure your privacy here. Most of us can't realistically choose not to fly.
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!
Forget the credit cards -- where did they get the "health data" from? That seems far more invasive to me...
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).
Of course, in places which are metric the unit is the 11/9.
Sources report the "sensitive customer data" included:
-Passenger's favorite brand of peanuts
-Success passenger had flirting stewardess
-Whether or not passenger washes hands after using washroom.
Compounding the problem is the vagueness of policies and incomplete training of personnel. My laptop gave a false positive for TNT a while back, so I had to submit to a secondary search at the security checkpoint. Besides proving that the laptop did indeed boot up, the police officer double-clicked on my trashcan to see what files were there, and checked the dropdown on my browser to see what recent links I had been to.
It didn't look like the officer was following any kind of script, was just nosy. But I was quite steamed about it at the time. (Good thing I had recently cleared both before packing the laptop!)
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
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.
According to HIPAA, this is a big, costly, no-no.
IANAL. Yeah yeah.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
no, no, a thousand times, no.
use:
George Orwell
1984 Europa ST.
(your hometown)
What's really sad is after using the above for over 10 years and getting countless "thank you, Mr. Orwell"'s, there has been only one (1!) acknowledgement of said gag.
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
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...
"A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear... the truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
Here's where Ashcroft is using the essay as a guidebook:
"Last summer, the CCRA informed me that, contrary to its past undertaking, it has decided to keep all API/PNR information about Canadian travellers for six years in a massive new database.
All this personal information - more than 30 data elements including every destination to which we travel, who we travel with, how we pay for the tickets (sometimes including credit card numbers), what contact numbers we provide, even any dietary preferences or health-related requirements we communicate to the airline - will be available for an almost limitless range of governmental purposes...
"This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society...
It is difficult to imagine a m
...I have to say that this is scary, considering that both Sabre and Galileo aren't limited to airlines for their clientele. In other words, if you booked a hotel, rented a car, bought a train ticket, or anything other transaction that can be made on Travelocity (a Sabre Company), then your info could possibly be in the hands of the TSA or other third parties. Also, I remember when I first started working there, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork stating that I would not give out sensitive information to third parties. This is crucial considering most of the paperwork was for EU compliance. I'm not surprised that the EU is not in an uproar.
Where's the French when you need them?
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
If you believe that the rest of the world hating the US is a myth, than I urge you to test your theory and travel to said forgein land and announce to the entire community there you are an American. If the US is not the most hated country, then why is it that Americans visiting Greece for teh Olympics have been urged not to wave American flags at the games? No other country has been prohibited from this. As for #'s 1 & 2 of your statement of course countries will continue to trade with the US. Have you worked for someone you didn't like? Yet you still took thier money right?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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!