Airport Monitoring of Travellers via Blackberry

Posted by timothy on Monday June 28, 2004 @12:49PM from the if-you-have-nussink-to-hide dept.

glhturbo writes "According to this article in Mass. High Tech, Massachusetts State Police stationed at Logan Airport will soon have access (via Blackberry handhelds) to "7 billion records" containing information on "nearly 98 percent of the U.S. population, including, for example, a person's prior residence and with whom he or she lived, criminal information, court filings, vehicles owned, and even restricted government data." The database is from a Massachusetts company, LocatePlus, started by a former policeman who was "on the waiting list for the FBI". Seems like a good tool, but major potential for abuse, and hopefully no false identifications."

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Big deal.. by Donny+Smith · 2004-06-28 15:54 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Big deal - someone looks up my residence or phone number - so what?
If that's the price we have to pay for just marginally better security, so be it!

Another thing - if they have records on 98% of the U.S. population and if there's 10,000 abuses a year, that means each person has about 3,000,000,000/10,000 = one in 300K chance to get "abused". So fscking what?