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Registered Traveler Program Open For Business
storem writes "Enrollment into TSA's Registered Traveler program started yesterday at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Frequent flyers are given the opportunity to sign up for a fast-track system using biometrics to identify themselves. It seems this is pretty much the same system tested in Europe in the s-Travel program. There frequent flyers carried their biometric identifiers (fingerprint & iris) with them between airports on a smart card (privacy reasons)."
I don't see how this solves a problem. A businessman of ethnic background working in the Middle East and flying regularly will not be possible to distinguish from a terrorist posing as a businessman.
Or perhaps the hidden subtext is "The biometrics signatures will enable white non-suspicious regular travelers to whizz through customs while suspiscious non-whites are filtered for more efective controls by customs".
Other than that possibility, I have nothin per-se against biometric controls - it's how they are used and who by that's the problem.
A little planning goes a long way...
This seems like it was designed by Microsoft -- let's make the system more secure by adding ways to bypass it in the name of convenience! I feel much better about flying now.
I read in today's San Fransisco Examiner , page 3, PJ Corkery column 6-28-04:
Then I wish [visiting] Bill Clinton could roam the streets of SoMa, where he might spy the posters showing the hooded, bewired Iraqi prisoner, with the angry caption, "Got Democracy?" The posters are the work of Robert Mailer Anderson, the gifted and funny novelist of Northern California ("Boonville", Mr. President, is Anderson's terrific novel about growing up as the child of especially narcissistic and narcotized Baby Boomers). Those posters were prompted by Anderson's on going concern about civil liberties, a concern sharpened into dismay when, while trying to board a plane last month, he was told that his traveling companion was on the government's "No Fly List" and could not alight the plane. Who was this suspect traveling companion, this possible terrorist?... Anderson's two-year old daughter, that's who. This toddler was identified by name as one too dangerous to let on a plane."
These are the people you're paying billions in taxes to for Homeland Security?
I am not trying to start a flame war here (hows that for a pre-emptive strike! :)
On 2: As a police officer you should also have heard of 'innocent until proven guilty'; someone is innocent until the situation is fully ascertained (not when you are first storming the building) or when a crime is blatantly committed (you are fired upon). Until then, any assumption of guilt is purely circumstantial, and thus not worthy of punishment. There is an acceptable level of uncertainty on the police officer level, but not in the international policy level.
On 3. I agree with you on the nature of intelligence, just wanted to be a pain, and point out you meant Hanlon's Razor', not Occam's Razor.
On 4. The classic argument for torture (terrorist, nuclear bomb, 3 hours before detonation.. heated argument in philosophy 101) is hardly applicable to the current problems encountered in Iraq. I am sure you read the articles, so I am sure you remember that a large number of young men, who may have been invovled in attacks on soldiers were tortured and humiliated, although many of the soliders admitted to not doing it to extract any information. The problem here is that torture was the rule, not the exception.