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CAPPS 2 Back to the Drawing Board
dagnabit writes "Just saw this over at MSNBC. Apparently Tom Ridge is revising CAPPS II due to the lawsuits and complaints from some Congresscritters As an alternative, the TSA is hoping frequent travellers will voluntarily give up their info..."
I've travelled and been green lighted by CAPPS I.
So CAPPS II is dead...but is my information still...
to be honest, a voluntary system with no rules on what information can be collected scares me more than the all-knowing capps ii program. it puts in effect the same sort of discrimination and information gathering without any of the restrictions that would be in place in a legislated system. say 8 passengers give their information and two don't-- who do you think will get the cavity search?
What Future?
I already moderated this story - but what the heck - I have to respond here. You're not kidding about this: Airlines can't even book seats correctly 100% of the time - what are the chances that their data is going to be good quality 100% of the time? The last time I flew (earlier this summer) the trip had 2 flights each way. By the time we got from ATL -> Houston, 2 of us had apparently "never flown to houston" so continental was reluctant to let us on the plane.. Anyway, they finally let us on after showing them our Delta boarding passes. We flew to honolulu.
On the way back - when we went to check in - they'd sold our seats in honolulu (all but 1 of the 4 people traveling together) - because the other 3 had never been on the flights to honolulu (despite us having boarding passes scanned/torn at the gate/etc). The people at the continental counter would not believe that we had all flown there. Finally they let us on that plane - and when it came time to fly from houston to atlanta - the 3 people who had previously had problems, had none - and then the 1 person who hadn't had problems - got their seat sold - and had to argue to get it back). What a pain!
The fact that their computer systems showed that we weren't on the plane seriously makes me wonder what kink of useful data they can even give to the government. I mean, they didn't think we were on the plane - but at the same time they didn't remove our luggage. I thought that was a federal rule? Anyway...
I thought that in preparation for an attack, the hijackers take the flight they intend to use several times, in order to observe the crew and map out the operation. It's tough to distinguish that kind of flight activity from a business consultant who makes the same sort of regular trips.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I'm a native born, US citizen, of (obvious) northern European ancestory. I have 2 degrees, an honorable discharge and have filed a tax return every year since I was 15 (that's 19 years if you're counting). I held a secret clearance for several years and have been bonded several times. I've had a couple speeding tickets, but never even been accused of any other misdemeanor, let alone a felony. In other words, my life has been documented by our government in quite substantial detail.
Despite this, every time I fly in the continental US I get searched. At the security screen where everybody else is passed through the x-ray and detector, my shoes are removed, I'm patted down, my hands and shoes are swabbed for explosive residue and my bags are rifled through. When I get to the gate and hand my ticket over, I get hauled off to the side, patted down again, and my bags re-searched. Every plane change, every pass through a gate or security station brings the same result. I have not boarded a flight in the US in the last 3 years without this happening. There is no appeal, there is no questioning why, there is only the choice to submit to this or not fly. My crime? Well, the only event I can come up with is I declared a firearm in my luggage after 9/11. A perfectly legal thing, I followed all the rules - demonstrated it was clear, locked the case, and placed it in the suitcase with the "steal me" tag.
It's embarassing, being dragged off to stand in the "special line" by myself. Mainly, I wonder what lowlife is getting through while they interogate me? Security personel are a finite resource, people have to be moved through at a reasonable clip or else flights are missed. When they spend 15 minutes with me, that's 15 minutes they could be investigating someone with bad intentions. Mistakes on credit reports can be researched, documented and appealed, usually successfully. This is unappealable, hell, nobody will even admit I've been flagged, it's "random".
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
particularly the current flight security lines.
Lets face facts:
1. The 911 flights were brought down with box knives that did not go through security at all.
2. A box knife is no longer an effective way to hijack a plane. This is simply because a hijacked plane is no longer about a 3 day trip to Cuba. Now its about becomming a lawn dart. If you tried to hijack a plane prior to 911 with a knife, maybe we'd sit back and enjoy some cigars when we landed. Today, this firefighter and dozens of other people on the plane are going to shove the box cutter up your ass sideways. I'm not a kung-fu master by any means, but I am a 200 pound man in pretty good shape. Its a narrow plane. If I come running down the isle at you, you are going to fall down. I may get cut with a box cutter. So be it.
Now, making me wait 3 hours in line so you can take my nail clippers away isn't going to change anything at all. There are LOTS of ways we could still take stuff on planes (and if I can think of them, so can anyone else -- but I'd rather not broadcast them).
Tom Ridge and his ilk like to keep people scared because they get more power and funding that way. One way to keep people scared is to make them stand like cattle in long lines to give up deadly nail clippers.
Here's an idea, lets not vote for this administration this time either!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
There were, as you can imagine, an insane number of troubles and issues with this approach. And our office was one of the ones that screamed bloody murder over these issues.
I certainly don't hear a whole lot of French people complaining about the well-documented practice of French airlines assisting French corporations in industrial espionage.
I'm not new here, I should not be surprised. Everytime there's a political discussion, some neo-con starts bashing the French for the most unlikely reason.
I thought I had seen it all. According to our well-documented accusers, we sold weapons to Saddam during the embargo, we sold him nuclear weapons, we stole Iraq oil, we're antisemitic, we hate Americans, we've killed Rwandan babies, we protect Serbian fascists, we don't bath... But what I had not yet heard is that our airlines (that would be Air France, I guess) practice industrial espionage. Wow, that's a serious accusation! Bear in mind, next time you're on an Air France flight that your French competitor will know whether you chose beef or chicken!!!
Of course, nobody can never show any evidence for such well-documented facts. It doesn't seem to matter. The French apparently committed a deadly sin when they tried to prevent the US from doing (what IMHO is) a huge mistake in Irak. So anything goes against them. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, it's true as long as it bashes the French.
Some of these accusations might be true though. I'm perfectly aware that my country has not always be on the right side and that we've had our share of dark hours or shameful years. I just feel that as a whole, the balance is positive. Maybe I'm even wrong here. And I'm ready to discuss that with anyone interested in an honest debate. But all this constant hatred against the French is something else entirely, and frankly it's frightening.
I do not fear for my country. We've been through worse situations than being bad-mouthed by O'Reilly or some anonymous geek on Slashdot. No, I fear for the US. A country I and most French people love, whatever you're told on Fox News. You know, we're not perfect in France. Our words and actions are not guided by God, more by plain old human experience. And one lesson we learned from being occupied by the Nazis for 4 years: If you let yourself hate someone solely based on his religion, color or nationality, you're on a very, very dangerous slope.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
The problem is that the airlines are big backers of the ID requirement. It doesn't do a lot to increase security because fake ID is fairly cheap and all terrorists would have to do would be pick suicide bombers without a record. What it does do is increase revenue by cutting out the ticket resale market.
It used to be that you could sell your ticket if you changed your plans, now you have to try to get a partial refund and the airline can sell a last-minute ticket to someone else at three times the cost. If you had sold the ticket they'd have only been paid once - the horror.
In almost all other areas of our society you are able to buy a service and resell it. If I contract to have your company ship an industrial container across the country you can't refuse later because I resold the left-over space and made a profit. If I buy a book you can't stop me from reselling it, or ripping out the pages and selling them individually if I want. The airlines though saw this great opportunity to, using the bogey-man of terrorism, prevent all resale of their products.
You can't even say the 9/11 terrorists would have been caught had we checked ID because they'd have known about the ID checks and bought fake ID or used someone whose record is clean. Wow, so we cost the terrorists a few hundred dollars for fake ID, we don't prevent the attacks, and we burden everyone with this annoying, useless, and potentially dangerous invasive system.
Sure, sometimes trading liberties for security is a good value, but I'd like to see how they honestly expect to improve security. As is, I think I'm being asked to trade liberties for a placebo, and another government-mandated airline bailout package.
El Al, the Israeli airline, is world-reknowned for its security measures.
Here's an informative article from Business Week about a year ago.
The point is that effective and efficient security can be achieved, and it doesn't require this sort of extreme federal legislation. I think that if US carriers and airports look to the example set by El Al, air travel would be much safer.
"Interesting side note: as a head without a body, I envy the dead."