Slashdot Mirror
TSA Lied About Protecting Passenger Data
wk633 writes "A report by Homeland Security Department Acting Inspector General Richard Skinner, said the agency misinformed individuals, the press and Congress in 2003 and 2004. It stopped short of saying TSA lied.
Bruce Schneier does say 'the TSA lied' on his blog." Scary stuff, and yet it's even scarier how little the general public has caught on.
I personally spoke with a large software firm about this very issue -- how can such a system keep the false positives low to nill while catching the ocassional needle or two in a very large haystack, and they waffled on the question. Considering the number of terrorists are extremely small with regards the rest of the population, how can you possible have enough data to be statistically significant? Again, they waffled on the question, giving a half-baked "executive response" rather than anything concrete.
The real truth is we are far more likely to die in a car crash than to die at the hands of a would-be terrorist. Yet, billions are being poured into Homeland Insecurity and the TSA efforts, and what do we have? High false positive rates, millions of needlessly harrased travelers, and it's hard to get a fix on the false negative rates since terrorists are so rare to begin with.
In short, the entire approach makes no sense.
But try explaining this to the general public, who tend to be dumb as boards when it comes to basic statistics and probabality.
90% of the public is simply unable to think, but merely jumps from one belief pattern to another. That my friends is the problem.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I worked for the TSA for over a year and a half. I was a god-damned screener -- I was checking passengers and baggage both. I have little respect for most of the other screeners and for the management. (Did you know the hiring process was little more than "first-come-first-served" and that people were hired before background checks were complete? They didn't even check resumes much of the time! People were placed in management roles at the age of 18! Their last job at a burger joint! This is a no-shitter!) But enough of that. The TSA is also filled with a lot of well-meaning people who really want to do a good job. But I have yet to detect deceit in any of the people I have encountered regardless of how high in rank. I am honestly shocked.
The general public doesn't want a democracy. It wants a group of people to solve all their problems. Protects us from these bad men. Give us free food because I don't want to work. Keep my comunity safe from drugs.
The government doesn't want a democracy. It wants a group of people to let them decide everything. To take their protection from percieved threats. To give them tax money because they don't want to work. To keep comunities safe from drugs so people will work and pay taxes.
The truth is usually quite simple. Real governments exists to serve themselves as much as the people.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The lie being that if the US government spend loads of money on checking on people who come into the country by air, this will have any effect on terrorists at all? As I see it, the known terrorists would all be planners, the operatives aren't expected to last long anyway (life expectancy as a human bomb is not good). So, unless you have some way to identify a person, who has never been heard of before, as a fanatic, you have no hope of catching anybody this way. Even then, terror operations can take weeks or months to plan and execute, whats to stop them from coming in via Mexico for example? So if the people involved in it lie, are you surprised?
I might not be a wit, but at least I am more than half way there.
And so, we get the endless debates about gay weddings, about living wills, about abortion, about the "theory" of evolution, about the role of religion in public structures, and so on.
Meanwhile debate about subjects that in any open democracy would make the front pages, would bring millions onto the streets, and would topple presidents... almost totally absent.
The general public does not debate the role of the state, the yawning chasms in the democratic process, the boom in military spending, gerrymandering, government-sponsored TV "news", political prisoners, torture, the corruption of every agency meant to protect the public, the environment, the economy into an agency designed to exploit and abuse...
So, you are saying that the issues like gay weddings, living wills, abortion, and the teaching of evolution simply are not worthy of debate?
The reason nobody in America debates about the issues you want to get us riled up about is because our current society is very stable, and there is nearly a consensus (for better or worse) on all of them.
Other than libertarian crackpots like me (and a handful of pie-eyed college kids), nobody cares about the concept of "limited government."
Almost everybody agrees that the military is one of the few things worth throwing vast sums of money at.
Most older folks still watch TV news, but more and more people are simply turning to other sources, to get away from the endless parade of Michael Jackson trials and whatnot.
The "political prisoners" and "torture" you speak of are not nearly the hot-button issues you wish they were.
Government agency corruption has always been with us. Anybody who thinks it's an invention of either Bush or Clinton is simply too young to know any better.
Meanwhile, the issues you dismissed so quickly are critically important to the culture.
Marriage is the basic unit of family organization upon which our entire civilization is built. While I happen to think that government has no business prohibiting families made up of same-sex couples (or even multiple-partner marriages), there are those who strongly feel otherwise, and not simply for reasons of puritan bigotry. Their objections are not entirely without merit.
Living wills and abortion both get down to a very fundamental question: At what point do your rights, specifically the single most important right of survival, begin and end? When does a person become a person? When to they cease to be a person? Are we entitled to waive our own right to life under certain circumstances? These are big questions, and the minutae of how the answers are applied can impact millions of people.
Evolution is the theoretical model upon which all of our modern knowledge of biology is built. It is absolutely vital to the long-term advancement of science that it is taught in schools. At the same time, Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man, runs afowl of several major religions regarding man's relationship to other animals. Balancing the need to teach "this is what our best science has established" with the need to avoid saying "your family's religion must be incorrect superstition" is a challenge which presents no easy answers (unless you are willing to dismiss the other side's concerns out of hand.)
The role of religion in public structures is also a problem. Our first Ammendment states that our government must neither endorse nor hinder any specific religion. Some people feel that public displays of religious dogma constitute an endorsement. Others feel that banning such dogma from all public places constitutes a hinderance. The problem with the debate is that both sides are completely correct. You can't really ban religion from all public places without restricting the free practice, and you can't really have public space and/or resources promoting religion without forcing those who oppose it to be in the position of contributing to it with their tax dollars.
The religion clau
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In order for a government to make the common man depend on it, it needs to give the common man an arch enemy. It used to be the Kaiser, communists, drug dealers, and now it's terrorists.
When the common man doesn't have an absolute enemy to fear, he'll tend not to depend on the government as much. Of course this isn't in the lawmakers best interest.
Keep your dependents living in fear and they'll always remain your dependents.
Its often amusing how your political position can cause you to say things that go against what you'd normally say....
The "Ruling political class" is some amalgam of the democrats and the republicans, and both groups prevent debate about significant topics--espeically morality.
My basic morality is that people are not your property. This is a moral position that both democrats and republicans violate at will.
Both parties want people enslaved by taxes and absurd laws, and so they create this charade wher you are (like most americans) deluded into thinking its the other parties fault. And your republican counterparts are deluded into thinking its the democrats fault.
The reality is, the "Ruling Political Class" is both of these parties-- the socialist republic we have become (do you really think our elections are fair? Even if it were so, this is a republic.)
But your right-- the general public, including slashdot readers-- won't engage in debate. Who would consider the argument that taxes are immoral? (And yet, who can come up with a counter argument?)
We've all been trained to stop thinking about politics-- to reduce politics to a football game of hatred, whereby we blame everything on the "other party" and make them out to be evil.
I hate republicans as much as the next guy, but its amazing to me how my friends who are liberal will ascribe all evil to them, but never notice when democrats do the same exact things.
The reality is, the mafia is in control. Not the italian mafia, the political mafia. Our government is nothing more than a parasite and mechanism by which cowards use fools to enforce control over the populace-- and not for the populaces benefit.
If you actually think about politics for awhile, and look into economics, you quickly become an anarchist.
If government was worth paying for, taxes would be voluntary. But they aren't, and they aren't for a reason.
Government's role and purpose is to exercise exactly the kind of control you're wondering how they are exercising.
People don't debate politics? Could it be they were taught in *government* schools not to think about politics?
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I have an obviously foreign name, and my luggage was searched two in a row for the last two times that I travelled. They put in a "notice of baggage inspection" slip in my bag. Now, the fact that they were searched wasn't a problem. The problem is that last August, they (1) delayed one luggage for a more thorough search, and (2) when I finally got my luggage, my $300 minidisc player/recorder was missing. The minidisc player was kept in a soft pouch; the pouch was stored inside a hand bag, which sit inside the luggage. They apparently opened the hand bag, pulled out the contents, found the minidisc player/recorder and found it convenient to transfer it to the inspector's own pocket.
..."
Now, I tried to contact TSA and it wasn't helpful. The phone number they provided, (866) 289-9673, always responded with a busy tone. I e-mailed the airline, United Airlines, and they never got back to me. Maybe I was too cynical. I told them I don't think an innocuous little device like my minidisc player is a threat to airline safety.
But it is funny if you think about it. TSA steals my stuff and put a slip saying "we did it." Then the fact that there is no where to complain is like them saying to me, "nanner nanner nanner
I once had a signature.
it was just released yesterday that FOIA requests have released official documents showing the Saudis were shipped out of the USA when noone else could fly right after 9/11 by the FBI.
...
Sigh, don't you hate it when the conspiracy theorists are right
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you want to take the legal point of view, you have to accept that Clinton did not lie under oath. He was asked if he had "sex" with Lewinsky, was given a written definition of "sex" that required mutual gentital contact and penetration, and truthfully said "no". Which is one reason why his impeachment failed. Bush and his lieutenants have repeatedly lied to Congress. And surely in the many courts in which they have perpetrated their actions since late 2001. Lying to Congress is a high crime, and treasonous when it sends our troops to a fraud war that destroys the Treasury and our international relations, to say nothing of destroying the credibility of the government among Americans.
--
make install -not war
One of the major instruments of the ruling political class is to divide and distract public opinion with intense moral-laden debate
The first part is correct, the second is wrong. Politicians divide not based on intense moral issues, they polarize their base when needed. Bush claimed we MUST fight the war in Iraq because WE were THREATENED. It turned out later, when the threat was shown to be non-exsistant, his reasons changed. Morality had very little to do with it. Morals have little to do with Social Security or Taxes or where government should build schools or highways. Governments function has very little to do with religion, unless you count the prayer the Senate says each morning.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."