Slashdot Mirror
CDC Wants to Track Travelers
gearspring writes "According to Government Health IT the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants your email address, your mobile phone number, names of your traveling companions, your name, your address, and your emergency contacts name, address, and phone number. This information would be gathered by airlines, travel agents, and online reservation systems for all travelers. Their goal is to protect us in the event of a pandemic. The SARS crisis showed them the difficulty of notifying people that they may have been exposed to a disease. It is a noble goal, but couldn't they do this anonymously?"
Anonymously? What, will they use a war-dialer to randomly notify people that someone somewhere was likely exposed to a new strain of bird flu? Maybe a really big phone tree?
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
It is a noble goal, but couldn't they do this anonymously?
It just begs the question, doesn't it?
The submitter asks "couldn't they do this anonymously?"
:)
Err.. probably not. Even if you only gave them a phone number, or an e-mail address, you wouldn't be anonymous any more. And if you didn't give them any personally identifying information, how would they be able to contact you?
Besides, I think I'd want to know that I'd possibly contracted some deadly disease, rather than remain anonymous
"Don't break my arse, my bargey wargey arse, I don't think my pants would understand..."
Almost all airlines keep that information already in some form (for marketing, frequent flyer programs, etc.), they just may be too disorganized to be able to respond to CDC requests. This would require them to be able to do that. I don't see a problem with that. This kind of mandate would even be compatible with a strict data retention and privacy standard that requires deletion of all customer data after, say, a couple of weeks.
That's easy, I'm homeless and have no friends. Maybe I'm not, but how are they going to know?
No address, no contacts, no email, no phone. Are you going to deny someone travel because they can't afford these things? Or choose not to have them?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Back home in the good old days KGB used to collect this sort of information. Just in case you get sick and they need to give you a shot.
and they need to collect it electronically because, when they used to print it out on a piece of paper, those slips were often confiscated at check-in because terrorists could threaten to give someone a really nasty paper cut with it...
Cool! And what about here goal?
Yep it's a noble goal but it sounds to me like an avenue to control the masses the first time the wrong person get his hands on the "the easy button" this provides. Noble goal but not a noble result.
It may save lives but increase overall human misery. Power like that just *finds* its way into the wrong hands. --JTWe really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Honestly, this seems like a pretty good idea...in theory. The problem is you are giving up some of your personal freedoms, to travel wherever the fuck you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want. They're not really stopping you from doing any of this (unless there is a disease wherever you want to go, which in that case you probably shouldn't go anyway), but now "they" know about it.
Could this list be used to track possible terrorist suspects? Yes and you can bet it will be.
But if you're not a terrorist (still don't know if they have a big readership on Slashdot) I don't really see the harm in telling the CDC where you're going so in case some flu pandemic breaks out where you just got back from they can notify you . Sacrificing a little personal freedom for increased safety of the whole is worth it to me in THIS SITUATION. There are other situations where I think the benefits do not outweigh the consequences, but with the increased possibility of a flu pandemic in the future this might just help quell the casualties.
Frell Security! My privacy for security, poor trade, look at Britain...
But my health, my child's health! Definitely worth while to store all this information, in the case of an outbreak and all!
Sure, but who's going to protect us from them? I'm always leery of people wanting to "protect" me without being asked to do so. And if the airport questionnaire asks "Do you have stairs in your house?", then I think I'd rather walk.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
With the seemingly never-ending erosion of privacy these days, congress needs to pass a constitutional amendment that puts clear restrictions on what data the government can collect, under what conditions, and what the government can do with this sort of data. There also needs to be clear standards for violating people's constitutional rights.
Without some very clear constitutional restrictions, this erosion of privacy will continue forever. Next the DOJ will want your list of acquaintances so they can track down terrorists. Then the CDC will want stores to identify everyone that purchased something and when. Then they will want cell phone companies to give them constant updates on where people are.
You would think that the fourth amendment would be clear enough:
But then it was decided this amendment should only apply to seizures, not searches. It was further decided that it was okay to bar people from doing anything unless they "voluntarily" surrendered this right every time they board a plane, buy a bus ticket, enter a federal building, an so on.
Why? I care about freedom of speech, but if I have to pick between freedom and safety I will usually pick safety.
Homer's auto-dialer: "This is CDC. You or someone around you may have been exposed to . Please report to the nearest fenced area for quarantine. Thank you for traveling with ."
Blog via SMS text messaging
but if I have to pick between freedom and safety I will usually pick safety then you don't deserve either.
info on us can be collected on us under many precepts by our goverment and accessed by any in goverment. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759 enough said....
So the Cult of the Dead Cow has gone from crackers to trackers.
Yes, it all makes perfect sense!
Mr. Bush has already made his intentions clear .
e wsid=5596
He has publicly stated if a pandemic strikes there will be martial law, and
the national guard, state police, local police, and "other" authorities will
block "all" travel .
My quetion to this is , who is gonna stop the birds from flying around ???
Want to take that to a WHOLE new level ???
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8788
Remember the civet cat and Sars ???? Oh my, guess what .
This virus is changing, and it is not done changing .
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8372
If this thing becomes transmitible to the common house cat, killing and eating birds in
every city that has alley cats . We got ourselves a recipe for a bad situation .
Another point of this strain that is being missed is the mortality rate so far .
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?n
If this thing kicks off at anywhere near this supposed 75%, it will be worse than the plague .
Some current numbers put it under 50% and lets hope it becomes less deadly as it mutates .
Keep in mind the 1918 pandemic was 2 - 5%, and not with modern medicine .
This has the potential for a major catastrophe .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
20 - 50 million world wide died in a time before widespread food shipment and travel .
A pandemic has reoccured with regularity every few decades, but this is shaping up to be
the deadliest in modern times if the mortality rates are anywhere near what they are now .
I hope all countries around the world take this VERY seriously .
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
some of us don't want our freedoms sacrificed for your/our/everyone's safety. If people like you got your way there would be no interstate travel because "thats how them there sickness gets spread" and yes you might not die of dog/cat/media-scare flu, but odds are you weren't going to anyway.
You already have to provide your name due to security regulations. So I don't see how there's any change there, really.
If you want to book travel, chances are you already provided this, in the form of a billing address, or a shipping address... so I don't see why this would be a big deal.
Not too hard to give a fake one, and really, if you want to take the risk of being out-of-contact when the CDC is trying to contact you to tell you you have just been exposed to some sort of new strain of Hemorrhagic Fever... hey, it's your ass that's bleeding, not mine.
Okay, perhaps a stretch. But again, not too hard to set up a hotmail account, "mikes_garbage_email@hotmail.com", and provide that. You never even have to check it, if you don't want to.
I'm not sure of the regs on this, but it would seem to me that using your passport when you travel would get tracked somewhere in some government database already.
And if you don't want to say who you're traveling with? Say you're traveling alone... not so hard, is it? What are they, going to deny you access to the airplane because you talked to someone while waiting in line?
Well, seems to me the airline would already know this, since you booked yourself on the flight and purchased tickets... so I think this falls in the "already tracked" category.
Again, not a particularly unreasonable request... but not hard to give bogus info if you really wanted to, either.
I guess I'm just having a lot of trouble seeing this as any sort of risk or violation of privacy, as I think most of this stuff would either be: a) already tracked, or b) easy to look up given that you HAVE to give your name to get on the plane... with a name and a credit card number, I'd imagine it would be pretty straightforward to track down pretty much anybody. (And let's be honest... sure, you could probably pay cash to buy the ticket... but how many people are REALLY going to do that?) It seems to me that this would simply allow the CDC to speed up the data collection... which means that it would take them 3 days to notify me I've been exposed to the new Ultra-death-killer SARS strain on my return flight from Singapore... rather than 2 weeks later, when I've already developed a strange cough . . .
There this piece from the Alaska HSS: "Although the recent spread of avian influenza to Europe is a major agricultural and economic threat, it is not a pandemic.
Scientists and public health experts agree that we cannot stop an influenza pandemic, but we can control and limit disease and death through early detection and a well-planned response. In Alaska, disease-monitoring systems are in place for detection of influenza.
Call me paranoid, but it looks like a multi-pronged approach. "See, there's no chance of a pandemic, it's an economic crises. But just in case, we'd like to get your information, and here a small chip we would like to plant just under your skin, temporarily. Thanks."
I live in the air crossroads (Alaska), for birds and people, and I'm not taking any chances, but I'm not going to panic, either.
I see that Alaska has been monitoring the Avian Flu since at least 2000.
If that means that I sacrifice some of my freedom for the safety of the general public, so be it.
Then on that premise, I demand the government install cameras in everyones homes to stop drug abuse, to stop domestic violence, to stop bomb making, to stop religious cults, to stop all manner of evil deeds that are plotted and conducted in the privacy of peoples homes.
You see where that reasoning gets you? It's a huge slippery slope. You need to decide where to draw the line in the sand. I would recommend you get yourself a history book and start reading. What I know of history tells me that you draw the line in the sand as far away from your home and personal life as possible, or you'll end up with no home and personal life.
Freedom is dangerous. That's the way it is. Maybe you're happy with a big brother watching over you, but I don't want that.
And I thought the basis of the civil rights movement was that everyone was equal.
This is MY life. I don't owe you or anyone else anything. You don't pay my bills. You don't bear my burdens. You don't fight my demons. You don't share my triumphs.
Your "equal rights" do not extend to MY life. Equal rights mean that we are dealt with equally according to the law. It does not mean that you get an equal cut of my labor, or of my freedom. I don't want your freedom, why they hell do you want mine? I'll tell you this, you'll have a great chance of survival against an infectious disease, than against your fellow citizens rising up against you when you try to take away their rights.
There will probably be a clause in the bottom of a particular document that reads something along the lines of ;
"I hereby swear that the above information is true and complete".
Soon after on the document will be a statement that says "providing false information is a Federal offence and is punishable by a million years in a government correctional facility.
All they seem to have to do anymore is claim something will make us safer and most americans will offer up their Bic lighters to help burn the Constitution. Just how much information about everything we do does the government really need? Several thousand people die in the 9/11 attack and they offer up the constitution on a platter. 20X that many die from the flu every year in this country and there's no out cry. It was tragic but isn't heading down the police state road and making tin foil hats mandatory a bit of an over reaction? This flu may be as bad as claimed but I still remember the swine flu scare in the 70s and SARS just happened. It's important to take these threats seriously but over reaction gives the bad guys in the government more power and threatens to make people suspect the next time around, cry wolf anyone? The threat is real but until it manifests the over reaction can do more harm than good. We've all but been promised it'll happen within the year yet the truth is no one knows if a human strain will show up next month, next year or ten years from now. Can we mantain DEFCON 2 for that long? The irony is over use of antivirals before it hits could leave it immune and kill far more people. Let's not start implanting tracking chips and sending people to leper colonies for a head cold just yet. Wait till there's at least one confirmed human to human transmition before we torch that abused document that protects us when we let it. Give up your privacy rights if you want but bloody well leave mine alone.
Problems such as 911 and avian flue have been used as excuse for giving up much of our privacy. Are we heading towards a future much like the book "1984"? What would someone like Hitler have done with RFID technology? No one would have been able to blend into the background and hide from him.
There is a "loss of privacy" pattern in recent years. An example is the plans to use RFID tags in most consumer products. Wallmart and various other companies as well as the U.S. military and federal government agencies have been pushing for increased use of RFID tags. There are plans to use inexpensive RFID tags in every item that we buy. The RFID tags would have a unique serial number for each and every single item sold. The passive type of RFID tag does not use a battery and would continue working for many years afterwards. It is mainly intended for inventory control. In a few years we will quite likely be wearing shoes and clothing which have hidden RFID tags which can be read from several feet away by anyone. We will also quite likely have RFID tags in items in our wallet such as our drivers license, charge cards, shoppers discount cards, and passports. There are also proposals for RFID tags in our tires, license plates and possible requirements to be embeded elsewhere in our cars. There has even been a proposal to embed RFID tags in postage stamps in the U.S. I don't know the details but, perhaps tracking all our mail would would be intended as a way to protect us from terrorists who send us packages with explosives or letters with Anthrax.
Many cars in the Houston area have toll passes hanging from their mirrors which have active RFID tags. Houston has over two hundred miles of freeways with "Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) stations every five miles along the road. Big brother is watching.
I won't go into all the various privacy issues associated with RFID tags. But, if anyone is interested, the entire first chapter of a "Spychip" book is avialable online from the publisher at http://www.lfb.com/index.php?stocknumber=PV9017. There is also a RFID spychips organization at http://www.spychips.com.
People are already tring to figure out how to deactivate RFID tags by microwaving them, slicing them or zapping them with static electricity. If RFID tags ever become common I will search out the few stores that still sell RFID tag free items. Should I be less paranoid and be more trusting and less suspicious of my government?
if *you* are said traveller, handing over all this information won't help you. So you go to Singapore, fly back, and suddenly Singapore has a SARS outbreak. You won't need the CDC to phone you - it'll be all over the news.
The information will be used so that they can track the disease's spread across the country. It's not Patient Zero (that's P0 for the USA, not P0 for the disease) they'll be helping...given the speed of bureaucracy they'll never reach P0 before symptoms set in.
Being able to examine an outbreak - and trace it back to a P0 - will allow them to work back up the tree via P1, P2, P3...and predict further outbreaks based on their behaviour.
(Trivia digression: when did ID for airlines start? Answer: after the 1996 TWA "non-terrorism" crash. Wow, that ID stuff was really effective, wasn't it?)
TFA/CDC may have mentioned only airlines, but of course it would be extended to all forms of travel. Pretty clever, actually -- it's easier to sell the idea of ID'ing on buses for the bird flu than it is for terrorism.
And I didn't see a link for it in any of the +5 comments, so here is Gilmore v. Gonzales, John Gilmore's attempt to challenge the practice of ID'ing at airports.
If you happen to not have a mobile phone, you'll be a shadow, moving from place to place and leaving no trace of your presence. At least until you pay for something with a credit card.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
OK. Lets put the privacy issue aside.
As a taxpayer, do you want every government agency tracking your every move just from a financial point of view?
The CDC wants to track travelers in the event of a nasty disease. What can that do beyond simply asking the people with common and severe symptoms questions (if they want) about where they have been and whatnot? Isn't that just as effective and cheaper?
As someone else pointed out, the airlines started compulsory checking and requiring IDs for travel in 1996. To get commercial airline training requires IDs and other loopholes. But its still completely possible for 3 airlines to get hijacked by foreigners who showed their IDs and everything and have fun with them.
What about "gun control"? That takes and ID. Convicted felons have lost the right to have firearms of any kind. I guess that will start to eliminate murder by guns any day now, right? (BTW, in the USA guess what is the 3rd most common murder weapon after guns and knives? Glass -- usually in the form of a broken bottle!)
Personally, I believe that privacy is the fundamental thing in question here. But lets put our tin foiled hats aside, and focus on dollars and cents. Is this privacy bashing effective in terms of doing what it is supposed to do in terms of its intent or in terms of cost? I don't believe so. Its only very recently during the "war on terror" that the government is even playing lip service to doing things like guarding our borders, but they are incarcerating people without being charged with crimes for years, they are trying to collect our reading at libraries, they are trying to give us a full strip and body cavity search to ride on an airplane. The thing here is not that some people are gaining from the government's actions, but rather that most people are loosing because of them.
So, I say that instead of focusing on our privacy which most people seem very willing to give up, let them focus on their pocket book. Its quite clear that the government sucks at collecting and keeping their information private (eg, the recent CIA leak).
If a private company has tight requirements for their liability or whatever reason. That is fine, we have the choice of another company or just do without. Its very difficult and a long process to overthrow a government. So lets just keep them doing whatever they do so long as it keeps out of our business and pocket books.
CYA
after there is a problem, people will say "why didn't you..."
"Why didn't you track all travelers"
"we tried but everyone said 'no'"
Okay, let's look at it from a financial perspective:
- It's not the government tracking this information, so I fail to see how it costs the government any money aside from the time spent developing the standards. They're asking the airlines to maintain a database of information -- most of which they already maintain , probably in multiple, diverse, insecure, incompatible formats -- in order to allow the CDC to find out who's been exposed to some sort of transmissible health issue as rapidly as possible. I fail to see how this costs the government inordinate amounts of money, if the airlines are charged with implementing, tracking, and maintaining the system.
- In the case of a massive outbreak of flu, or SARS, or ebola, or some other nasty virus, how much time & money would it cost for the CDC to track this data after the fact? When you're trying to stop the spread of a transmissible disease, time is a crucial factor -- the more time you let infected people walk around, passing it on to others, the more people become infected, and end up walking around passing it on to others. It's an exponential curve... that extra week it would take to find all the possibly infected people could cost the government a lot to our health care system, because the response needed to contain the disease becomes all that much more massive -- rather than quarantining & treating 5000 people who've been exposed, you have to try and quarantine & treat several million... so in terms of economics, what's cheaper, paying to find & treat five thousand people who've come in contact with an infected person in the 2 days since the person was exposed, or mobilizing the military to quarantine a few dozen cities where the disease has been possibly spread to millions in the 2 weeks it took the CDC to track all the people on that plane?
In the final analysis, I still fail to see how this is a bad thing, or really even all that newsworthy... The airlines already track 90% of the data the CDC would ask for already, so it can't be THAT much of a privacy issue -- if you didn't want them having that info, you'd already refuse to purchase air travel on grounds of privacy... and by your financial argument, it seems that NOT doing it would be at least as expensive, financially, due to the simple fact of infection following an exponential growth curve -- and in that case, time is money in a very real sense.Yes.
For a pandemic, they could simply broadcast over all TV stations, all newspapers, all radios (Emergency Broadcast System) that people traveling on Plane Flight 123 from LNX to WIN or OSX should contact their local authorities to be tested, innoculated, treated.
An identity provision suggests the authorities want the option to be able to more strictly enforce quarantine measures.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The CDC would be stupid not to interview these people anyway. If a nasty new disease comes out, and it was caused by people fucking a pig, looking for airline information would be a waste of time and money. Also, the CDC does want the tracking of this information according to the article. If I get my lawnmower fixed, they collect things like my name and phone number, but that is not shared with other lawnmower fixers or the government (AFAIK).
In the case of a massive outbreak of flu, or SARS, or ebola, or some other nasty virus, how much time & money would it cost for the CDC to track this data after the fact?
How much time does it take to cure something like SARS, AIDS or flu? These things have not yet been cured in a matter of days, weeks, years, or decades to date. Diseases come from many different places. Fleas, mosquitos, sex, airborne, food. What makes airlines so special? So, if its OK for the CDC to track airline information, what about my sexual partners? What about the insects I've been exposed to? What about my diet?
This is a spurious argument on several levels:
Oh, and by the way... do you really, truly, believe that the FBI or even local police couldn't get at your lawnmower repair information if there was some bizarre reason they needed to have it for reasons of public safety or law enforcement?
How much time does it take to cure something like SARS, AIDS or flu? These things have not yet been cured in a matter of days, weeks, years, or decades to date. Diseases come from many different places. Fleas, mosquitos, sex, airborne, food. What makes airlines so special? So, if its OK for the CDC to track airline information, what about my sexual partners? What about the insects I've been exposed to? What about my diet?
Another spurious argument. They're not saying that with this information they'll be able to cure all of those diseases. Nobody made that claim, so to use this as a counter-argument is a little silly. BUT, if they can intervene before a disease spreads to pandemic proportions in the population, they can prevent a lot of people from getting sick in the first place.
As far as your question of what makes airlines different from fleas, mosquitoes, etc. -- you're confusing the issue. Fleas, sex, etc. are vectors for transmission, just like people are in these cases. The airlines are "special" in that they allow an infected person to travel around the world in a matter of hours, greatly increasing the distance a disease can travel, and as a direct consequence, the number of people around the world that can be affected by a nasty disease that jumps out of a local quarantine.
And incidentally, if you contract a disease which is being monitored by the CDC, you'd better believe they're going to ask you a lot of questions about your diet, your sexual partners, and who you've been associating with lately. All that the airline info tracking does is make it easier for the CDC to find out who an infected person may have been in contact with, which allows them to intervene and perhaps halt the spread of something nasty before it reaches pandemic proportions. As I said before, time spent gathering data == lives lost to disease == more money spent on more sick & dying people, when you're talking about epidemics.