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Air Marshals Place Innocents on Secret Watch List
An anonymous reader writes "The Denver Channel 7 News reports that federal air marshals are operating under a quota for reporting a minimum number of suspicious travelers which is resulting in innocent people being placed on a secret government watch list. From the article: 'These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR.'"
We don't need no rights. Thank you for the illegal surveillance, "Homeland Security"!
Fuck you.
Put your cry baby government complaints somewhere else. This website has gone downhill and half the articles are about how you think the government is fucking you in the ass. Guess what. All governments have, are, and will always screw you, do stupid things, mismanage money, and fuck you over. Nothing will ever change. STFU and post real tech posts.
Does anybody know what the requirements are to get off the list, or if there is a timeout period?
There are none. It's just like microsoft's WGA - once installed, it takes a lot of effort to uninstall it and it has a lot of false-positives.
-Palal
There is nothing new about this. If you make a new law, or a new regulation, you need "proof" that said law or regulation is working. Since real terrorists are about as rare as multi-million dollar lottery winners, and since these techniques have a dubious ability to stop terrorists at best, how can you show that you are "succeeding" against terrorists? You have to invent them.
This same thing happens for just about any law they make, if it is gun laws, or drug laws (cause we have been winning the war on drugs these last 30 years according to the government!), or computer crime laws, or enviornmental laws, or whatever. You need to put a certain number of people away in order to look like you are "doing something" about the problem. People want "results", and people behind bars are "results".
Every law needs to be looked at with a cost benifit analysis. Is the cost in innocent people being punished worth the cost to society caused by the crime? Unfortunatly, people think that they can pass a law against something, and there is not going to be a social cost in enforcing it. Laws are a crude and clumsy way to stop something before it happens (laws are designed to punish a crime after a crime, or to deter a crime because people want to avoid punishment after the fact, but not to prevent a crime).
If you are completly against having a terrorist watchlist, then go ahead and complain. But all you people who support laws like these, and then complain when then turn out badly, shut the hell up! What the hell did you expect to happen when you put unconvicted people on a watchlist? What the hell do you think is going to happen when people are punished because of some risk analysis software decides it is OK?
No, the purpose is not to defeat terrorism. The purpose is to look like you're defeating terrorism.
No, the purpose is to manage the marshals. They are doing this by trying to measure how effective they are. The side effect is that it adds noise to the list.
Take off the tinfoil hat. If true, this is just plain incompetence rather than malice.
meh