Congressman Calls for Arrest of Security Researcher

Christopher Soghoian writes "Yesterday, I published a tool that allows you to Create your own boarding pass for Northwest flights. This was an attempt to document the fragile and broken state of identity/security for domestic flights in the US. Today, Congressman Markey (D-Mass) has called for my arrest." From the ABC article: "'I don't want to help terrorists or help bad guys do bad things on airplanes, but what we have now is what we in the industry call security theater. It's made to make you think you're secure without actually making you secure,' Soghoian said. 'As a member of the academic research community, I consider this to be a public service.' Soghoian admits that he hasn't actually tried to use one of the boarding passes yet."

Comments

Ummm. The First Amendment?

[mbstone]

The prosecutors would never file a criminal case, because it would be quickly thrown out on First Amendment grounds? Wouldn't it?

but of course

[Phantom of the Opera]

This whole homeland security mindset is not one of rationality. It is one of panic. There is an element of OMG - he's giving the badguys ideas. This call to arrest him is probably more along the lines of OMG - he's giving passengers the idea that they are unsafe. It isn't the issue wether they are unsafe or not, but making them feel that is going to have negative affects on the airline industry and get people jumpier. All in all, its going to make going on a plane that much less pleasant.

"The Bush Administration must immediately act to investigate, apprehend those responsible, shut down the website, and warn airlines and aviation security officials to be on the look-out for fraudsters or terrorists trying to use fake boarding passes in an attempt to cheat their way through security and onto a plane," Markey said in a statement. "There are enough loopholes at the backdoor of our passenger airplanes from not scanning cargo for bombs; we should not tolerate any new loopholes making it easier for terrorists to get into the front door of a plane."

One, shouldn't they already be on the lookout for frausters and terrorist.
Two, this isn't a new loophole. It's been there a while folks.

Re:not likely

[UbuntuDupe]

Conservative/Libertarian radio talk show host Neal Boortz ran into the same thing. (According to a story he regularly tells) He told some airline, Delta I think, that the security check in procedures were too lax. They ignored him. After he was fed up with that, he made a bet with the head of security, then dressed up like a pilot, got waved through a checkpoint, and once on a plane, he got out his cell phone and called the head of security to let him know he got through.

Don't know what became of that. (This was long before 9/11.)

Reminds me of an old southwest.com "HOST" bug

[thehossman]

Background: my last name starts with the letters "Host"

When southwest first started offering online checking, i discovered a small bug, when you got the the "Print your boarding pass" screen, with my name in all caps, the letters "HOST" were replaced with "southwest.com" ... so if your name was "Jim Hostenfeffer" it would appear on your boardingpass as "JIM southwest.comENFEFFER" ... I played with the site a little bit and found that it was a straight macro replacement bug of whatever domain name was used, so would say "JIM wWw.SOutHwesT.cOmENFEFFER" if that was the domain you typed into the URL bar.

The first time it happened i thought it was ammusing, I emailed their tech support, saved the HTML to a file and edited it so it had my name again and would match my ID when i checked in.

4 or 5 flights and at least 9 months later it was still happening and I spent a good 3 hours on the phone being transfered arround to different people trying ot get them to understand what the problem was and how fucking ridiculous it was that i had to constantly "hack" my boarding pass because of a bug they'd had for months.

Re:Political spectrum

[NineNine]

Ha! You didn't actually think that the Republicans and Democrats were opponents, did you? C'mon.
 
    There's a very popular case study in business school about Coke and Pepsi, and how they're both very happy with approximately 49% of the market. People think they have a real "choice". Neither one has to worry about "monopolies". And, they already know each other. It's a fake battle to make people think that they actually have a choice, all the while, both parties are very happy with half of a FUCKING HUGE pie.
 
Sound familiar?